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CHAPTER 12: THE CONCEPT OF RELATIVE SURPLUS-VALUE

Chapter 12 proposes a simple argument with a few complicated wrinkles. Yet it is a chapter that it is all too easy to get wrong. The initial argument goes like this:

The value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor-time congealed in it, and this value diminishes with increasing productivity. “In general, the greater the productivity of labour, the less the labour-time required to produce an article, the less the mass of labour crystallized in that article, and the less its value” (131).

The value of labor-power as a commodity is affected by all manner of historical, cultural and social circumstances. But it is also tied to the value of the commodities that laborers need to reproduce themselves and their dependents at a given standard of living.

The value of labour-power can be resolved into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of the means of subsistence, i.e. with the quantity of labour-time required to produce them. (276)

Other things remaining equal, therefore, the value of labor-power will decline with rising productivity in those industries producing the goods laborers need to reproduce themselves.

In order to make the value of labour-power go down, the rise in the productivity of labour must seize upon those branches of industry whose products determine the value of labour-power, and consequently either belong to the category of normal means of subsistence, or are capable of replacing them. (432)

For the capitalists, this means that they can lay out less in the way of variable capital because the workers need less money to meet their needs (as fixed by a given standard of living). If capitalists have to lay out less for variable capital, then even if the length of the working day is fixed, the ratio s/v, or the rate of exploitation, rises. A greater mass of surplus-value thereby accrues to the capitalist even though the length of the working day is fixed.

This process in no way involves any infringement of the laws of exchange. To be sure, capitalists will seek to purchase whatever labor-power they can at less than its value, and that will augment the mass of surplus-value they receive. “Despite the important part which this method plays in practice, we are excluded from considering it here by our assumption that all commodities, including labour-power, are bought and sold at their full value” (431). So once again, acceptance of the market logic and the theses of classical political economy take precedence over the study of actual practices, demonstrating once more Marx’s commitment to deconstructing the utopian theses of classical political economy on their own terms. One other peculiar result arises out of Marx’s mode of reasoning. “An increase in the productivity of labour in those branches of industries which supply neither the necessary means of subsistence nor the means by which they are produced leaves the value of labour-power undisturbed” (432). Therefore, reducing the value of luxury goods by increasing productivity does not yield relative surplus-value. It is only the declining value of wage goods that matters.

This produces a conundrum. Why would individual capitalists raise the productivity in their own particular industry producing a wage good, when all capitalists will benefit? This is what is now called a free-rider problem. The individual capitalist who goes out, innovates, reduces the price of a wage good and so reduces the value of all labor-power gains no particular or singular benefit from so doing. The benefit accrues to the whole capitalist class. Where is the individual incentive to do that?

Could relative surplus-value arise through a class strategy? While Marx does not mention it in this chapter, he earlier related a case where this was so—the abolition of the Corn Laws (tariffs on wheat imports) as a result of the collective agitation of the Manchester industrialists. The cheaper wheat imports that resulted brought down the price of bread, and this allowed wages to be reduced. This sort of class strategy turns out to have been of great historical importance. The same reasoning exists now in the United States with respect to the supposed advantages of free trade. The Wal-Mart phenomenon and cheap imports from China are welcomed because cheap goods reduce the cost of living to the working classes. The fact that money wages have not risen much for workers over the past thirty years is made more palatable since the physical quantity of goods they can acquire has increased (provided they shop at Wal-Mart). In exactly the same way that the nineteenth-century British industrial bourgeoisie wanted to reduce the value of labor-power by allowing cheap imports, so the reluctance to block cheap imports in the United States today derives from the need to keep the value of labor-power stable. Protectionist tariffs, while they might help keep jobs in the United States, would result in price increases which would create pressures for higher wages.

It turns out historically that there have been many state-organized strategies to intervene in the value of labor-power. Why, for example, does the State of New York not charge sales taxes on food? Because that is seen as fundamental to the determination of the value of labor-power. On occasion, the industrial bourgeoisie has supported rent control, cheap (social) housing and subsidized rents and agricultural products because that, too, keeps the value of labor-power down. So we can identify many situations where there have been and still are class strategies worked out through the state apparatus to reduce the value of labor-power. To the degree that the working classes gained a modicum of access to state power, they could use it to increase their income in kind (through state provision of many goods and services) and so raise the value of labor-power (in effect claiming back a part of the potential relative surplus-value for themselves).

Marx eschews any mention of these kinds of issues in this chapter almost certainly for the same reason he dismissed the way capitalists perpetually seek to purchase labor-power at less than its value. Conscious class strategies and state interventions are not admissable in the theoretical framework Marx has established. We don’t necessarily have to follow him all the way on this, particularly to the degree we are interested in actual histories. But he nevertheless accomplishes something very profound by sticking to the restrictive assumptions of free-market utopianism. He shows how and why individual capitalists might be impelled to innovate (without any class or state interventions) even though the return on their innovation goes to the whole capitalist class.

“When an individual capitalist cheapens shirts, for instance, by increasing the productivity of labour, he by no means necessarily aims to reduce the value of labour-power and shorten necessary labour-time in proportion to this.” The individual capitalist does not act on the basis of a generalized class consciousness even though “he contributes towards increasing the general rate of surplus-value” through his actions. Marx then warns: “the general and necessary tendencies of capital must be distinguished from their forms of appearance.” This peculiar phrasing signals that something special is going on (the odor of fetishism is in the air). So what’s he getting at?

While it is not our intention here to consider the way in which the immanent laws of capitalist production manifest themselves in the external movement of the individual capitals, assert themselves as the coercive laws of competition, and therefore enter into the consciousness of the individual capitalist as the motives which drive him forward, this much is clear: a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses. (433)

Now we need to think long and hard, critically and carefully, about what he is saying. I earlier suggested you remain alert for when the coercive laws of competition come into the argument, and plainly they do so here. Yet Marx seems to want to downplay their import even as he recognizes that he cannot do without them. At this point, I can only offer my own interpretation, knowing full well that many will disagree with me. I think there is a certain parallel between the way in which Marx analyzes the role of supply and demand fluctuations and the role of competition. In the case of supply and demand, Marx concedes that these conditions play a vital surface role in generating price movements for a particular commodity, but when supply and demand are in equilibrium, he argues, supply and demand fail to explain anything. Supply and demand cannot explain why shirts exchange for shoes on average in the ratio that they do. This has to be explained by something totally different, congealed socially necessary labor-time, or value. This does not mean that supply and demand are irrelevant, because without them there could be no equilibrium price. Supply and demand relations are a necessary but not sufficient aspect of a capitalist mode of production. Competition between individual capitalists within a particular line of commodity production plays a similar role. In this instance, however, it redefines the equilibrium position—the average price or value of the commodity—through changes in the general level of productivity in that line of commodity production. Competition as Marx here depicts it is a sort of epiphenomenon that occurs on the surface of society, but, like exchange itself, it has some deeper consequences that cannot be understood by reference to competition. This was the position he took in the Grundrisse: competition does not establish the laws of motion of capitalism

but is rather their executor. Unlimited competition is therefore not the presupposition for the truth of the economic laws, but rather the consequence—the form of appearance in which their necessity realizes itself … Competition therefore does not explain these laws; rather it lets them be seen, but does not produce them.¹

Let use see how this process works out in this instance. “For the understanding of the production of relative surplus-value, and merely on the basis of the results already achieved, we may add the following remarks” (433). The value of a commodity, recall, is fixed by the socially necessary “labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society” (129). What happens if an individual capitalist departs from this social average and sets up a productive system which is super-efficient and instead of producing ten widgets in an hour produces twenty? If one capitalist does that but all the others still produce at the rate of ten, then this one capitalist can sell at or close to the social average of ten while producing and selling twenty. “The individual value of these articles is now below their social value; in other words, they have cost less labour time than the great bulk of the same article produced under the average social conditions” (434). The innovative capitalist gains an extra profit, extra surplus-value, by selling at or close to the social average while producing at a rate of productivity far higher than the social average. This gap is crucial and yields a form of relative surplus-value to the individual capitalist. In this case, it does not matter whether the capitalist is producing wage goods or luxuries. But how does this capitalist sell the extra ten widgets per hour at the old social-average price? Here the laws of supply and demand come into play. And the answer is, probably, that they cannot be sold at the old price. So prices begin to decline. As prices decline, the other capitalists are faced with less profit. This amounts to a redistribution of surplus-value from those with inferior technologies to those with superior technologies. Those working with an inferior technology, therefore, have an increasing competitive incentive to adopt the new technology. Once all capitalists in this line of production follow suit and adopt the new technology to produce twenty widgets an hour, so the socially necessary labor-time congealed in widgets declines.

This form of relative surplus-value, which accrues to the individual capitalist, only lasts as long as he or she has a superior technology in relationship to everybody else. It is ephemeral.

This extra surplus-value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalized, for then the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes. The law of the determination of value by labour time makes itself felt to the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value; this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method. (436)

So the first form of relative surplus-value considered in this chapter is a class phenomenon. It accrues to the whole capitalist class, and it is as permanent as conditions of class struggle over the value of labor-power allow. The second form is individual and ephemeral. It is this second form, the one that confers individual advantage, that individual capitalists are forced to pursue via the coercive laws of competition. The result is that all capitalists at some point or other are forced to adopt the same technology. The two forms of relative surplus-value are not unrelated, since ephemeral innovations in the wage-goods sector will also drive down the value of labor-power at a physically fixed standard of living. “Capital therefore has an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself” (436–7).

But if you are a savvy capitalist, you will know that you can always get this second ephemeral form of relative surplus-value, provided you always have a superior technology. This generates some interesting results. Suppose the new technology is a new machine. Marx has argued that machines, since they are dead labor, can’t produce value. But what happens when you get extra relative surplus-value because of your new machine? While machines are not a source of value, they can be a source of relative surplus-value to the individual capitalist! Once these machines become general, they can then appear to be a source of the relative surplus-value to the whole capitalist class because of declines in the value of labor-power. This produces a peculiar result: machines cannot be a source of value, but they can be a source of surplus-value.

From the way Marx has set up the argument, we see that there is a tremendous incentive for leapfrogging technological innovations among individual capitalists. I get ahead of the pack, I have a superior, more efficient production system than you, I get the ephemeral surplus-value for three years, and you then catch up with me or even go beyond me and get the ephemeral surplus-value for three years. Individual capitalists are all hunting ephemeral surplus-value through new technologies. Hence the technological dynamism of capitalism.

Now, most other theories of technological change treat it as some sort of deus ex machina, some exogenous variable outside the system, attributable to the inherent genius of entrepreneurs or simply to the immanent capacity of human beings for innovation. But Marx is typically reluctant to attribute something as crucial as this to some external power. What he does here is find a simple way to explain why capitalism is so incredibly technologically dynamic from the inside (endogenously, as we like to say). He also explains why capitalists hold the fetishistic view that machines are a source of value, and why all of us are also subject to the same fetish conception. But Marx is resolute. Machines are a source of relative surplus-value but not of value. Since capitalists are interested in the mass of surplus-value, and since they would generally prefer to gain relative surplus-value rather than confront class struggles over absolute surplus-value, then the fetish belief in a “technological fix” as an answer to their ambitions is all too understandable. We even have a hard time disabusing ourselves of it.

But there is another interesting inference to be drawn that Marx refrains from examining, though he does lightly allude to it elsewhere. Suppose workers live on bread alone, and the cost of bread is cut in half because of increases in productivity. Suppose that capitalists cut wages by a quarter. They gain the collective form of relative surplus-value, thus increasing the general rate of exploitation. But at the same time, the workers can buy more bread and raise their physical standard of living. The general question this poses is, how are gains from increasing productivity shared between the classes? One possible result, which Marx unfortunately neglects to emphasize, is that the physical standard of living of workers can rise, as measured by the material goods (use-values) they can afford, at the same time as the rate of exploitation, s/v, increases. This is an important point, because one of the criticisms frequently heard about Marx is that he believes in a rising rate of exploitation. How can that be, ask the critics? Workers (at least in the advanced capitalist countries) now have cars and all these consumer goods, so obviously the rate of exploitation cannot be increasing! Are not the workers so much better off? One part of the answer is that it is perfectly feasible, in the terms postulated in Marx’s theory, for steady increases to occur in the standard of living of labor at the same time as the rate of exploitation either increases or remains constant. (The other part might be to point to the benefits that accrue to one portion of the global working class as a return on imperialist practices of exploitation of the other portion, but that cannot be appealed to here.)

I say it was unfortunate that Marx did not emphasize this point in part because it would have easily forestalled an erroneous, spurious line of theoretical and historical criticism. But it would have also made us focus more clearly on the question of how benefits from gains in productivity get shared as a crucial aspect of the history of class struggle. In the case of the United States, some share of the gains from higher productivity went to the workers from the Civil War period onward. A typical union bargaining strategy is to agree to collaborate with increasing productivity in return for higher wages. If the benefits from technological dynamism are spread around, then opposition to that technological dynamism becomes muted even as capitalists are cheerfully raising the rate of exploitation. Political opposition to capitalism in general also may become less strident, even if the rate of exploitation is increasing, because workers are at least gaining a higher physical standard of living. The odd thing about the United States is that it is only in the past thirty years or so that workers have failed to gain from rising productivity. The capitalist class has appropriated almost all the benefits. This lies at the core of what the neoliberal counterrevolution has been about and what distinguishes it from the Keynesian welfare-state period, when gains from productivity tended to be shared more evenly between capital and labor. The result has been, as is well documented, a tremendous increase in levels of social inequality in all those countries that have moved down neoliberal lines. In part this has to do with the balance of class forces and the dynamics of class struggle in different places, while in the United States, cheaper imports (and imperialist practices) have also helped workers maintain an illusion that perhaps they may be benefiting from capitalist imperialism. But all this lies way beyond what Marx’s text is proposing. I find it helpful, however, to extend his key insights in these directions.

CHAPTER 13: CO-OPERATION

The three chapters that follow deal with the various ways in which capitalists can procure relative surplus-value of the individual sort. The overall focus is on whatever it is that raises the productivity of labor, and it is clear that this depends on organizational forms (cooperation and divisions of labor), as well as on machinery and automation (technology, as we usually think of it). This can create some confusion, since Marx sometimes bundles all these strategies together under the heading “productive forces,” but then on occasion uses the term “technology” as if it were the same thing. He is clearly as interested in organizational form (the software, as it were) as he is in the machines (the hardware). I think it best to assume that Marx’s theory of technology/productive forces is machinery plus organizational form. I find his stance on this particularly relevant since, in recent times, transformations in organizational form—subcontracting, just-in-time systems, corporate decentralization and the like—have played a major role in the quest to increase productivity. While the profitability of Wal-Mart has its basis in the exploitation of cheap Chinese labor, the efficiency of its organizational form sets it apart from many of its competitors. Similarly, the Japanese conquest of the US auto market at the expense of Detroit had as much to do with the organizational form (just-in-time and subcontracting) of the Japanese car companies as with the new hardware and automation they deployed. Indeed, ever since time-and-motion studies (and what became known as Taylorism) became fashionable around 1900, there has always been a strong link between the hardware and the software of capitalist production systems.

Marx begins by examining how two organizational forms—cooperation and divisions of labor—can be used by capital under existing technological conditions of artisanal and handicraft labor to increase productivity. Innovations in these two aspects of organizational form have been integral to the acquisition of relative surplus-value throughout the history of capitalism, and we should never forget them. As in the chapter on the labor process, however, where the potential nobility of the process is stressed in contrast to its alienated form under capitalism, Marx casts neither cooperation nor division of labor in an inherently negative light. He views them as potentially creative, beneficial and gratifying for the laborer. Cooperation and well-organized divisions of labor are wonderful human capacities that add to our collective powers. Socialism and communism would presumably have great need of them. What Marx will seek to show is how these positive potentialities are seized on by capital to its own particular advantage and thereby turned into something negative for the laborer.

“When numerous workers work together side by side in accordance with a plan, whether in the same process, or in different but connected processes, this form of labour is called co-operation.” Note the word “plan” here, since it’s going to become an important idea. Cooperation permits, for example, an increasing scale of production, and the resultant economies of scale can generate increases in labor efficiency and productivity. This is made much of in conventional economic theory, and Marx does not demur. “Not only do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one” (443). This collective power

begets in most industries a rivalry and a stimulation of the ‘animal spirits’, which heightens the efficiency of each individual worker. This is why a dozen people working together will produce far more, in their collective working day of 144 hours than twelve isolated men each working for 12 hours. (443–4)

Furthermore, “co-operation allows work to be carried on over a large area” while rendering

possible a relative contraction of its arena. This simultaneous restriction of space and extension of effectiveness, which allows a large number of incidental expenses … to be spared, results from the massing together of workers and of various labour processes, and from the concentration of the means of production. (446)

There is an interesting tension here between geographical expansion (work conducted over a large area) and geographical concentration (bringing workers together for purposes of cooperation in a particular space). The latter, as Marx points out, can have political consequences as workers get together and organize.

He insists, however, that “the special productive power of the combined working day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power arises from co-operation itself.” Furthermore, “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species” (447). This is one of those instances where Marx reverts to some notion of universal species being, which was an important theme in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. At this point, it is hard to view this discussion of cooperation in a negative light. We strip off the fetters of our individuality and develop the capability of the species. To the degree that this capability has not been realized, we have yet to realize the potentiality of our species being.

But what happens when we return to the world of “our would-be capitalist”? First off, the capitalist needs an initial mass of capital in order to organize cooperation. How much, and where does it come from? There are what we now usually refer to as barriers to entry into any production process. In some instances, the start-up costs can be considerable. But there are ways to ameliorate this problem. Marx here introduces an important distinction. “At first, the subjection of labour to capital was only a formal result of the fact that the worker, instead of working for himself, works for, and consequently under, the capitalist.” But as time goes on, “through the co-operation of numerous wage-labourers, the command of capital develops into a requirement for carrying on the labour process itself, into a real condition of production” (448). The distinction here is between the “formal” subsumption of labor under capital versus its “real” subsumption.

What does this difference mean? Under what was called the putting-out system, merchant capitalists would take materials to laborers in their cottages and return to collect the worked-up product at a later date. The laborers would not be supervised, and the labor process would be left up to the cottagers (it often entailed family labor and was dovetailed with subsistence agricultural practices). But the cottagers depended on the merchant capitalists for their monetary incomes and did not own the product they worked up. This is what Marx means by formal subsumption. When laborers are brought into the factory for a wage, then both they and the labor process are under the direct supervision of the capitalist. This is real subsumption. So the formal is out there, dependent, while the real is inside the factory under the supervision of the capitalist. The latter entails more start-up costs, more initial capital; in the early stages of capitalism, when capital was scarce, the formal system of exploitation could well be more advantageous. Marx believed that over time, the formal would give way to the real. But he was not necessarily correct in this. The revival of contract work, home working and the like in our times indicates that some reversion to formal kinds of subjection and subsumption is entirely possible.

When laborers are brought into a collective structure of cooperation in a factory, they come under the directing authority of the capitalist. Any cooperative endeavor requires some directing authority, much as a conductor directs an orchestra. The problem is that “the work of directing, superintending and adjusting becomes one of the functions of capital, from the moment that the labour under capital’s control becomes co-operative.” Furthermore, “as a specific function of capital, the directing function acquires its own special characteristics.” This function is to recognize that moments are the elements of profit and to squeeze as much labor-time out of the laborer as possible. On the other hand, “as the number of co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and, necessarily, the pressure put on by capital to overcome this resistance” (449).

The struggle between capital and labor, which we earlier encountered in the labor market, gets internalized on the shop floor. This happens because cooperation is organized through the power of capital. What was once a power of labor now appears as a power of capital.

The interconnection between their various labours confronts [the laborers], in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose. (450)

The capitalist’s purpose is to secure “on the one hand a social labour process for the creation of a product, and on the other hand capital’s process of valorization,” i.e., the production of surplus-value. This entails the development of a specific kind of labor process in which the “work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and groups of workers” results in “a special kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen, overseers).” A certain structure of supervision of the workers emerges which is both authoritarian and “purely despotic.” In this, the capitalist acquires a distinctive role as orchestrator of the labor process in all its aspects. “It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an attribute of capital” (450–1). Only by way of command over the labor process can capital be both produced and reproduced. Laborers, on the other hand,

enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with each other. Their cooperation only begins with the labour process, but by then they have ceased to belong to themselves. On entering the labour process they are incorporated into capital. As co-operators, as members of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital.

Workers lose their personhood and become mere variable capital. This is what Marx means by the real subsumption of the laborer under capital.

The socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital which places them under these conditions. Because this power costs capital nothing, while on the other hand it is not developed by the worker until his labour itself belongs to capital, it appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature—a productive power inherent in capital. (451)

An inherent power of labor, the social power of cooperation, is appropriated by capital and made to appear as a power of capital over the workers. Historical examples of enforced cooperation abound—the Middle Ages, slavery, colonies, slave labor—but under capitalism the connection of organized cooperation to wage labor is manifest in special ways. This had a key role in the rise of capitalism.

The simultaneous employment of a large number of wage-labourers in the same labour process … forms the starting-point of capitalist production. This starting-point coincides with the birth of capital itself. If then, on the one hand, the capitalist mode of production is a historically necessary condition for the transformation of the labour process into a social process, so, on the other hand, this social form of the labour process is a method employed by capital for the more profitable exploitation of labour, by increasing its productive power. (453)

This originary status of a certain form of cooperation is perpetuated throughout the whole history of capitalism.

Simple co-operation has always been, and continues to be, the predominant form in those branches of production in which capital operates on a large scale, but the division of labour and machinery play only an insignificant part … Co-operation remains the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production, although in its simple shape it continues to appear as one particular form alongside the more developed ones. (454)