turning japanese 9 (Onishi)
4 The Growth and Death of Capitalism: Accumulation Theory: A New Quality Created by Quantity
[bag of hammers]
4.1 THE BIRTH, GROWTH, AND DEATH OF CAPITALISM: THE MARXIAN OPTIMAL GROWTH MODEL
4.1.1 Formulation of the Issues
In the previous chapter, I explained capitalist exploitation in terms of the qualitative character of capitalist productive forces, and Marx followed up those explanations in the first volume of Capital with a discussion of the long-term tendencies of capitalism. The law of capitalism, which makes capital accumulation the primary task is thus an explanation of the various tendencies resulting from capital accumulation, which can also be called the accumulation theory. And since Marx states at the end of this explanation that “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation”1 “and that “the knell of capitalist private property sounds,”2 this issue here is to discuss the growth and death of capitalism.
Discussing the growth of capitalism (via accumulation) leads to discussing the death of capitalism, in historical materialist terms. Now, it must be recalled that Marx stated in the preface to the first edition of Capital that (a society) “can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development.”3 This sentence is also indicated by the statement: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future,”4 indicating that industrial development or capitalistic development is necessary before the stage of future society.
In other words, only the development of capitalism can prepare for the transformation to the post-capitalist mode of production. The question here, therefore, is how capitalism paves the way for the transformation of the mode of production. This chapter explains this problem by discussing the growth and death of capitalism. Showing its death is a consequence of its growth. In other words, since capitalism is “a system in which capital accumulation is the primary task,” this chapter explains that the necessity of capital accumulation itself will disappear as a result of its progress. To explain this, this chapter also relies on mathematics to a large extent.
In the previous chapter, the proof of exploitation was presented as Okishio’s FMT, but here it is necessary to discuss the core proposition of historical materialism, the death of capitalism, in mathematical form to confront contemporary mainstream economics. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Engels states that Marx’s theory is composed of the theory of surplus value and historical materialism. Therefore, the theory of historical materialism also needs to be proved, in the same way that Okishio proved the theory of surplus value.
My research group is working on this issue and has fulfilled this task through the framework of the Marxian optimal growth theory, which was formed in 2002 and has developed since then. Since this chapter discusses the tendencies of capitalism, I also discuss the law of the falling rate of profit and the increase in the relative surplus population discussed in Marx’s Capital. However, while the former is also derived from the Marxian theory of optimal growth, the latter leads to a different conclusion.
…Then, the first task is to describe the nature of capitalistic production. In the previous chapter, we presented it as a society of machines that developed after the industrial revolution, and broke away from a society of tools, and that difference between these two societies can be conceptualized as follows.
That is, while the accumulation of tools before the industrial revolution did not result in a higher capacity for production, the accumulation of capital after the industrial revolution did.
This is because, while giving a second or third hammer to a feudal craftsperson who used tools did not result in an increase in their production capacity, an increase in the number or sizes of machinery used by a single worker in modern industry alone leads to an increase in their production capacity.
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Michael Hardt 1999 notes
Spring 1999
Capital, Volume 1
Preface, Postface
Abstraction and expression
What is meant by science? laws, abstraction, change.
· science and laws: what is meant by “law”; what do laws determine;
what governs the laws?
p. 91 — “iron necessity. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”
p. 92 — read “Even when a society has begun to track down … shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.”
Two points here 1) the movement or development of a society has natural laws; 2) the succession is linear.
p. 101 — read Russian economist Kaufman: “For this is quite enough… but rather, determining that will, consciousness, intelligence.”
p. 101 — read “But this is exactly what Marx denies … its own laws.”
· not abstract laws but historical laws, evolution
· science and abstraction
The power of abstraction and biology
· read p. 90: Because the complete body … economic cell-form.” What does abstraction mean here? How is the study of economics like biology?
· compare to example of butryic acid and exchange of two different commodities. Read p. 141: “In the same way … physical formation.”
· relate this to the capitalist mode of production in England and Germany. The physicist conducts experiments to study the process in “its pure state.” “What I have to examine in this work is the capitalist mode of production, and the relations of production and the forms of intercourse that correspond to it.” The question is: how does capitalism in England or capitalism in Germany relate to capitalism in its pure state?
· Althusser, Reading Capital, Part II Appendix, pp. 194–98. The abstraction can be seen in two ways. One might think of the abstraction as beginning with the actual conditions in England and abstracting from them, purifying them — as if Marx were moving from the empirical to the ideal. Abstraction as subtraction. But Althusser claims the relation is just the opposite. Marx pursues the capitalist mode of production on a conceptual level. “What I have to examine in this work ….” The capitalist mode of production is the “theoretical object.” Read Althusser, p. 196. Althusser’s notion of the “concept of the real” is meant to pose the distinction from the ideal on one hand and the empirical on the other. Related to “the law of phenomena”? (p. 100).
· Althusser also says in this regard that Marx discovered the concept of the proletariat before discovering its empirical existence.
Here, Marx compares the personification and bearing of economic relations with the wearing of masks. It is as wearers of masks that individuals confront one another on a market, which suggests that individuals are not identical with these masks.
the practical agents of capitalist production and their ideological word-spinners are as incapable of thinking of the means of production separately from the antagonistic character masks that presently adhere [ankleben] to them as a slave-owner is incapable of thinking of the worker himself as distinct from his character as a slave. 14
p. 92 — Träger, bearer of economic categories: the structure of subjectivity. Read p. 92. This is a form of abstraction, but also later we’ll see its a mode of representation.
· See p. 126: use values bear exchange values.
· p. 143: coat expresses in linen, gold-braided uniform.
· dialectics and change
- opposite to Hegelian: material and ideal. Read p. 102: “My dialectical method … forms of thought.” p. 103 “standing on its head” head metaphor = idealism.
p. 103 — idealist “glorify what exists”; material change, fluidity: “it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state.”
p. 96 — political economists view capitalist order as “absolute and ultimate form of social production.” Read p. 96.
Capital, Volume 1, Part 1 (Chapters 1, 2, and 3)
“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities.”
What is a commodity? What is the value of a commodity? How is that value determined?
Definition #1: a commodity is an external thing that satisfies a need (a need that might be natural or socially determined) p. 125
This definition leads directly to the conception of use-value, satisfying a need. It is the physical properties of the commodity itself that is its use-value. Use-values are qualitatively different: iron, corn, diamond. They form the material content of wealth in all societies. They are incommensurable.
But in capitalist societies each commodity also has an exchange value. “in the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers [Träger]of … exchange value” (p. 126).
Hence Definition #2: a commodity in capitalist society is defined by its dual character, use-value and exchange-value. “they are only commodities because they have a dual nature (read p. 138).
· primarily quantitative rather than qualitative; exchange values are defined by their commensurability.
Abstraction and expression:
· abstraction from use-value (read p. 127 bot)
· exchange value puts two incommensurables in common (read p. 127 top)
((· later Marx will use “value” to mean “exchange-value”))
What is expressed by exchange value and what is the common element that makes exchange-values commensurable? Labor. The quantity of labor determines the quantity of each exchange-value. But all labors are different; they are concrete, material, particular, incommensurable.
The labor that can be viewed purely quantitatively — as “human labor-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure” — is abstract labor. Read p. 128 top paragraph.
This is the real instance of abstraction and expression. Read p. 135 bottom.
Darstellung and Forschung:
Don’t get fooled by the progressions of the argument. These aren’t really causal relations just means of presentation:
1) use-value priority
2) development of money, the “origin” of money.
Some Questions
a) Do use-values have an existence autonomous from capital? (See p. 138: “Commodities come into the world ….” Natural form of commodities. It is an outside of capital? Spivak argues that use-value exists only in relation to exchange value, that it is not an autonomous outside. Use-value is a rhetorical starting-point that has to be canceled out once the argument is set in motion.
b) Is a commodity really a thing? Expansion of service industries and the dematerialization of commodities puts this further into question. Is a video cassette a service of a durable good? Maybe commodities in general should be thought of not as things but as services or really social relations. (Affective labor).
c) Note that abstraction is not all bad: commensuration leads to social unification.
1.3 The Value-Form, or Exchange Value
· The point here is to show the social “origin” of the money-form, or really to demonstrate how money is socially constructed.
· The value-form “can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity” (139) — or rather it’s the sociality of exchange value that leads to the money form. The interesting thing in this progression is expression and sociality. What is an adequate expression of abstract labor? What is the social nature of commodities?
A: Relative and Equivalent Forms
· 20 yards of linen = one coat
(relative form) = (equivalent form)
commodity whose value is expressed = commodity that expresses value
· In commodity in relative form we see the movement from use value to exchange value and from concrete to abstract labor in order to realize a qualitative equivalence.
· In commodity in equivalent form we move in the opposite direction. It is first exchange value and abstract value and only second use value.
· It needs a commodity of different quality before it to realize its value — this is the social character. Expression requires difference but what is expressed is what is common (abstract labor).
Read p. 140: the commodity can only express its value in another — relation to the other is the social character of commodities.
- read p.144 note: Peter and Paul. Difference and commonality: In the face of the other each recognizes its common essence. Language as sociality: read p. 143 bot: abstract labor is the language of commodities.
· The value of commodities is “purely social” — read p. 149. Purely social has two meanings:
1) it conceals a social relation (concrete labor)
2) it expresses a social relation (among commodities)
· Hence 1st mystery (p. 149) — use / exchange
2nd mystery (p. 150) — concrete / abstract labor
3rd mystery (p. 151) — private / social labor
In each case the second term appears as natural and the former appears as a product of it.
· Aristotle example (p. 152) : incommensurability of objects and need for commensurability for exchange. Aristotle couldn’t recognize abstract labor because of slavery (historical limitation). Modern equality and exchange.
B: Expanded Relative Form of Value
20 yards of linen = one coat = 20 lb of tea = etc
Read p. 155. Two things are going on here:
1) movement toward an adequate expression of abstract labor;
2) development of the society of commodities. · Defect of expanded form: bad infinity, never stops. Or really: it is an inadequate expression — read p. 156: “it is a motley ….”
C: General Form
one coat
20 lb of tea = 20 yards of linen
40 lb of coffee
· Read p. 159–60: positive expression of abstract labor.
· Read p. 159 “It thus becomes evident ….” Purely social existence of commodities. Again 2 meanings of social.
D: Money Form
the general equivalent is excluded.
Chapter 1.4: Fetishism
1) What is mysterious about the commodity? (pp. 163–65)
· The dancing table (use value and exchange value), read pp. 163–164.
· Progression from concrete labor to abstract labor to social relation between the products of labor (commodities)
· Reification — a social relation appears as a relation among things.
· Metaphor of sight, not sufficient because light is external to the eye
· Metaphor of religion: fetish — an inanimate object worshiped as if it had magically qualities, or as if it were animated.
2) What is the origin of the fetish-like character? (pp. 165–68) Valid only for capitalist society: Darstellung (representation) and Forschung (research)
· reflection and reality, p. 168.
· Robinson Crusoe as individual capitalist pp. 169–70.
· Medieval production as not based on commodity fetishism, p. 170.
3) What political economists do and don’t understand, pp. 173–74. They treat it as eternal, p. 174n.
Again about the fetishism of commodities: dual meaning of “purely social”
Part of the fetishism is that the commodity tends to hide its own history and appear as something natural. What is hidden is the labor that went into its production and the social relations implied in that labor. Dancing table appears as an autonomous subject not the product of labor. Read p. 187: “The movement through which the process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind.”
“…recall that China and the tables began to dance when the rest of the world appeared to be standing still,”
— — — — — — — — — — — — —
dancing tables
While Marx’s Capital begins at a high level of conceptual abstraction, at times the opening section of the text drops into a concrete illustration, or refers to a specific historical situation. One of these better known early moments of illustration takes place in the text’s opening chapter on the commodity, when Marx brings into view an oddly animated wooden table. In the midst of his introductory demonstration of the dual nature of commodities — the disjunction between their concrete utility as things that can be consumed, on the one hand, and their force as agents of abstract value, on the other hand — Marx lifts the curtain on an overturned table:
The form of wood [Die Form des Holzes], for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing on its own free will.
Marx attaches the following historicizing footnote to this passage: One may recall that China and the tables began to dance when the rest of the world appeared to be standing still — pour encourager les autres [in order to encourage the others].2 With this crucial footnote, Marx situates the figure of the dancing table in a specific historical moment. Sometime around 1853, tables began to dance in Keighley, a West Yorkshire textile town, home to the first significant grouping of English spiritualists, whose séances featured rattling tables.3 In the same year, Marx composed an essay for the New York Daily Tribune on the Taiping Rebellion, which had broken forth a couple of years earlier and would extend into the mid-1860s. In this essay, Marx wrongly predicted that the rebellion in southern China would further disrupt trade relations and spur a crisis of overproduction in the West:
At this period of the year it is usual to begin making arrangements for the new teas, whereas at present nothing is talked of but the means of protecting person and property, all transactions being at a stand. Under these circumstances,… it may be safely augured that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent.4
This is the sense in which, during the reactionary 1850s, when Europe “appeared to be standing still,” Marx hoped that the uprising in China might “encourage the others.” But by 1867, when he was completing his first volume of Capital, Marx would have known that his hopeful predictions of midcentury crisis and revolution — of economic stasis and political movement — had not come to pass. Nevertheless, at this later date, he chose to footnote a false augur, to evoke an unrealized possibility of revolution. The figure of the wooden table, along with its accompanying footnote, helps position Capital historically. In referencing an unrealized revolutionary possibility from fourteen years prior, the text situates itself afterwards, in the midst of a moment of historical closure or failure. In pulling the curtain on a dancing table that couldn’t quite “encourage the others,” Capital suggests that it will be pursuing an anatomy of a capitalist system that, despite mid-century crises, had recently found new footing.5 But the figure of the table also indicates that Marx does not take capitalism’s apparent triumph for granted. Fourteen years later, the table still appears to rattle.6 Capital thus seems, however subtly, to hold open the possibility not only that everything could have turned out differently, but also, a la Walter Benjamin, that what looks like a mid-century moment of closure might yet retroactively be recast.7 The text sets up this ambiguous relation to its recent past by evoking a figure that seems to occupy space in two ways at once: a wooden table that “stands with its feet on the ground,” while also “stand[ing] on its head.”
https://www.mediationsjournal.org/files/Mediations31_1_01.pdf
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
· Take a pencil for example. We encounter as something natural and take its existence for granted. How was it produced, by whom, and where? In a simple commodity are contained a vast network of social organization. Think about this morning’s breakfast.
Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.1
Exchange
1) Träger: in what sense are humans guardians of the commodities? What is Marx’s explanation for treating them merely as “personifications of economic relations … bearers of these economic relations”? (p. 179 top).
2) How is it that a product of labor “becomes” a commodity? Why was it not a commodity before? Read p. 181 bottom. A use-value must become a non-use-value. Alienation.
3) Historical origin of commodities and the development of money. How does this relate to the logical explanation Marx already gave? Social and anthropological explanations of the origin of commodities, pp. 182–83.
4) Money appears as natural, money fetish, p. 187. Reverse relation. money-form (price) -> social relation -> abstract labor
Money
· Money is “the direct incarnation of all human labor” (p. 187) and thus “Money as the measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labour- time” (p. 188). What is the mystery of money? Why money fetish?
· Money serves only in an ideal or imaginary capacity (pp. 189–90): “relation with gold exists only in their heads” (p. 189).
· attributes of gold that allow it to serve as money: uniformity and quantitative divisibility (p. 184).
· divergences of price and value (pp. 196–97, 202): overproduction, supply/demand.
· Alienation and metamorphosis (pp. 199–200). “Money is the absolutely alienable commodity” (p. 205).
· Metamorphosis of commodities = abstraction of labor (p. 204).
READ p. 199–200: what is alienation here? What is the antagonism between commodity form and money form? How does one “negate” the other?
Circulation
· commodities are not exchanged directly for each other money stands between them: C-M-C and then continue this out C-M-C-M-C…
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Capital, Volume 1: Parts 2, 3, and 4
This section of the text contains the one move of economic theory at the heart of the whole project, and I want to be sure it’s clear to everyone. Part 2 really belongs with Part 1 in the sense that they are both written from the perspective of exchange and circulation. Part 3 will bring the shift of perspective that will condition the rest of the book.
Part 2 asks on the basis of Part 1 (commodity, circulation of commodities, money), what is capital? We will find that from this perspective we can’t answer the question adequately; Part 2 exhausts this perspective.
I’ll organize the whole explanation around three definitions of capital
Chap 4: General Formula of Capital
·nb: previously Marx gave us in the 1844 ms the two-part definition: capital is (a) stored-up labor and (b) domination over labor.
·What is capital? We use “capital” to refer to commodities or land that are of value, but here we get a different definition.
1st definition:
money is the first form of capital (p. 247). Money is the expression of capital. This is what is revealed in exchange and circulation.
· circulation of commodities: C-M-C
· circulation of money: M-C-M
. M-C-M is an absurd tautology, why would anyone do that. The difference between paths is that C-M-C refers to the same quantity but different qualities; but M-C-M refers to the same quality and thus must have different quantities. “One sum of money is distinguishable from another only by its amount” (251).
·M-C-M’ is the general formula of capital where Delta M is surplus value (p. 251). Note: this is really industrial capital. — Merchant’s capital M-C-M (p. 256, 266–67) — or should it be M-C-M’ where the commodity is not transformed?
Interest-bearing capital or usurers’ capital M-M’ (p. 257, 267)
These others are criminal (theft or cheating); industrial capital is productive if monstrous (self-creation).
·valorization is the addition of value (p. 252), but we’ll get a better definition later with respect to labor. — p. 255 note Say: “It is not the material which forms capital but the value of that material.”
2nd definition:
capital is self-valorizing value, “value in process”, value as the subject of the process. Read p. 257.
Chap 5: Contradictions in the general formula of capital
·In circulation only things of equivalent value are exchanged, and yet after the process the capitalist comes out with more than he put in. Where does this increase in value come from?
Surplus cannot arise from circulation. “Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, creates no value” (266)
Read pp. 268–69. “Hic Rhocus, hic salta.” Put up or shut up. Understand what is not what ought be.
Chap 6: Sale and Purchase of labor-power
The paradox will be resolved by anayzing the special properties of labor as a commodity. (p. 270) Selling labor power in the capitalist system is predicated on the freedom of labor in two senses:
1. freely in possession of the labor-power to sell (not slave) and therefore formally equal to the capitalist in the exchange. (read p. 271). In other words, the worker is the free bearer of labor-power. (C.B. MacPherson, Possessive Individualism). Note the shift from the bearer of a commodity to the bearer of labor-power. What is the subject that is separate from its labor power?
2. has nothing to sell but his or her labor-power. (read 272).
·Summary, read pp. 272–73.
· Aside: you might be wondering how did these conditions come about? Capitalist cares little and we are sticking to the capitalist point of view. Historical description of primitive accumulation to come later (p. 273).
·What is the value of labor-power? It is determined like every other commodity by the quantity of abstract labor to make it, that is, by the value of the reproduction of the worker for a given period (p. 274 middle). What counts as reproduction varies according to social and historical circumstances, but appears as fixed in any given social formation (English workers need beer as French workers need wine). This makes good on the labor theory of value; this is its real importance.
·It also begins to make good on the use value/exchange value distinction.
- labor power is exchange value (the value of which is equal to the labor that went into it). “the value of labor-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner” (p. 274).
- labor is use-value. “labor power becomes a reality only by being expressed; it is activated only through labor” (p. 274). Or more clearly, “The use of labor-power is labor itself.” (p. 283).
Two ways of thinking about it:
1 — Expression / bearer : the abstract expressed in the concrete.
2 — potential / actual: Aristotle Metaphysics. “By working, the [seller of labor-power] becomes in actuality what previously he wonly was potentially, namely labor-power in action, a worker” (283).
·Summary: Freedom, equality, property, and Bentham (egoism). The glory of capitalist ideology.
·Movement from circulation to production. Read p. 279 and p. 280. In the hidden abode of production the two actors no longer appear equal. This shift in perspective is the central move in the book. Parts 1 and 2 have only been in the realm of circulation.
Part 3
Chap 7: The Labor Process
·definition: means of production = instruments and objects of labor (p. 287).
·characteristics of labor under capitalist production
1) control of capitalist over the labor process (p. 291)
2) capitalist owns product (p. 292)
·What happens in labor process? What is labor? Worker changes nature and self (p. 283); living labor awakens things from the dead (p. 289); labor is the fermentation that transforms things (p. 292); “fire that bathes things”. Relation to Hegelian notion of labor in Phenomenology (in master/slave passage).
·Labor=value tautology: What is value? Accumulated labor-time. What is labor? Value creating activity, activity that produces value. The interesting point is that value and labor are socially determined. What is labor and what is valued is a site of political struggle. In effect the lack of ground, the tautology is what opens up the side of political struggle.
The Valorization Process
·Definition: Valorization is value creation in excess. Read p. 302. It is not just creating value.
·Secret is that the cost of the reproduction of the worker (the value of labor) is not equal to the value created in the labor process. The difference between these two is surplus value. Read p. 300.
·Let’s look at the difference between the value of labor-power (which will later be represented in the wage) and the value added to the product by labor. “The only thing that interests the capitalist is the difference between the price of labour-power and the value which its function creates” (p. 682).
·How is the value of labor-power determined? Costs of reproduction. How are the costs of reproduction determined? Social, historical. In order for there to be surplus value, the costs of reproduction of the worker must be less than the value created by the worker in the production process. The process of creating more value than the cost of the labor-power is capitalist valorization.
. Why is it possible for the capitalist to pay the worker only the costs of reproduction and not the full value of what is produced? Because labor-power is treated as a commodity. Since it is a commodity, the capitalist only has to pay for the abstract labor objectified in it, that is, its costs of (re)production. It is a special commodity, a living commodity, that creates more than it costs. The capitalist buys labor-time (for a fair price) and all the value created during that time belongs to the capitalist, which the capitalist subsequently sells. Each is a fair exchange, just on different scales. This is how waged labor is the central element of capitalism. (Or you might say surplus labor or surplus value or valorization or exploitation is the key to capitalism.) “The trick has at last worked: money has been transformed into capital” (301).
·Here is where we really make good on use/exchange values. The capitalist pays for the exchange value of labor-power, but he gets back its use-value.
·Now what is capital? More than M-C-M’(that was only how it was seen from circulation). It is a social relation, the social relation embodied in the system of waged labor.
3rd definition:
capital is self-valorizing value, or rather it is the social relation that produces surplus value. Vampire, read p. 342 (also p. 367).
Chap 8
Definition: Constant capital and variable capital: read p. 317. — only the human creates value; machines and raw materials only transfer their value (the labor that went into them) to the product. Means of production absorb a certain amount of labor.
This is important for Senior’s fallacy. Senior thinks that the work day cannot be reduced one hour because all the profit is produced in that last hour (333). He doesn’t distinguish betweeen constant and variable capital so he doesn’t understand that:
1) if work less, less means of production (cotton) used;
2) value of means of production doesnt’ have to be reproduced, it is simply transfered to the product.
Chap 9: Rate of Surplus Value:
A series of definitions:
·C=c+v and C’=c+v+s
·Put this back in M-C-M’ (M-C-C’-M’ or M-c+v-c+v+s-M’)
·surplus is solely the result of the labor process s=delta v, p. 322.
·rate of surplus value = s/v, p. 324
·necessary labor is that necessary for reproduction (teminological confusion, p. 325).
·surplus labor is the excess.
·degree of exploitation is the rate of surplus value, p. 326.
·the quantitative form of this is setting up a political argument about the length of the working day in England (surplus labor -> surplus labor time).
·for Wednesday: How is “exploitation” different from “domination” or “oppression”?
Absolute and Relative Surplus Value:
These are two capitalist strategies for increasing surplus value.
·A — — B — — C AB=necessary labor-time, BC=surplus labor-time
Imagine in a certain historical and social situation 8 hours is required to produce the value of reproduction of the worker (neccesary labor time) and the worker works a 10 hour day.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
A — — — — — — -B — — C
The surplus labor time is 2 hours and the value created during that period is the surplus value that the capitalist gets. Now there are two ways this surplus value can be increased.
1) Lengthen the working day to 12 hours.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
A — — — — — — -B — — — — — C
The surplus labor time (B-C) would then be 4 hours. This is called the production of absolute surplus value.
2) Increase the productivity of labor so that the costs of reproduction can be accomplished in 6 rather than 8 hours.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
A — — — — -B — — — — C
The surplus labor time (B-C) is again 4 hours. This is called the production of relative surplus value.
Absolute
In absolute surplus value the working day is the object of political struggle. Should read factory legislation for Wednesday (Chap 10, part 6, pp. 389- 410). Two things are particularly interesting here:
1) role of State: capital needs aid of the State when economic power is not developed enough (382).
2) result of class struggle (read p. 395).
Debate over New Deal legislation (8 hour day).
Relative
·increase of productivity (p. 431) leads to fall in value of labor-power (432).
·law of value at work / productivity (p. 436–37)
·riddle: Why does capitalist work to bring down price of commodities? (437) Really, the capitalist’s aim is to maximize surplus labor time. He doesn’t want to bring down the price of commodities — that is an unintended consequence.
Chap 13: Cooperation
Three periods of capitalist development
·handicraft industries
·manufacture: based on division of labor
·large-scale industry: based on machines
Capitalism proper begins from large-scale industry, but quantitative become
qualitative (with increased productivity):
1. Average social labor
2. Joint use of means of production
3. Cooperation
- increased productivity
- socialization and capabilities of the species (p. 447)
Increased cooperation is perhaps the most progressive aspect of capital, and the one that points beyond it.
·Role of capitalist (p. 448–49) general, conductor.
·despotism, hiring supervisors, now purely parasitic (p. 450)
Capital is an impersonal form of domination, p. 247 note and p. 381.
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Capital, Volume 1
Parts Four, Five, and Six
Last week I tried to organize the argument as proposing a series of definitions of capital, each more adequate. Today I want to focus rather on Marx’s use of dialectical arguments in this section of the book. So I’ll present 3 or 4 examples of his dialectic. (I’m not in fact sure that any of them should be called dialectics but they are presented in that language — wait till I’ve presented them all and then we can discuss them in second half.)
We read three chapters for today: 15, 16, and 19. I’m going to talk almost exclusively about 15. I think 16 (about absolute and relative surplus value) repeats in large part what we have already said last week about this; and 19 (about the wage) also repeats what we have said about the value of labor-power and the costs of reproduction.
Review overall structure of the argument:
Capital is aimed at the production of surplus-value. This is yet another definition of capital: “Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by its very essence, the production of surplus-value” (644). Surplus-value is the great discovery of the book (which appears first in Part 2 but then is developed throughout).
Then surplus-value has to be broken down into the two capitalist strategies for increasing the rate of surplus-value:
1) absolute surplus value — Part 3 — length of the working-day — quantity of time.
2) relative surplus value — Part 4 — technical organization of production — quality of time.
Now the history of capitalist projects to increase relative surplus- value have presented two forms that correspond to the passages among the three stages of the technical organization of production (nb: changes in technical organization do not change the mode of production; they are changes within the capitalist mode of production).
A) Passage from Handicrafts [Handwerk] to Manufacture raises productivity mainly through division of labor (from individual labor to collective labor; collective because production of each product requires numerous workers each contributing a single task). Collective labor is more productive than individual labor. (Chapter 14)
B) Passage from Manufacture to large-scale Industry raises productivity mainly through mechanization.
Chapter 15
OK, that’s the context for Chapter 15. Now we are faced with several questions:
1) What is a machine?
2) What is its value?
3) How does mechanization effect workers?
4) What drives the mechanization of production?
1) What is a machine?
A machine differs first of all from a tool. In fact, a machine is defined as that which employs tools to conduct a certain operation. “From the moment that the tool proper is taken from man and fitted into a mechanism, a machine takes the place of a mere implement.” “The machine, therefore, is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools” (495). Now, it doesn’t really make any difference if this machine is powered by human power or natural power or machine power — for example, the pedal-powered sewing machine is just as much a machine as an electric sewing machine. What is central is that the human worker is no longer working directly with the tool and thus not working directly on the object. The worker tends to the machine, which in turn employs its tools to work on the object. One practical difference is that while in general the human could only employ one tool at a time, the machine can in principle employ several. Example: the spinning Jenny can spin 12 spindles at once.
Now, what is interesting here is that once machines replace humans (as the agents that employ tools to work on objects), the machines are then organized in production as humans were. What was developed as the organization of humans in production during the phase of manufacture is now aimed at machines. So, first of all machines are subject to the division of labor. “Here we have again the co-operation by division of labor which is peculiar to manufacture, but now it appears as a combination of machines with specific functions. The tools peculiar to the various specialized workers, such as those the beaters, combers, sherers, spinners, etc. in the manufacture of wool, are now transformed into the tools of specialized machines, each machine forming a special organ, with a special function in the combined mechanism” (501). So, just as in the passage to manufacture we saw a movement from individual human labor to collective human labor (through the division of labor and cooperation), so too here we move from the individual machine to the “collective working machine”, an articulate system of individual machines. This collective working machine (mechanical monster, Cyclops, etc) constitutes a “vast automaton” in that it presents a whole organization of production (at least relatively) autonomous from human labor.
First dialectic (?):
Dialectic of industrial development in the passage from manufacture to large-scale industry. Manufacture provided the basis for the passage to large-scale industry and hence for its own destruction: “in manufacture, we see the immediate technical foundation of large-scale industry . Manufacture produced the machinery with which large-scale industry abolished the handicraft and manufacturing systems in the spheres of production it first seized hold of. The system of machine production therefore grew spontaneously on a material basis which was inadequate to it. When the system had attained a certain degree of development, it had to overthrow this ready-made foundation, which had meanwhile undergone further development in its old form, and create for itself a new basis appropriate to its own mode of production.” (Not mode of production but technical organization of production.) Now, this is very similar to the passages in the Manifesto that I read the first day in which M&E describe the inevitable historical movement from feudalism to capitalism to communism. Each mode of production (its relations of production) develop productive forces that expand beyond this “narrow basis” and eventually the old relations of production which at one time had been adequate become merely fetters to increased development — they have to be broken asunder. Here the question is not of modes of production but phases of technical organization, but in both cases the form of the argument is the same.
What is dialectical here? The initial basis necessarily promotes the development of forces that will lead to its own destruction. Specifically, manufacture promoted the development of machinery and the division of labor that together led to the factory system, the vast automaton, and large-scale industry, which in turn destroyed manufacture. It’s really a dialectic of emanation — or maybe not a dialectic at all.
2) What is a machine’s value?
As we saw earlier in the section on constant and variable capital, machines (like all constant capital) do not create value. They merely transfer value from the labor that went into making them to the product. Clearly they transfer it over time. If it took 100 hours of labor-time to make a machine and that machine can work to make 100 products before being replace, then it transfers one hour of labor-time to each product. What is at question here, as I said last week, is Marx’s axiom about the distinction the human, the natural, and the mechanic. “The less labor [the machine] contains, the less value it contributes to the product. The less value it gives up, the more productive it is, and the more its services approach those rendered by natural forces” (512). Only the human produces value. The machine merely transfers both human-produced value and the “free” powers of nature.
3) How does mechanization affect workers? Marx gives 3.
A) The first effect is that by changing the qualifications for work (principally by lowering the need for muscle power), mechanization allows capital to employ women and children where it hadn’t before. This certainly adversely affects the health and education of children, but the primary result here is the great influx of labor-power and hence the depreciation of the value of labor. (One might explain this with a supply/demand argument — ie, increased supply of labor — but Marx makes the point by pointing to the change in the costs of reproduction. Destruction of the family wage (p. 518).) The increase of the supply of labor and the decrease in its value both undermine the power of the working class. “Machinery, by this excessive addition of women and children to the working personnel, at last breaks the resistance which the male workers had continued to oppose to the despotism of capital throughout the period of manufacture” (526). In other words, the organized worker resistance developed under manufacture is destroyed by large-scale industry. (Mechanization as weapon against the working-class.)
B) Extension of the working-day. This is the paradox: machines reduce necessary labor-time and one might assume that they would then lessen the working-day, but instead machines create the conditions and added incentives for the capitalist the lengthen the working day. First of all, the machine is most valuable if it is used up quickly — it might rust of become outdated. So you can get the most value out of machines if you never turn them off. Machines also make the work less strenuous physically so the workers may be more capable of working longer hours. So, the capitalist on one hand wants to reduce the number of workers so that he will have to pay fewer wages, but on the other hand he needs to increase the number of hours worked to make the most surplus value possible. Here, Marx says, we arrive at a contradiction.
Second dialectic (?):
“Here there is an immanent contradiction in the application of machinery to the production of surplus-value, since, of the two factors of the surplus-value created by a given amount of capital, one, the rate of surplus-value, cannot be increased except by diminishing the other, the number of workers. This contradiction comes to light as soon as machinery has come into general use in a given industry, for then the value of the machine-produced commodity regulates the social value of all commodities of the same kind; and it is this contradiction which in turn drives the capitalist without his being aware of the fact, to the most ruthless and excessive prolongation of the working day, in order that he may secure compensation for the decrease in the relative number of workers exploited by increasing not only relative but also absolute surplus labour” (531). Is this a contradiction? Does it imply a higher resolution, subsumption? The capitalist is faced with conflicting pressures and he finds a way to satisfy them both: work fewer workers longer hours.
C) Intensification of labor. “Capital’s tendency, as soon as a prolongation of the hours of labour is once for all forbidden, is to compensate for this by systematically raising the intensity of labour, and converting every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means for soaking up labour-power” (542). I see this as a passage from the quantity of time to the quality of time; or rather, we might think there are different times. Intensification is done either by speeding up production or requiring one worker to oversee more machines. Speed up, stretch out. Capital can change time itself.
The factory is the site and unification of production dominated by machines.
Humans have to adapt to machines: “In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him” (548). Or really, the worker becomes a machine, or part of a machine: The lifelong speciality of handling the same tool becomes the lifelong speciality of serving the same machine. Machinery is misused in order to transform the worker … into a part of a specialized machine” (547). This means the introduction of discipline. Factory discipline is a barracks-like discipline for the industrial army. This discipline is first of all hierarchy but more important the regimentation of time.
At this point Marx makes an interesting shift. The process of mechanization not only forces the worker to become like a machine and under the rule of machines, but the worker comes to see the machine as its primary enemy. In effect, class struggle appears in the form of the struggle of the worker against the machine. Marx has to qualify this immediately because he does not at all think that mechanization as such is against the interests of the workers or society. The Luddites have a good first instinct but the opposition to machines is not total. “It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore the transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments” (554–55). The struggle against machines can thus be a form that working-class struggle against capital can take in certain circumstances and at certain times.
Mechanization is also a means of class struggle from the point of view of capital. “It is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital” (562). Machines are a weapon that capital wields. But this really points to a more interesting formulation, which deals with what drives technological development (on the surface) but really capitalist development as a whole. The slogan: “Where there are strikes, machines will follow.” In Nietzschean terms, worker antagonism is the active element; capitalist restructuring (technological development) is merely reactive. Capital cannot develop on its own (even if it would profit from new technology); it needs worker antagonism to drive it forward.
Third dialectic:
the dialectic of capitalist development. Capitalist relations of production are negated by worker revolt, refusal, strike. That negation leads to a capitalist restructuring (technological advance) that is more productive and takes away the potential for that old form of revolt. A new form of worker revolt must develop again, and so forth. This is a two-part dialectic that is never resolved.
So to the question: what drives the mechanization of production? one might answer a) scientific invention; b) capitalist thirst for surplus value; or c) worker revolt. I would say c is primary, most immediate.
Last, I want to look at perhaps the most properly dialectical argument in this chapter which comes at the end, in the section on the health and education parts of the Factory Acts. The contradiction here regards the specialized and/or varied tasks that workers have to due in large- scale industry. In one respect, with the division of labor in the factory, the tasks of the workers become ever more repetitive creating a stunted or one-dimensional subject. On the other hand, large-scale industry is constantly throwing workers from one branch of production to another, forcing them to acquire a variety of skills. That is the contradiction: “large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions. But on the other hand, in its capitalist form it reproduces the old division of labour with its ossified particularities” (617). This contradiction will lead to a new higher individual: instead a merely the “bearer of one specialized social function” the worker will become a “totally developed individual” (618). [NB: large-scale industry brings a destruction of the family, patria potestas, changes parental authority and relation between the sexes, but also creates “a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes” (621). Foucault and biopower.]
So, here is the dialectical formulation:
Fourth dialectic:
“There is also no doubt that those revolutionary ferments whose goal is the abolition of the old division of labour stand in diametrical contradiction with the capitalist form of production,l and the economic situation of the workers which corresponds to that form. However, the development of the contradictions of a given historical form of production is the only historical way in which it can be dissolved and then reconstructed on a new basis” (619). Or later: “By maturing the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending toward the overthrow of the old one” (635). Now, this is certainly a dialectical form in which a contradiction (between variation and specialization) will lead to collapse the reformulation on a higher plane. I wonder if these needs to be posed in such dialectical form. Is Marx perhaps just saying that capitalist brings bad elements, such as poverty in terms of wealth and one-dimensionality of human experience, which both lead to the delegitimation of its rule, ie, to revolt; and good elements, cooperation, variation of activity, that form the basis of the potential new society. Does this double aspect of capital have to be conceived dialectically?
Formal and real subsumption (645). Formal subsumption of labor under capital involves laboring forms that were developed outside of capital. They suffice for absolute surplus value. Relative surplus value requires the real subsumption, that is the rule of laboring forms developed within capital itself. The real subsumption is the specifically capitalist mode of production. More next week. What of this had happened during Marx’s time and what happened since.
