This post in the Anticapitalist Chat supports a group reading of Karl Marx’s Capital Vol 1. #GoodMorningMarx #WeeklyMarx.
Not quite this type of commodity, but more like a pork barrel.
M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.
The reader will understand that in this thankless task we have often had to abandon our criticism of M. Proudhon in order to criticize German philosophy, and at the same time to give some observations on political economy.
www.marxists.org/...
Marx’s Categories:
Marx famously opens the first volume of Capital with the statement that ‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities”; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity’ (1990: 125). So, what’s a commodity? Well, to start with, a commodity is a product or service that’s bought and sold on the market on the basis that it satisfies someone’s needs or wants. This useful characteristic of the commodity Marx calls its use-value. Simply put, ‘The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value’ (1990: 126). You might buy a cup so that you can drink from it or a bed in order to sleep in it.
Use-value is therefore comprised of a commodity’s material characteristics—the shape and solidity of the cup, for instance, which allows it to hold and carry liquid—and so is a matter of its qualitative properties. Use-values, then, ‘constitute the material content of wealth’ in all societies, as Marx writes, ‘whatever its social form may be. In the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers of exchange value’ (1990: 126). In other words, a cup is a cup, whether it was made by a medieval craftsman or mass produced in a factory. But where its social form in a feudal economy might be a tribute or a tithe, in a capitalist economy it is a commodity, which has both a use-value and an exchange-value.
A commodity’s exchange-value is its quantitative aspect. That is, what you can trade it for on the market. For one cup, perhaps you can get a pair of socks. The exchange-value of a cup is thus a pair of socks, and vice versa. Or four knives. Or a hat. A commodity has many exchange-values. There’s an equivalence here between a cup, a pair of socks, four knives and a hat, insofar as they are all interchangeable amounts of something else. In other words, their exchange value must be a ‘form of appearance’, as Marx says, ‘of a content distinguishable from it’ (1990: 127). What is this something else, this ‘third thing’’ (1990: 127) as Marx calls it, that the cup and the hat have in common?
It cannot be a matter of their material properties, since it is precisely the abstraction from use-value that renders these objects exchangeable, an abstraction that occurs at the moment of exchange. What’s left when we abstract from the useful, concrete, material properties of a commodity? What’s left is that they are products of human labour, and not particular, concrete acts of labour—cup making or hat stitching—but ‘human labour in the abstract’, in Marx’s words (1990: 128). Whenever we abstract from the use-values of commodities in the act of exchange, Marx writes:
- There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values (1990: 128).
The value of a commodity is not the measure of an individual’s concrete, particular labour, but of ‘human labour in the abstract’, which is to say a social average, or what Marx calls socially necessary labour time, which is the average time socially necessary to produce a given commodity.
Labour in a capitalist economy therefore has a dual character. It is both concrete labour, or the particular form of labour that produces a cup, for instance, and abstract labour, or labour abstracted from its concrete particulars in the act of exchange. Marx notes that he was ‘the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities’, and states that ‘this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy’ (1990: 132). This category of abstract labour is crucial on several levels: it is distinct from the concrete particular activity of a given form of useful labour; it is a purely social determination, abstracted from the material properties of a commodity’s use-value; its existence is peculiar to capitalist society; and it is the source of value in a capitalist economy.
What is value? To explain this mysterious thing called value, Marx famously uses the example of 20 yards of linen, which for purposes of explication he says are worth one coat. Here, we are working with two commodities in isolation, linen and a coat, and it’s entirely arbitrary or accidental which commodities we use for this thought experiment. So, if 20 yards of linen are worth one coat, then the value of the linen is expressed in the form of a coat. The linen now has a ‘value-form’ distinct from its physical form as linen. The coat ‘represents’ the value of the linen, which exists only as a relation between the two commodities: Marx writes, ‘in the expression of value of the linen the coat represents a supra-natural property: their value, which is something purely social’ (1990: 149).
In this simple expression of the value-relation there is a relative form, the linen, and an equivalent form, the coat. In other words, the relative form of value, the linen, is valued in relation to the coat, which is therefore the equivalent form of value in this equation. The inverse is also true. If we then expand this equation, to consider for instance that 20 yards of linen are not only worth one coat, but also ten pounds of tea and two ounces of gold, we now have an expanded form of value, which is nothing other than many simple forms of value considered together. If we invert this string of equations into the general form of value, we can say that a coat, ten pounds of tea and two ounces of gold are all worth the same amount, represented here by the 20 yards of linen, which has now assumed the form of a ‘general equivalent’. And ‘by social custom’, Marx argues, the money-form of value comes to assume the role of a ‘universal equivalent’ (1990: 162-63), here represented by the two ounces of gold. In this manner, Marx is able to solve the mystery of how it is that things which are entirely different from each other in their material properties can somehow come to be exchanged as equals on the market.
Yet there remains something rather strange about a commodity. On the one hand, a commodity—a table, for instance—is a thing with material properties and subjective utility. It is made of wood, and there is a demand for it because it is useful to its owner to eat or write upon, or perhaps to burn as firewood. In this, its use-value, the table is ‘an extremely obvious or trivial thing’, as Marx writes, ‘an ordinary, sensuous thing’ (1990: 163), perceptible to the senses and entirely lacking in mystery. ‘But as soon as it emerges as a commodity’, Marx continues, ‘it changes into a thing that 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’ (1990: 163).
What could Marx possibly mean by this? A table, standing on its head, sprouting grotesque ideas from a wooden brain? This rather gothic poetic passage is in fact a dramatic and suggestive way of gesturing to what Marx calls the ‘mystical’ or ‘enigmatic character’ of the commodity form, which:
- arises from this form itself. The equality of the kinds of human labour takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values; the measure of the expenditure of human labour-power by its duration takes on the form of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour; and finally the relationships between the producers, within which the social characteristics of their labours are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour. The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves (1990: 164-65).
What we find in capitalist society is a world in which relations between people are mediated by things: in other words, you have social relations between things, and material relations between people. And it is in this section on ‘The Fetish-Character of the Commodity and its Secret’ that Marx explains that what distinguishes his critical approach is attention to the form of value:
- Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within this form. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. These forms, which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself (1990: 173-75).
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David Harvey is one of many puzzling out the commodity’s relation to surplus value.
At the outset, capital appears as money. The capitalist spends the money to buy commodities of equivalent value: labour power, machinery, semi-finished products, energy and raw materials. At this second ‘moment’ in the circulation process, value resides (as does capital) in these various commodities, waiting to be incorporated in production. In the next ‘moment’, workers use their labour power, under the direction of the capitalist, to re-shape the raw materials and semi-finished products to make a new commodity. This labour process preserves and transfers the pre-existing values, of labour power and the means of production, into the new commodity and adds a surplus value to it. Value, then, is a social relation, which operates as an ‘invisible thread’ within the circulation of capital, which takes on different material forms as it circulates.
Value is initially defined as the cumulative ‘socially necessary labour time’—past and present labour—embodied in these new commodities. The surplus value arises because the labour power employed congeals more value in the commodity than is required to pay for the value of the labour power itself, which is fixed by the value of the commodities needed to reproduce the labourer at a given standard of living. The new commodity is then sold in the market, an operation that transforms value back into the money form. But there is now more money than at the beginning. ‘Profit’ is the money name and material representation of surplus value. Capitalists typically seek to maximize their amassed profit, either by raising the rate of exploitation of labour power or hiring more workers to increase production. The total value realized in money form is then distributed to the various factions that have claims upon it: to workers in the form of wages, to industrial producers as profits, to merchant capitalists as a monetary reward for facilitating sales, to bankers as interest on their loans, to landlords as rent and to the state as taxes. The capitalists, driven by competition, then reinvest to make more profit, and the process starts again. Repeated production of surplus value creates, however, a net accumulation of values in the form of compounding growth. The reproduction of capital becomes a never-ending spiral of endlessly expanding accumulation in space and time.
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Reading group’s supporting links and resources:
Contents
Section 1 - The Development of Machinery
Section 2 - The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product
Section 3 - The Proximate Effects of Machinery on the Workman
A. Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-Power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children
B. Prolongation of the Working-Day
C. Intensification of Labour
Section 4 - The Factory
Section 5 - The Strife Between Workman and Machine
Section 6 - The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery
Section 7 - Repulsion and Attraction of Workpeople by the Factory System. Crises in the Cotton Trade
Section 8 - Revolution Effected in Manufacture, Handicrafts, and Domestic Industry by Modern Industry
A. Overthrow of Co-operation Based on Handicraft and on the Division of Labour
B. Reaction of the Factory System on Manufacture and Domestic Industries
C. Modern Manufacture
D. Modern Domestic Industry
E. Passage of Modern Manufacture, and Domestic Industry into Modern Mechanical Industry. The Hastening of this Revolution by the Application of the Factory Acts to those Industries
Section 9 - The Factory Acts. Sanitary and Educational Clauses of the same. Their General Extension in England
Section 10 - Modern Industry and Agriculture
The Historical Relation Between Absolute and Relative Surplus Value
- – in capitalism, social labor produces surplus-value
– early on: formal subsumption of labor produces absolute surplus-value by extending the working day
– later: real subsumption of labor produces relative surplus-value by reducing necessary labor
– but the means for reducing necessary labor also can increase absolute surplus-value– amount of potential surplus labor– Ricardo: saw labor productivity as source of profit
– Mill: affirms source of profits in productivity of labor against mercantilist focus on exchange
- – by making the working day longer
- – determined by natural conditions of labor– determined by requirements of life
- – need to master nature leads to development of social division of labor
- – where needs are few, a great deal of surplus labor can be imposed
The Historical Relation Between Absolute and Relative Surplus Value
Although, as this chapter makes clear, absolute and relative surplus value often co-exist as capitalist strategies, Marx nevertheless suggests a fundamental historical linkage between the two approaches.
- On the one hand, during the period of the "formal" subordination of labor to capital, before there is any capitalist modification of the labor process, absolute surplus value dominates, i.e., the main way capitalist seek to extract more surplus labor is through making workers work longer.
- On the other hand, the historical success of workers' resistance to absolute surplus value forces capital to shift its emphasis to relative surplus value.
As soon as the gradual upsurge of working-class revolt had compelled Parliament compulsorily to shorten the hours of labor, and to begin by imposing a normal working day on factories properly so called, i.e., from the moment that it was made impossible once and for all to increase the production of surplus-value by prolonging the working day, capital threw itself with all its might, and in full awareness of the situation, into the production of relative surplus value, by speeding up the development of the machine system. (pp. 533-4)
libcom.org/…
Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16
Summary of Capital Vol.1 by Harry Cleaver is also found in libcom.org: (14) libcom.org/… (15) libcom.org/…
The making of the English working class - E. P. Thompson libcom.org/...
Engels’s Synopsis of Capital
This resource is for those who haven't come across this before, because everyone needs (neo-)"classic comics" for free https://www.academia.edu/34506723/_Rius_Michael_Appignanesi_Marx_for_Beginners_BookZZ_org_
also this introduction to Marx’s Kapital (also free)
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-2ZCqM065WT7tuisv
and then there's the 13-part series by David Harvey https://youtu.be/gBazR59SZXk
en.wikisource.org/…
Reading Marx’s Capital Volume 1 with David Harvey – 2019 Edition
A close reading of the text of Karl Marx’s Capital Volume I in 12 video lectures by Professor David Harvey. Recorded at The People’s Forum in New York City in 2019. Links to the complete course:
YouTube Playlist
Podcast available on Spotify, iTunes, PodBean, and RSS.
Course Materials:
davidharvey.org/…
General laws and formulas:
Ok, let’s now consider how these categories interact synchronically and diachronically. ‘The capitalist production process,’ Marx writes, ‘is essentially, and at the same time, a process of accumulation’ (1991: 324). Capital accumulation refers to the process whereby profits are reinvested in order to increase the monetary value of the initial capital, thereby increasing the total sum of capital. This is what Marx calls ‘the general formula for capital’ (1990: 257), or M-C-M’, where M stands for money, C for commodities, and M’ for money plus the surplus value generated in the transformation of money into commodities and back into money.
Marx distinguishes the terminal movement of selling commodities in order to buy other commodities with the interminable process of transforming money into commodities for the purposes of generating surplus value:
The simple circulation of commodities—selling in order to buy—is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless (1990: 253).
The general formula for capital therefore describes the movement of self-valorizing value, whereby monetary value congeals in the commodity-form only on the condition that it be realized at a profit, which distinguishes the capitalist mode of production from simple commodity production. As Marx says, ‘the act of selling in order to buy finds its measure and its goal…in a process which lies outside it, namely consumption, the satisfaction of definite needs. But in buying in order to sell, on the contrary, the end and the beginning are the same, money or exchange value and this very fact makes the movement an endless one’ (1990: 252).
Unlike simple commodity circulation, which ‘reaches its conclusion when the money brought in by the sale of one commodity is withdrawn again by the purchase of another’, when engaging in M-C-M’, the capitalist ‘releases the money, but only with the cunning intention of getting it back again. The money therefore is not spent, it is merely advanced’ (1990: 249-50). Money, or rather the capital form of value, therefore appears as an autonomous entity that exists independent of human actors, an automatic subject that moves of its own volition:
In simple circulation, the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of their use-values, i.e. the form of money. But now, in the circulation M-C-M, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which money and commodities are both mere forms (1990: 256).
But how is it that capital can come to appear as an automatic subject, as Marx describes it? Marx lays out this problematic in terms of ‘capital personified’:
As the conscious bearer of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist… The objective content of the circulation we have been discussing—the valorization of value—is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist; nor must the profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather the unceasing movement of profit-making (1990: 254).
The late Moishe Postone is perhaps the preeminent theorist of value as a ‘self-moving substance’ or ‘automatic subject’, arguing that ‘the historical Subject analyzed by Marx consists of objectified relations, the subjective-objective categorial forms characteristic of capitalism, whose “substance” is abstract labor, that is, the specific character of labor as a socially mediating activity in capitalism. Marx’s Subject…then, is abstract and cannot be identified with any social actors’ (1993: 79). And yet, as Werner Bonefeld (2004: 113) has argued, in their tendency to read Capital as a purely logical presentation of capitalist categories, value-theoretical approaches such as Postone’s risk eliding the fact that the production of surplus value depends on the historical emergence and reproduction of a relation of class antagonism – an antagonism based on the separation of the labourer from the means of subsistence through what’s called proletarianisation.
Proletarianisation describes the process whereby the peasantry become formally ‘free’ to sell their labour through their forcible release from serfdom. Marx describes this state of affairs as the ‘separation of labour, capital and landed property’ (1978: 71) in the 1844 manuscripts, and as ‘the separation of free labour from the objective conditions of its realization’ in the Grundrisse (1993: 471), and argues in Capital that such separation ‘is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production’ (1990: 273). This process of separation, then—which deprives workers of the means of subsistence and renders them radically dependent on wage labour for survival—establishes the historical specificity of the modern proletariat and constitutes its functional distinction from that of earlier exploited classes.
But it is equally the case that this condition of separation must be reaffirmed at every moment in order for the accumulation of capital to proceed. In other words, the capitalist and the labourer must meet time and again in the marketplace, as each reproduces the other through their encounter. This is what Marx calls the reproduction of the class relation. Capital accumulation therefore constitutes a historically distinct mode of social reproduction, which is the reproduction of capital as a social relation. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse, ‘the result of the process of production and realization is, above all, the reproduction and new production of the relation of capital and labour itself, of capitalist and worker’ (1993: 458). This diagram, from the afterword to the first issue of endnotes, shows what is called in the French translation of Capital the ‘double moulinet’, or double millstone. The reproduction of capital covers the production and circulation of capital, or what we discussed above as the general formula for capital, and the other sphere covers the reproduction of labour power.[6]
The worker and the capitalist meet in the marketplace, and the worker exchanges her labour for a wage in the capitalist production process, and then purchases the commodities necessary for her reproduction on the marketplace before returning to work. This is how each pole of the capital-labour relation reproduces the other pole: labour reproduces capital, and capital reproduces labour. And yet, as Marx famously argues, the very movement by which capital accumulates compromises the conditions of its own reproduction. Marx writes, ‘capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth’ (1993: 706).
Marx calls this process the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation,’ which charts the general movement of constant over variable capital as it is coded into the most basic movement of capital over time:
The greater social wealth, the functioning of capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation (1990: 798).
Capital works, on the one hand, to create as much available labour power as possible, and, on the other, to steadily decrease the amount of socially necessary labour time. This is Marx’s theory of crisis, according to which rising productivity leads to diminishing rates of accumulation and ever-slacker labour markets. But note here, again, how capital appears to act as an independent subject, how its action takes place before anyone even shows up for work.
Logically speaking, capital recalibrates the conditions for accumulation before exploitation (as a technical feature of accumulation) even begins. Through the real subsumption of labour, capital reduces the amount of labour time that is socially necessary for production. Decreasing socially necessary labour time entails what Marx calls a ‘rising organic composition’ of capital, which indexes ‘the progressive decline in the variable capital in relation to the constant capital’ (1991: 318). The organic composition of capital measures the relation between the amount and value of constant capital, or plant and machinery, and variable capital, or waged labour, in the production process. A rising organic composition means an increase in constant over variable capital, or a displacement of necessary labour by the means of production. In other words, capital accumulation proceeds with more hardware and software relative to the number of workers on the job.
The Marxian concept of subsumption has proven central to the larger problem of tracking accumulation logically and historically. Spatial readings of subsumption, in particular—as capitalist expansion from the factory into previously separate or semi-autonomous spheres of social life—have been especially influential in recent decades, particularly in the work of Italian post-Marxists. But subsumption is a contested term in Marxist theory. Marx inherits the concept of subsumption from the German Idealists, for whom it denotes the process of cognitive abstraction through which the particular is brought into subordinate relation with the universal.[7] For Marx, however, the material act of exchange presupposes an abstract universal—value—to which particular concrete labour processes are subsumed. According to Marx, already existing labour processes are first formally subsumed in their pre-capitalist forms through the introduction of the wage. To produce surplus value under such conditions, capital must lengthen the working day beyond what is necessary for the reproduction of labour power, producing what Marx calls absolute surplus value. Driven by competition and limits to the working day, capital increases the productivity of labour via technological ratcheting, reducing the amount of socially necessary labour relative to surplus labour, producing what Marx calls relative surplus value. Real subsumption for Marx then describes the ‘form-determination’ of the capital-labour relation in anticipation of value.[8]
It’s not only that concrete labour is negated in the abstracting process by which labour becomes abstract labour measured as socially necessary labour time. Through the domination of the money form and the mediations of the exchange relation labour becomes a form of value for capital, internal to its reproductive movement. What happens when capital reaches a level of development at which labour, expelled from production, is unable to find its way back into the production process?
[7] For Kant (2007), subsumption is a cognitive process that organizes conceptual experience according to categorical truths, whereas for Hegel (2008) the universal resides in and is mediated by the particular. For an extended critical appraisal of the category of subsumption as it figures as a periodizing model in various strands of Marxian thought, see Endnotes, ‘The History of Subsumption’ (2010).
[8] The idea that value ‘form-determines’ the labour process derives from Marx’s writings on the capitalist value-form. In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx uses the German term Formbestimmtheit (‘form-determination’ or ‘determination of form’) to describe the process by which money or commodities become forms of value for capital (1910: 531). Diane Elson develops a cogent account of how value form-determines labour in her essay, ‘The Value Theory of Labour,’ where she writes, ‘The argument of Capital, I, goes on to show the dominance of the universal equivalent, the money form of value, over other commodities, and how this domination is expressed in the self-expansion of the money form of value i.e. in the capital form of value. Further it shows that the domination of the capital form of value is not confined to labour ‘fixed’ in products, it extends to the immediate process of production itself, and to the reproduction of that process. The real subsumption of labour as a form of capital…is a developed form of the real subsumption of other aspects of labour as expressions of abstract labour in the universal equivalent, the money form of value’ (2015: 165-166). This concept of form-determination and its relationship to reproduction will be important in later lectures.
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