This is the fifth set of notes for a reading group on Marx’s Capital, and includes a Volume I refresher for further reading of Volume II. There are links to earlier posts and texts that may be useful.
Section 1: "The limits of the Working Day"
Outline of Marx's Discussion
The working day is a "variable," "fluid" or "indeterminate" quantity that can be represented thus:
1. A ---------- B ----- C
where the length A---------B represents the part of the day that produces V
and B------C represents that part of the working day that produces S
But B-----C can be "variable," longer or shorter
B-----C, or
B-------C, or
B---------C, depending on the power of business to impose work
2. But there are limits:
There is a minimum limit to A---B for workers to enable the reproduction of their labor power
so the capitalists must obtain a working day at least A---B + B---C,
where B---C = average profit (or they will withdraw from this form of investment).
There is a maximum limit of A----C, which is a function of:
—the "physical limits" set by workers' needs for sleep, food, etc.
—a "moral/social" limit set by workers' needs for intellectual and social requirements.
—both of these are elastic though within 24 hours.
3. In LP—M (and M—LP) we have an exchange between two subjects with two different views on the implications of the exchange.
Capitalists: demand the use of daily working power, LP, in exchange for wages
Workers: demand enough time so that along with their wages they can re-produce LP and live, i.e., a normal working day
4. Thus, capitalist rights as purchaser vs. workers' rights as sellers
"Between equal rights force decides. Hence it is that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists and collective labor, i.e., the working class."
Outline of Marx's Discussion
- 1. "Capital did not invent surplus labor."
Class society with the monopolization of MP has long produced surplus labor. (generic)
2. Where use-value predominates
—surplus labor is limited by set of wants
—no boundless thirst from production itself
3. Where exchange-value (capitalist market) dominates
—there is just that boundless thirst, the aim is not use-value and therefore not limited by wants
—this comes with capitalist world market and production for export, e.g., in the United States slavery transformed from paternalism to the using up of slaves' lives to maximize exchange-value and profit.
4. Corvee labor
—in Danubian Principalities, Reglement Organique (1831)
—a "positive" expression of thirst for surplus labor. It is positive, because explicitly defined and expanded
—here "surplus labor in an independent and immediately perceptible form," i.e., work on seignoral estate.
5.Factory Acts in England (1850)
—negative expression of thirst, negative because the Acts set limits to surplus labor
—limits set through state, forced by working class struggle & exhaustion of LP
—capital responds with "nibbling and cribbling" at working day in a way that shows the nature of surplus value is no secret to anyone.
6. Full-timers, half-timers: people defined as personified labor time.
The Physiocrats and Adam Smith
Quesnay conceived of the distinction between fixed and circulating capital as that between avances primitives (originaladvances) and avances annuelles (annual advances). Correctly, he presented the distinction as one within productive capital, i.e. capital already incorporated into the production process. Quesnay also (correctly) conceived of the distinction as a distinction between the different ways these two elements of productive capital entered the value of the finished product, the value of one being completely replaced in a year, that of the other piecemeal over a longer period. Smith applied the distinction to productive capital in general; hence, rather than the distinction being one between annual and more than annual turnovers, it reappears as one between more or less shorter and more or less longer turnovers. But, in doing this, Smith loses sight of the significance of the distinction as one within productive capital in its impact on turnover and reproduction. Smith designates as ‘circulating capital’ capital as it passes through the metamorphoses of the cycle of capital (in reality commodity capital), and thus confuses the movement of industrial capital as a whole with the distinct elements that exist within productive capital, in other words conflating the distinction between production capital and capital in the circulation sphere and that between fixed and circulating capital within productive capital. For Smith, on the other hand, ‘fixed capital’ is simply that capital which ‘yield[s] a[...] profit without changing masters’. Smith derived his concepts not from the actual ‘function of productive capital ,but [...] rather [...] [from what] obtains subjectively for the individual capitalist, to whom one part of capital is useful in this way, another in that.’1 In addition, by stating that fixed capital realises a profit by remaining in the production process, while circulating capital does the same through circulation, ‘permits the similarity of form that variable capital and the fluid component of constant capital have in the turnover to conceal the basic difference that they have in the valorisation process and the formation of surplus-value [...].’2For the physiocrats, who correctly subsumed the capital advanced in wages within the category of avances annuelles, what actually appeared was not labour – power itself but the means of subsistence received by the workers. In this way, the portion of value added to the product by labour-power was the equal of the value of the means of subsistence (entirely consistent with the Physiocratic doctrine that the source of profit was the result of the collaboration between nature and production); for Smith, following the Physiocratic logic and substituting the workers’ means of subsistence for the actual labour-power into which the variable part of capital is transformed, these means of subsistence play a part no different to that played by the other elements of productive capital, i.e. they simply reappear in the value of the product. Smith’s conception of the role of variable capital in production is, in Marx’s words, a ‘Physiocratic definition without the premises of the Physiocrats [...].’In addition to all this, when Smith lists elements of production as either circulating or fixed capital (in so doing reducing the function of the elements of production to their material properties), he excludes labour-power from his categories. Since Smith’s ‘circulating capital’ is in reality commodity capital, labour-power, which, before being incorporated into production, i.e. before it is sold, is not capital at all. Thus for Smith variable capital cannot belong to the category of circulating capital; instead, it appears in his scheme – in which the whole of social wealth is divided into immediate consumption fund, fixed capital, and circulating capital – as means of subsistence. But what is incorporated into the production process is the worker, not her means of subsistence.31
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Ricardo identifies two sorts of capital: ‘capital that is to support labour’ (fixed capital), and ‘capital invested in tools, machinery, and buildings’ (circulating capital); respectively, instruments of labour and variable capital. The distinction is made on the basis not of the valorisation process but – as in the case of Smith – on that of circulation. Two misconceptions arise:
1 ‘The differences in the degree durability of the fixed capital, and the variations in the composition of capital in terms of constant and variable, are taken as equivalent.’1This standpoint is that of ‘phenomena in their finished form’, as opposed to that of the ‘inner mechanism of capitalist production’. The former, however, as far as valorisation is concerned, only relates to how a given quantity of value is transferred to the product; the latter determines variations in the production of surplus-value. In terms of the circulation process, the former is concerned solely with the period of the renewal of capital.
2 As Marx notes, in the distribution of the social surplus-value between capitals, the effect on the equalisation of the general rate of profit and the transformation of values into process or production32 of differences in the time for which capital is advanced (i.e. variations in the lifespans of fixed capitals) and in organic compositions of capital are similar. In Ricardo’s categories, with instruments of labour on the one side and variable capital on the other, objects of labour disappear from the picture. They cannot appear as fixed capital, since their manner of circulation coincides with the capital laid out on labour-power; but neither can they appear as circulation capital, because of Smith’s legacy in conflating fixed/circulating capital and constant/variable capital.
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Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their labor power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production. — Marx, Das Kapital
in the last post the path from the Platonic Cave Allegory was drawn through Hegel providing a classical foundation for the dialectic that Marx develops into a dialectical materialism
Plato’s Cave Allegory
The Hegelian Evolution of Consciousness
The Platonic notion of the ascent of the soul through levels of being is the model for the Hegelian concept of the progress of consciousness. While Plato conceives of the soul as rising through a timeless series of levels of being, Hegel conceives of consciousness rising through a historical series of levels. For Hegel, the Platonic ascent of the soul becomes a historical evolution of the consciousness of humanity as a whole. This is the Myth of the Cave: the whole human races is being led out of the Cave. In Figure 3, Plato's Divided Line is in RED, Hegel's in BLUE.
The phenomenologist is the one who guides consciousness on its ascent out of the cave into the daylight, the one who compels consciousness to make the ascent.
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Life is more explicitly rational than mere physical matter because it is more explicitly self-determining. Life itself becomes more explicitly rational and self-determining when it becomes conscious and self-conscious—that is, life that can imagine, use language, think and exercise freedom. Such self-conscious life Hegel calls “spirit” (Geist). Reason, or the Idea, comes to be fully self-determining and rational, therefore, when it takes the form of self-conscious spirit. This occurs, in Hegel’s view, with the emergence of human existence. Human beings, for Hegel, are thus not just accidents of nature; they are reason itself—the reason inherent in nature—that has come to life and come to consciousness of itself. Beyond human beings (or other finite rational beings that might exist on other planets), there is no self-conscious reason in Hegel’s universe.
In his philosophy of objective spirit Hegel analyses the institutional structures that are required if spirit—that is, humanity—is to be properly free and self-determining. These include the institutions of right, the family, civil society and the state. In the philosophy of absolute spirit Hegel then analyses the different ways in which spirit articulates its ultimate, “absolute” understanding of itself. The highest, most developed and most adequate understanding of spirit is attained by philosophy (the bare bones of whose understanding of the world have just been sketched). Philosophy provides an explicitly rational, conceptual understanding of the nature of reason or the Idea. It explains precisely why reason must take the form of space, time, matter, life and self-conscious spirit.
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The New Dialectics is different from the old Marxian dialectics (or Diamat), which was concerned primarily with the influence of Hegel on Marx’s theory of history, and the eventual triumph of socialism. The New Dialectics, by contrast, is concerned mainly with the influence of Hegel’s logic on Marx’s theory in Capital of capitalism, as a given historically specific society; hence it is also called ‘systematic dialectics’ (as opposed to ‘historical dialectics’). Different authors have different interpretations of Hegel’s logic and systematic dialectics, but they all agree that Hegel’s logic is important for understanding Marx’s theory in Capital.
libcom.org/...'s%20Capital%20and%20Hegel's%20Logic%20-%20A%20Reexamination.pdf
The first essay, ‘Marx Reads Object-Oriented Ontology’, is by Žižek, Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and perhaps the most famous living philosopher. Žižek is particularly notable for his unexpected juxtapositions of Marxist–Hegelian philosophy with Lacan and popular culture. Here, he brings in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (a term coined by Levi Bryant), a recent neo-Heideggerian movement that overturns the primacy of subjects over objects and anthropocentric correlations of cognitive content with external reality to consider objects in other terms than human perception, praxis or activity (real vs. sensual objects). Žižek approaches this debate critically from the perspective of a philosopher whose analysis privileges subject–object dialectics. Yet, whatever the merits of object-oriented ontology may be, Žižek’s continued reliance on a subject–object ontology limits his ability here to offer genuine alternatives. He attempts to reconstitute subject–object relations performatively as they appear to themselves, while their ‘“material base” is just a neuronal–biological apparatus’ (p. 50). Yet, he is trapped within this same restrictive opposition. Still, within this opposition, his claims remain interesting.
- The first concerns normativity. In his account, communism functions through the activity of involved subjects, yet its normativity requires that they treat the norms constituted by subjective activity as objective, and thus, as universal givens, despite the fact that those norms were freely, and thus contingently, enacted by autonomous subjects. Žižek’s virtual philosophy of ‘as if’ makes psychological sense even if it sounds suspiciously like Sartrean bad faith, treating as objective what one knows is subjective.
- A second interesting claim is that Hegel should be read as a thinker of antagonism, rather than as a reductive universalist. Just as John Burbidge has argued that Hegel’s absolute knowing is precisely the recognition of the necessarily relational, contingent or differential character of thinking, Žižek argues that the true or the totality is inherently defined as the whole by its contradictory, antagonistic, inconsistent nature (p. 44), and the necessary by its ineradicable contingency (p. 53). The key is that to forget the antagonisms – the radical core of emancipatory potential in a movement – is to lose that dimension that enables transcendence of the historical impossibility of a given time-bound moment.
The conclusion of the essay, that Harman’s object-oriented ontology lacks the ability to articulate anything but passive subjects, is less valuable as a critique, because the demerits of thinking about persons as subjects are well-known and transcend the Lacanian critique. Nietzsche argued that subject–object thinking is inadequate both for its failure to interrogate the nature of thinking, the primacy of consciousness, and the nature of the self, and its reliance on the contingent metaphysics of grammar. Heidegger similarly argued to the tertiary character of subject–object relations, which he subordinated to the ontological difference, logos, and the synthesis–diaeresis of the logos apophantikos or demonstrative language. A first step in moving Hegelian–Marxist dialectics into the sphere of the contemporary for the purposes of advancing emancipatory discourse would be to think beyond capitalist subjects and objects in the constitution of such discourses in a more complex, concrete, and historically specific approach to human identity. Perhaps this thinking beyond and through subject–object dialectics would enable a more incisive rending of the veil than Žižek’s example of seeing a reality through inhuman eyes in the unintended vision of the actors playing Siegmund and Sieglinde, still lying in an embrace behind a curtain suddenly parted after the end of Act I of Die Walküre (p. 52).
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Sieglinde
(in highest excitement tears herself away
and stands before him.)
Art thou Siegmund, standing before me?
Sieglinde am I, who for thee longed:
thine own twin sister thou winnest at once
with the sword!
(She throws herself on his breast.)
Siegmund
Bride and sister
be to thy brother:
then flourish the Wälsungs for aye!
(He draws her to him with passionate fervor. The
curtain falls rapidly.)
www.murashev.com/...üre_libretto_English_German
What does it mean to “think beyond capitalist subjects and objects in the constitution of such discourses in a more complex, concrete, and historically specific approach to human identity.”
This circuit of exchanges looks like this:
C – M – C
C = Commodity (labor power)
M = Money
C = Another Commodity (e.g., a coat)
The circuit C-M-C starts with one commodity, and finishes with another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of wants, in one word, use value, is its end and aim.
— Marx, Das Kapital
This circuit of exchange has a number of important features:
1) It begins with one commodity and ends with a completely
different commodity.
2) In principle, there is no intrinsic reason why the first commodity and the second commodity, although different in
their qualities, are not of equivalent value.
3) This second commodity is withdrawn from circulation
and is consumed.
4) The satisfaction of human wants is the end and aim of
this circuit of exchange.
This circuit of exchange is what most of us engage in everyday.
It is also utterly different from the circuit of exchange that characterizes capital. That circuit of exchange looks like this:
M – C – M+
M = Money
C = Commodity
M+ = More Money
The circuit M – C – M+, on the contrary, commences with money and ends with money. Its leading motive, and the goal that attracts it, is therefore more exchange value.
— Marx, Das Kapital
This circuit of exchange has a number of important features which
contrast with C – M – C, the circuit the majority of people are engaged in:
1) It begins with money and ends with MORE money –
money plus.
2) M+ occurs within the sphere of circulation and has no
concern with the satisfaction of human wants.
3) The aim of this exchange is to add value to the amount
it began with.
4) On the surface, more money or value seems to arise from
money itself.
This then is the circuit of exchange that characterizes a small minority of social actors.
But a more radical interpretation of Marx says that as long as we are engaged in value production, then there will always be class control by those who own the means of production, whether in the form of private property or state control. That is a much more radical interpretation – and opens up a much more radical project: the end of value production and not just a fairer distribution of value. (p.44)
Just as commodities are, at the same time, use values and values, so the process of producing them must be a labor process, and at the same time, a process of creating value.
— Marx, Das Kapital
The term “value” is basically equivalent to capital, but it is capital at the highest level of abstraction. Even capital takes different forms, as we shall see later. It can be embodied in buildings, machinery, raw materials, purchased labor power and finished goods. In a way value refers to the flow of wealth creation through these different embodiments of capital. The absolutely key factor in that flow is TIME. The slower the flow of value between these different material embodiments of capital, the less competitive a given capital is, the less money it is making compared to other capitals. The faster the flow of value between these different elements of capital, the more competitive it is in relation to other capitals, and the more money it stands to make. (p.47)
In the process we are now considering it is of extreme importance that no more time be consumed … than is necessary under given social conditions. … The time that is socially necessary alone counts.
— Marx, Das Kapital
In Marxist theory, interpellation—the process by which we encounter a culture's or ideology's values and internalize them—is an important concept regarding the notion of ideology. It is associated in particular with the work of French philosopher Louis Althusser.[1] According to Althusser, every society is made up of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) which are instrumental to constant reproduction of the relations to the production of that given society. While ISAs belong to the private domain and refer to private institutions (family, church but also the media and politics), the RSA is one public institution (police/military) controlled by the government. Consequently, 'interpellation' describes the process by which ideology, embodied in major social and political institutions (ISAs and RSAs), constitutes the very nature of individual subjects' identities through the process of "hailing" them in social interactions.
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Was it the Ricardian machine that Marx analysed in Capital? The answer is both yes and no. The subject matter of his argument is indeed the Ricardian machine. On an interpretative level, subject to some inconclusive and mutually inconsistent asides about where the machine’s precise boundaries lie, there can be no doubt about that. Indeed (and this is something which is not so widely understood as perhaps it should be), in many contexts it is the Ricardian machine that Marx is referring to when he uses the very word “Capital”. But to leave it at that would be to fail to do justice to the scope of Marx’s analysis. This is because of the profound insight Marx offers about the fungible substance – i.e. value – which all the diverse components of the machine quantifiably embody, such that one can meaningfully say that more is produced than consumed. His insight (which more than makes up for any mathematical modelling infelicities in his analysis) is that, under the specific historical conditions of the capitalist mode of production, that fungible substance is a social substance, embodied specifically through our market relations. You cannot analyse the Ricardian machine, so Marx demonstrates, without analysing the way value and capitalist society constitute each other.
And this is not to make a broad but vague claim that the Ricardian machine is embedded in a wider set of social relations, and laws in the juridical sense (although of course it is); Marx demonstrates that the social relations in question in fact drive the behaviour of the Ricardian machine with the ineluctable force of physical laws. The Ricardian machine is the chaotic monster that it is precisely because its lifeblood, value, cycles between ineluctable laws of a social, and a physical, and a social kind again, as the matter in which it is embodied cycles between market exchange, and the physical metabolic process of production, and back to market exchange again.
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In the late 1950s, he was among those who initiated the use of mathematical methods in economic planning. He elaborated the theory of two-level planning with Tamás Lipták and directed the first large-scale, economy-wide, multi-level planning project. Professor Kornai's early work Overcentralization (1953) created a stir in the West and conveyed for the first time his disillusionment with communist central planning.
His 1971 book Anti-Equilibrium criticizes neoclassical economics, particularly general equilibrium theory.
His 1980 book Economics of Shortage is perhaps his most influential work. It argues that the chronic shortages seen throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1970s and continuing in the 1980s were not the consequences of planners' errors or wrong pricing, but of systemic flaws. In his 1988 book The Socialist System, The Political Economy of Communism, he argued that the command economy based on unchallenged control by a Marxist–Leninist communist party leads to a predominance of bureaucratic administration of state firms, through centralized planning and management, and the use of administrative pricing to eliminate the effects of the market. This brings individual responses to the incentives of the system, culminating in observable and inescapable economic phenomena known as the shortage economy. Kornai remained highly skeptical of efforts to create market socialism.
en.wikipedia.org/...ános_Kornai
In German, the general meaning of "Verwertung" is the productive use of a resource, and more specifically the use or application of something (an object, process or activity) so that it makes money, or generates value, with the connotation that the thing validates itself and proves its worth when it results in earnings, a yield. Thus, something is "valorised" if it has yielded its value (which could be use-value or exchange-value). Similarly, Marx's specific concept refers both to the process whereby a capital value is conferred or bestowed on something, and to the increase in the value of a capital asset, within the sphere of production.
[...]
The capitalist production process, Marx argues, is both a labour process creating use-values and a value-creation process through which additional new value is created. However, value creation as such is not what the capitalist aims at. The capitalist wants his capital to increase. This means that the worker must create more value for the capitalist than he receives as wage from the capitalist. The worker must create not only new value but surplus value. A value creation process which goes beyond the point at which the worker has just created the equivalent of the value of his own labour power, and begins to increase the value of capital, is a valorisation process, not just a value creation process.
Valorisation thus specifically describes the increase in the value of capital assets through the application of living, value-forming labour in production. The "problem" of valorisation is: how can labour be applied in production so that capital value grows? How can assets be invested productively, so that they gain value rather than lose it? In Theories of Surplus Value, chapter 3 section 6, Marx emphasizes his view that "Capital is productive of value only as a relation, in so far as it is a coercive force on wage-labour, compelling it to perform surplus-labour, or spurring on the productive power of labour to produce relative surplus-value."
[...]
In Capital Vol. 3 (Penguin ed., p. 136) Marx defines the rate of valorisation as S/C where "S" is the surplus value produced and "C" is the total capital invested to produce it. This is strictly a value ratio, a relationship between value proportions, not to be confused with the rate of profit on capital invested, since the amount of surplus value yielded by a capital investment, corresponding to a certain quantity of labour-time expended in production, typically diverges from that part of the surplus value which is realized as profit, since at any time products are likely to be traded above or below their value, rather than at prices which exactly reflect their value (Marx often assumes for the purpose of his analysis that the total mass of profit and the total surplus-value are the same magnitude, although in reality they can vary from each other, due to continual changes in labour productivity across time, imperfect pricing, and imperfect competition).
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