'production for use', His Girl Friday, and Capital (aka 'slavery with extra steps')
This is the first set of notes for a reading group on Marx’s Capital using as a review the following book: MARX'S DAS KAPITAL FOR BEGINNERS BY MICHAEL WAYNE
these actions are also social relations and their networked extension into culture(s) is also interpellation
‘Production for use’ as a concept appears in the film His Girl Friday as an inference to the kinds of “socialist” street rhetoric popular during the interwar period. It is not about production but also about exchange, just as in media like the motion picture film, production for use is also about a sphere of exchange represented by distribution to media outlets and channels and ultimately about the formation of audiences. In all of this, commodities are produced: the film stock, the services, the merchandise, the audience itself measured as dollars yielded at the box office not just at the first weekend.
The transformation of The Front Page as a stage play into a film production (with many iterations) is a kind of articulation and interpellation of a cultural product concerned with a changing historical circumstance including the intersectional deployment of a female workforce at the beginning of a world war. It is more than merely a screwball comedy or a star vehicle for its actors, even as such brands also define commodities.
Production for use refers to an arrangement whereby the production of goods and services is carried out ex ante (directly) for their utility (also called "use-value"). The implication is that the value of economic output would be based on use-value or a direct measure of utility as opposed to exchange-value; because economic activity would be undertaken to directly satisfy economic demands and human needs, the productive apparatus would directly serve individual and social needs. This is contrasted with production for exchange of the produced good or service in order to profit, where production is subjected to the perpetual accumulation of capital, a condition where production is only undertaken if it generates profit, implying an ex post or indirect means of satisfying economic demand. The profits system is oriented toward generating a profit to be reinvested into the economy (and the constant continuation of this process), the result being that society is structured around the need for a perpetual accumulation of capital.[3] In contrast, production for use means that the accumulation of capital is not a compulsory driving force in the economy, and by extension, the core process which society and culture revolves around. Production for profit, in contrast, is the dominant mode of production in the modern world system, equivocates "profitability" and "productivity" and presumes that the former always equates to the latter.
en.wikipedia.org/…
The form of use-value is the form of the commodity's body itself, iron, linen, etc., its tangible, sensible form of existence. This is the natural form (Naturalform) of the commodity. As opposed to this the value-form (Wertform) of the commodity is its social form. Now how is the value of a commodity expressed?
www.marxists.org/…
The secret of the expression of value, the equality of all labours and the fact that all labours count equally because and insofar as they are human labour as such can only be deciphered when the concept of human equality already possesses the fixity of a popular prejudice. But that is only possible in a society in which the commodity-form is the general form of the product of labour and thus also the relation of people to one another as possessors of commodities is the ruling social relation. The genius of Aristotle shines precisely in the fact that he discovers in the expression of value of commodities a relation of equality. Only the historical limit of the society in which he lived prevents him from finding out what, ‘in truth’, this relation of equality consists in.
www.marxists.org/...
CLIP: PRODUCTION FOR USE in His Girl Friday
www.tcm.com/…
In the Howard Hawks-directed 1940 film His Girl Friday, written by Charles Lederer based on the 1928 Broadway play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) interviews accused killer Earl Williams (John Qualen) in jail to write his story for her newspaper. Williams is despondent and confused, and easily accepts it when Johnson leads him into an account of the events preceding the killing, which revolves around the desperate out-of-work man's hearing the expression "production for use" and transferring the concept in his mind to the gun he had: it was made for use, and he used it. This is the story about Williams that Johnson writes up, to the admiration of the other reporters covering the case. This version of Earl Williams' motivations differs significantly from that presented in the original stage play and the first film adaptation of it from 1931. In those scripts, the killer was a committed anarchist who had definite political reasons for the shooting, and did not need to be influenced by a stronger personality into a false narrative.[25]
en.wikipedia.org/...
Production for use is a phrase referring to the principle of economic organization and production taken as a defining criterion for a socialist economy. It is held in contrast to production for profit. This criterion is used to distinguish socialism from capitalism, and was one of the fundamental defining characteristics of socialism initially shared by Marxian socialists, evolutionary socialists, social anarchists and Christian socialists.[1]
[...]
This principle is broad and can refer to an array of different configurations that vary based on the underlying theory of economics employed. In its classic definition, production for use implied an economic system whereby the law of value and law of accumulation no longer directed economic activity, whereby a direct measure of utility and value is used in place of the abstractions of the price system, money, and capital.[2] Alternative conceptions of socialism that don't utilize the profit system such as the Lange model involve the use of a price system and monetary calculation.
The central critique of the capitalist profits system by socialists is that the accumulation of capital ("making money") becomes increasingly detached from the process of producing economic value, leading to waste, inefficiency, and social issues. Essentially, it is a distortion of proper accounting based on the assertion of the law of value instead of the "real" costs of the factors of production, objectively determined outside of social relations.
en.wikipedia.org/...
Widget is a placeholder name for an unnamed, unspecified, or hypothetical manufactured good or product. The word was coined by George S. Kaufman in his play Beggar on Horseback (1924).
Can one eat a widget or does it require a receptacle.
Capital: teabaggers, hammer-time, and Mango Mussolini's binoculars
Marx’s Das Kapital For Beginners is an introduction to the Marxist critique of capitalist production and its consequences for a whole range of social activities such as politics, media, education and religion. Das Kapital is not a critique of a particular capitalist system in a particular country at a particular time, but rather its aim was to identify the essential features that define capitalism, in whatever country it develops and in whatever historical period. For this reason, Das Kapital is necessarily a fairly general, abstract analysis. As a result, it can be fairly difficult to read and comprehend. At the same time, understanding Das Kapital is crucial for mastering Marx's insights to capitalism. Marx's Das Kapital For Beginners offers an accessible path through Marx's arguments and his key questions: What is commodity? Where does wealth come from? What is value? What happens to work under capitalism? Why is crisis part of capitalism's DNA? And what happens to our consciousness, our very perceptions of reality and our ways of thinking and feeling under capitalism?
...the example of a friend who knocks on a door. The person inside asks "Who is there?" and only opens the door once the "It's me" from the outside sounds familiar. By doing so, the person inside partakes in "a material ritual practice of ideological recognition in everyday life".[1] In other words, ... "you and I are always already subjects" and are constantly engaging in everyday rituals, like greeting someone or shaking hands, which makes us subjected to ideology. en.wikipedia.org/...
Plato’s Cave Allegory
In the allegory, Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, and deductive logic; and the theory of forms.
Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not reality at all. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.[1]
Socrates remarks that this allegory can be paired with previous writings, namely the analogy of the sun and the analogy of the divided line.
en.wikipedia.org/...
“In The Republic (509d–510a), Plato describes the divided line this way:
Now take a line which has been cut into two unequal parts, and divide each of them again in the same proportion,[2] and suppose the two main divisions to answer, one to the visible and the other to the intelligible, and then compare the subdivisions in respect of their clearness and want of clearness, and you will find that the first section in the sphere of the visible consists of images. And by images I mean, in the first place, shadows, and in the second place, reflections in water and in solid, smooth and polished bodies and the like: Do you understand?
Yes, I understand.
Imagine, now, the other section, of which this is only the resemblance, to include the animals which we see, and everything that grows or is made.[3]” en.wikipedia.org/...
historical materialism
Whereas Plato's "opposing sides" were people (Socrates and his interlocutors), however, what the "opposing sides" are in Hegel's work depends on the subject matter he discusses. plato.stanford.edu/…
The method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous. … There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
— Marx, Preface to the French edition of Das Kapital
The method of analysis Marx employed is called immanent critique. It starts with a simple category (e.g., the commodity) and gradually “unfolds” into more elaborate and complex webs of categories. It is motivated to do so because this “internal” criticism finds contradictions within and between the categories and discovers aspects of reality that the categories cannot explain. This then motivates the critic to develop new categories or refine old ones so they have greater explanatory power. (p.14)
So a commodity has two sides to it. It has a use value and an exchange value. An exchange value expresses itself as the price at which the commodity exchanges. (Wayne p.3)
So use value has its origins in nature and human labor. And this is true throughout human history – not just the recent history of capitalist production. Human beings have always produced use values from natural raw materials. And this process of production has in turn developed us as creative, intelligent human beings. (Wayne p.5)
Now, human labor produces two types of products. One type functions as tools or raw materials that will be used in further acts of labor. The other type produces final products that can be consumed or used by individuals to reproduce themselves – whether that is a roof over their heads or a bite to eat.
Finally we should note that although labor is absolutely central to what Marx called our “species being,” labor is in turn dependent on nature. (Wayne p.7)
Use values … constitute the substance of all wealth,whatever may be the social form of that wealth. (Marx)
However, in the last few hundred years, the production of use values has been embodied largely in commodities. This is a new social form of wealth that we call capitalism, and it means that use values are now combined with exchange values.
In the form of society we are about to consider, [use values] are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value. (Marx)
So what is exchange value? It must be the value at which commodities exchange for each other. This exchange value finds its expression in prices. And what are prices?
Prices are wooing glances cast at money by commodities. (Marx)
In money, commodities find an easily divisible and portable means of exchange. But money also measures the value of commodities. So the exchange value of a commodity finds a mirror of its value in money. (Wayne P.8)
Money is the universal mirror or equivalent that keeps company with all other ordinary commodities. It is in fact no more than a commodity itself, because it is a representation of the exchange value of the ordinary commodity.
Money functions as a means of circulation only because in it the values of commodities have independent reality. (Marx)
Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labor embodied in them and the concrete forms of that labor. There is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labor, human labor in the abstract.
So while human labor produces use values on the one hand, on the other, human labor undergoes some sort of “abstraction” and it is this abstract human labor that produces value in commodities. We have now learned that commodities are made up of two parts: use value and exchange value. We have begun to see that their combination in a commodity might not be as harmonious as we first supposed. (Wayne p.12)
Use value and exchange value then are strange bedfellows. They are joined together in the commodity but one is characterized by the principle of quality (use value) and the other by the principle of quantity (exchange value). (Wayne p.13)
But we can already see that the internal contradictions between use value and exchange value, and between concrete labor and abstract labor, are a problem. Marx was convinced that these contradictions, as they developed and deepened, eroded the historic justification for capitalism’s continued existence.
The method of analysis Marx employed is called immanent critique. It starts with a simple category (e.g., the commodity) and gradually “unfolds” into more elaborate and complex webs of categories. It is motivated to do so because this “internal” criticism finds contradictions within and between the categories and discovers aspects of reality that the categories cannot explain. This then motivates the critic to develop new categories or refine old ones so they have greater explanatory power. (Wayne p.14)
Chapter 2 the exchange of commodities
Imagine three piles of money, each bigger than the other. The first thing that we notice about these piles of money is that there is very little difference between them. The only difference in fact is a quantitative one.
Now this is in contrast to our three ordinary commodities we discussed earlier: the teabag, the hammer, and the binoculars. We saw that each of those had very different qualities. Of course these qualities come in certain quantities. The quantitative dimension is a natural part of what they are, but it is the qualitative dimension that is most crucial to their differential usefulness. But money is pretty much just money. There is not a lot you can do with it (p.9)
The evolution of the word 'tea bagger' Tea Party activists are outraged by therevelation that Obama once used the term "tea baggers" to describe them. theweek.com/...
Home Improvement was one of the most popular television shows of the 1990s. Based on the stand-up of Tim Allen, Home Improvement followed Tim ‘The Toolman’ Taylor, a well-meaning yet cocky know-it-all Detroit man interested in sports, cars, and tools. He hosted the ‘show within the show’, Tool Time, where his accident-prone tendencies resulted in hilarious mishaps, often turning into a ‘don’t try this at home’ for the audience. The show’s popularity spawned a number of products for adults and children (including a video game called Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!). The Tim Allen Signature Tools sold tool kits for children, complete with mini-projects for them to complete‘ around the house.’ For adults, the Tim Allen Signature line feature deverything from hammers to screwdrivers to robotic sockets. www.hammermuseum.org/…urbandictionary.com/...
Commodities are things, and therefore without power of resistance against man. … In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognize in each other the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflex of the real economic relation between the two.
Trump mocks glasses worn by Chinese officials in rambling speech riddled with false claims President suggests he personally negotiated release of US basketball players detained in China during bizarre monologue www.independent.co.uk/...
— Marx, Das Kapital
Marx is being a little ironic here, because we will later find out that commodities do in fact have “power of resistance” against their supposed owners. But our identity as consumers is fostered continually by capitalism within the sphere of exchange. Our sense that being a consumer empowers us is rooted in the daily reality of entering the market. This is a realm apparently of freedom, a realm where commodity owners meet and exchange on the basis of consent. It is a realm of law and a place where we express our individual will. In other words, exchange is not just about economics, it is about how we behave, how we feel, what assumptions we make and what society as a whole validates as “normal.”(p.16)
It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realized human labor, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values – i.e., into money.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Eventually our Buyer finds the coat she desires and exchanges $100 for it. At that magical moment, value undergoes a change of form. The money that was in the pocket ofour Buyer is transformed into the coat which has a use value that our Buyer wants. The coat that was in the shop is transformed into the money that left our Buyer’s pocket.
The conversion of a commodity into money is the simultaneous conversion of money into a commodity.
— Marx, Das Kapital
The shop assistant wishes our Buyer “a nice day” but both Buyer and Seller know that their relationship is entirely limited to the act of exchange.
The persons exist for one another merely as representatives of, and therefore as owners of, commodities.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Out of the act of exchange itself, the individual … is reflected in himself as its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary transaction; no force on either side; positing the self … as dominant and primary.
— Marx, Grundrisse
Price is the money-name of the labor realized in a commodity. Hence the expression of the equivalence of a commodity with the sum of money constituting its price is a tautology.
— Marx, Das Kapital
The whole process effectuates … nothing more than an exchange of products. If commodities, or commodities and money, of equal exchange value, and consequently equivalents, are exchanged, it is plain that no one abstracts more value from circulation than he throws into it.
— Marx, Das Kapital
So what we have seen so far in the act of exchange cannot explain the signs of inequality and social stratification hiding beneath the surface of the market. Crucially it does not explain how value is generated. Nor does it explain how it is possible for some people to consistently appropriate more value – a surplus – than they commit to the market. (p.21)
The value in circulation has not increased by one iota, it is only distributed differently. … The sum of values in circulation can clearly not be augmented by any change in their distribution.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Turn and twist then as we may, the fact remains unaltered. If equivalents are exchanged, no surplus value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, still no surplus value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, begets no value.
— Marx, Das Kapital
So we have a conundrum. Market mechanisms cannot explain the origins – the production – of the very substance, value, which market mechanisms exist to exchange. This limitation to the explanatory power of market categories also affects all politics, economics and cultural spheres that base themselves on expressing only market categories and categories that do not question what Marx called the appearance or “phenomenal” form of capitalist or bourgeois society. (p.22)
In present bourgeois society as a whole, this positing of prices and their circulation, etc., appears as the surface process, beneath which, however in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear.
— Marx, Grundrisse
Nothing can be more childish than the dogma, that because every sale is a purchase, and every purchase a sale, therefore the circulation of commodities necessarily implies an equilibrium of sales and purchases.
— Marx, Das Kapital
We are not yet in a position to know why sale and purchase may not necessarily go hand in hand in harmony, but Marx notes that the very categories imply both a connection and a separation. (p.23)
If the interval in time between the two complimentary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity becomes too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate connection between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing a crisis.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Just as market categories assume a tendency towards equilibrium, so a market society assumes that social unity and harmony can be built on the back of the pursuit of self-interest! No wonder Marx has some satiric fun with that idea. But let us return to the essential economic contradiction: Market categories cannot explain the origin of the very substance they are designed to exchange. Value. (p.24)
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)
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.
The value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains intact while in circulation, but adds to itself a surplus value or expands itself. It is this movement that converts it into capital. (Marx)
The expansion of M into M + is what makes capital capital.
On the surface it appears as if money begets money simply through the process of exchange.
As a periodic increment of the capital advanced, or periodic fruit of capital in process, surplus value acquires the form of a revenue flowing out of capital. (Marx)
Marx contrasts the two circuits of exchange:
The simple circulation of commodities – selling in order to buy – is a means of carrying out a purpose, unconnected with circulation, namely, the appropriation of use value, the satisfaction of wants.
The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement.The circulation of capital has therefore no limits. (Marx)
(Wayne p.27)
Let’s have a look at how the two circuits of exchange are interconnected. The majority of people are involved in the circuit of simple exchange or C – M – C. Their fate is to become directly incorporated into the circuit M – C – M +.Look at C – M in the C – M – C circuit. We have implied that the C being sold for M is the ability to work. Hence the ability to buy the second C and consume its use values (e.g., a winter coat).
Now look at the circuit of capital. Look at the M – C exchange. What is the C that Mr. Moneybags buys? Of course it is that which is sold in the circuit of simple exchange – the ability to work. Work has become a commodity to be purchased. Something wonderful happens, from the perspective of the capitalist when he or she “consumes” this commodity. It leads to M-PLUS.
These and other justifications for the way things are, however, would be less powerful and less persuasive if capitalism were not in some way hardwired to conceal inequalities. This process of concealment is quite unique to our present mode of production. For example, under feudalism, peasants would typically work some of their time on their own small land holdings and some of the time on the land of the lord. While peasants work their own land, they are performing labor that is necessary to support themselves and their families. This Marx calls NECESSARY LABOR. When they are working for the lord, peasants are performing SURPLUS LABOR – that is, they are producing wealth above and beyond what they, the direct producers, need to survive, and that surplus is going to the lord. This exploitation is very clear because the division between the labor that peasants perform for themselves and the labor that they perform for the lord is clearly divided in space and time. Such clarity is, as we shall see, completely missing when it comes to capitalism. (Wayne p.31)
The capitalist class is constantly giving to the laboring class order-notes in the form of money, on a portion of the commodities produced by the latter and appropriated by the former. The laborers give these order-notes back just as constantly to the capitalist class, and in this way get their share of their own product. The transaction is veiled by the commodity-form of the product and the money-form of the commodity.
— Marx, Das Kapital
chapter four: value
We have seen that Marx divides the working day, week or year between necessary labor time and surplus labor time. Necessary labor time refers to the time necessary to produce the value equivalent to the necessities which workers require to live in the comfort or discomfort that they are used to or will accept. This is reflected in the wage.
If the value of those necessaries represents on average the expenditure of six hours’ labor, the workman must on an
average work six hours to produce that value.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Marx calls surplus labor time that period of labor that exceeds necessary labor time (reflected in the wage) when workers produce no value for themselves.
He creates surplus value, which for the capitalist has all
the charms of a creation out of nothing.
— Marx, Das Kapital
If capital only got back from labor power what it had paid to labor power in the form of a wage, then it would not be capital for long. Capital as a system requires expansion. It requires surplus value, which requires surplus labor time.
Another way of looking at this is to ask a question. Is the social problem Marx is criticizing only the fact that surplus value is appropriated by capital? Or is the problem more profound? Is the problem with value production itself – with the production of value?
If you believe that the problem is just that surplus value is being taken by private capital, then you are more likely to believe that some institutional form that represents society as a whole – the state – can take control of the surplus and distribute it more fairly.
That is in fact how Marx’s project has often been interpreted and n many countries, state ownership of important resources have indeed ensured more equal access to social wealth. 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
Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor spent on it, the more idle and unskillful the laborer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labor, however, that forms the substance of value is homogenous human labor, expenditure of one uniform labor power. The total labor power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogenous mass of human labor power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labor power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Constant capital refers to buildings, machinery, and raw materials that are purchased as the means and materials of production. Variable capital refers to the human labor power which the capitalist buys to work these means and materials of production. The difference between constant and variable capital becomes crucial to Marx’s argument. (p.53)
The means of production on the one hand, labor power on the other, are merely the different modes of existence which the value of the original capital assumed when from being money it was transformed into the various factors of the labor process. That part of capital then which is represented by the means of production, by the raw materials, auxiliary material and the instruments of labor does not, in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration of value. I therefore call it the constant part of capital, or, more shortly, constant capital.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Labor power that adds value is a different form of capital:
On the other hand, that part of capital represented by labor power, does, in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and also produces an excess, a surplus value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to circumstances.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Marx calls that part of capital that buys living labor power, variable capital, because its produces value that varies according to circumstances. There are a number of ways in which that variability can be increased to the benefit of capital. Capital can extend the time that labor works without compensation (i.e., increase working hours). Capital can make labor work harder within any given period. Or capital can increase the productivity of labor via the introduction of new technology (p.56)
From what has gone before, we know that surplus value is purely the result of a variation in the value of V, of that portion of the capital which is transformed into labor power; consequently V+S = V + V1 or V plus an increment of V.
— Marx, Das Kapital
The rate of surplus value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist.
— Marx, Das Kapital
In point of fact, profit is the form of appearance of surplus value, and the latter can be sifted out from the former only by analysis. In surplus value, the relationship between capital and labor is laid bare. In the relationship between capital and profit … capital appears as a relationship to itself, a relationship in which it is distinguished, as an original sum of value, from another new value that it posits.
— Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. III
Chapter 5: work under capitalism
We saw that Marx began with the concept of the commodity. Gradually he developed the analysis, looking at exchange and circulation, and finally the buying of labor power. At each stage he found contradictions (such as between use value and exchange value) and mysteries (such as what is value and where does it come from?) These contradictions all derive from the central problem of turning labor power into a commodity.
The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he
tries to make the workday as long as possible, and to make,
wherever possible, two working days out of one. On the
other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the laborer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the workday to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore an antimony, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence it is that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a workday 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.
— Marx, Das Kapital
This is classic Marx. He takes the principles of bourgeois or capitalist economics, here private property rights, and he finds in them an irresolvable contradiction. The peculiarity of the commodity labor power is that once sold it also remains attached to the individual laborer. It is not as if labor power can be bottled and squeezed like a lemon while the seller (laborer) can go off and have fun. This conflict between property rights can only be resolved by force. And this in practice is how it is resolved. The force of capital takes many forms. There is economic force, political force, legal force and of course there is physical force at the disposal of capital in the form of the police and even the army (p.60)
Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the laborer works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor power he has purchased.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labor power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labor power that can be rendered fluent in a workday. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the laborer’s life, as a greedy farmer increases produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Long hours and night work were common for adults and children. Conditions were dangerous and life-threatening. Working-class agitation for change was growing. It became clear that the state would have to step in. Hence a series of Factory Acts between 1833-1864 attempted to rein in capital. (p.61)
These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labor power by forcibly limiting the workday by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist and landlord.
— Marx, Das Kapital
As we have seen, the capitalist will seek to reduce the time workers have to work to earn enough to sustain themselves (necessary labor time) and increase the time workers work for free for the capitalist (surplus labor time). One way of doing that is by increasing the duration of the workday. Marx calls this the production of absolute surplus value, because it involves simply extending surplus labor by making the worker work longer. Nevertheless, the workday is conditioned by physical needs and social needs as well. (p.63)
On the other hand, that part of capital represented by labor power, does, in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and also produces an excess, a surplus value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to circumstances.
— Marx, Das Kapital
A worker who performs one after another the various fractional operations in the production of a finished article must at one time change his place, at another his tools. The transition from one operation to another interrupts the flow of his labor, and creates, so to say, gaps in his workday. These gaps close up so soon as he is tied to one and the same operation all day long.
— Marx, Das Kapital
So began the fragmentation of the worker’s relationship to the
labor process as a whole, confined to a narrow repetitive task, while integrated into a system constantly ensuring maximum turnout of product. (p.65)
The habit of doing only one thing converts him into a never-failing instrument, while his connection with the whole mechanism compels him to work with the regularity of the parts of a machine.
— Marx, Das Kapital
All combined labor on a large scale requires, more or less, a directing authority, in order to secure the harmonious working of the individual activities, and to perform the general functions that have their origin in the action of the combined organism, as distinguished from the action of its separate organs. A single violin player is his own conductor; an orchestra requires a separate one. The work of directing, superintending, and adjusting becomes one of the functions of capital, from the moment that the laborer under the control of capital, becomes cooperative. Once a function of capital, it acquires special characteristics. The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor power to the greatest possible extent. As the number of the cooperating laborers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance by counter pressure. The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature of the social labor process, but it is, at the same time, a function of the exploitation of a social labor process, and is consequently rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between exploiter and the living and laboring raw material he exploits.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Marx suggests that there is a distinction to be made between the necessity of large-scale, socialized labor requiring some form of “conducting,” and the “special characteristics” which conducting acquires under capital. Given the aim of capital, the conducting must be “despotic” as Marx puts it elsewhere. Marx implies that with a different set of socioeconomic relations, ones without the antagonism that is inherent to capitalism, the directing authority could operate differently. Marx does not put it any more strongly than that, probably because he likes to unfold the contradictions of capital internally as it were, rather than simply find it wanting when measured against his own preferred yardsticks. (p.66)
In order to consult the mind least and impose commands most, a new layer of “conductors” would have to be cultivated in the modern workplace. (p.67)
An industrial army of workmen, under the command of a capitalist, requires, like a real army, officers (managers),
and sergeants (foremen, overlookers), who, while the work is being done, command in the name of the capitalist. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function.
— Marx, Das Kapital
The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to over-work and to subjugation under the dictates of capital.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Marx’s critique of political economy is primarily concerned
with the economic structures of capitalist society, and for that reason they are placed at the center of the present work. But one should not succumb to the illusion that with an analysis of the fundamentals of the capitalist mode of production that everything decisive has already been said about capitalist societies. (Heinrich 2004 p.13)
What is decisive is how class domination and exploitation function in a particular society. And in this, capitalism distinguishes itself fundamentally from precapitalist societies in two respects:
1. In precapitalist societies, exploitation rested upon a relationship of personal domination and dependency: the slave was the property of his owner; the serf was bound to his respective lord.
2. In precapitalist societies, the exploitation of the dominated class
served primarily the consumption of the ruling class: its members led a luxurious life, used appropriated wealth for their own edification or for that of the public (theater performances in ancient Greece, games in ancient Rome) or to wage war. Production directly served the fulfillment of wants: the fulfillment of the (forcibly) restricted needs of the dominated class and the extensive luxury and war needs of the ruling class. Only in exceptional cases was the wealth expropriated by the
ruling class used to enlarge the basis of exploitation, such as when consumption was set aside to purchase more slaves, to produce a greater amount of wealth.
But under capitalist relations, production for the sake of increasing the capacity to produce is typically the case. The gains of a capitalist enterprise do not serve in the first instance to make a comfortable life for the capitalist possible, but are rather invested anew, in order to generate more gains in the future. Not the satisfaction of wants, but the valorization of capital is the immediate goal of production; the fulfillment of wants and therefore a comfortable life for the capitalist is merely a by product of this process, but not its goal. If the gains are large enough, then a small portion is sufficient to finance the luxurious existence of the capitalist, and the greater portion can be used for the accumulation (enlargement) of capital.
The fact that earnings do not primarily serve the consumption of the capitalist, but rather the continuous valorization of capital, that is, the restless movement of more-and-more accumulation, might sound absurd. But the issue at hand is not an individual act of insanity. Individual capitalists are forced into this movement of restless profiteering (constant accumulation, expansion of production, the introduction of new technology, etc.) by competition with other capitalists: if accumulation is not carried on, if the apparatus of production is not constantly modernized, then one’s own enterprise is faced with the threat of being steamrolled by competitors who produce more cheaply or who manufacture better products. A capitalist who attempts to withdraw from this process of constant accumulation and innovation is threatened with bankruptcy. He is therefore forced to participate, whether or not he wants to. In capitalism, “excessive profit-seeking” is not a moral failure on the part of individuals, but rather a necessity for surviving as a capitalist. As will be shown more clearly in the following chapters, capitalism rests upon a systemic relationship of domination that produces constraints to which both workers and capitalists are subordinated. For that reason, a critique that takes aim at the “excessive profit-seeking” of individual capitalists but not at the capitalist system as a whole is too narrow (p.15)
By capital we understand (provisionally; we’ll get more precise later) a particular sum of value, the goal of which is to be “valorized,” which is to say, generate a surplus. This surplus can be obtained in various ways. In the case of interest-bearing capital, money is lent at interest. The interest thus constitutes the surplus. In the case of merchant capital, products are purchased cheaply in one place and sold dearly in another place (or at another point in time). The difference between the purchase price and the sale price (minus the relevant transaction costs) constitutes the surplus. In the case of industrial capital, the production process itself is organized along capitalist lines: capital is advanced for the purchase of means of production (machines, raw materials) and for the employment of forces of labor, so that a process of production comes about under the direction of a capitalist (or his agents). The products produced are then sold. If the revenue is higher than the costs used for means of production and wages, then the originally advanced capital has not only reproduced itself, but has also yielded a surplus.
The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense that labor is no longer the unity dominating and transcending it. Rather labor appears merely to be a conscious organ, composed of individual living workers at a number of points in the mechanical system; dispersed, subjected to the general process of the machinery itself, it is itself only a limb of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers but in the living (active) machinery, which seems to be a powerful organism when compared to their individual, insignificant activities. With the stage of machinery, objectified labor appears in the labor process itself as the dominating force opposed to living labor, a force represented by capital in so far as it appropriates living labor.
— Marx, Grundrisse
In bourgeois societies the economic fictio juris prevails, that everyone, as a buyer, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities.
— Marx, Das Kapital
chapter 6: reproduction and crises
We have looked at capitalist production. But now we must turn to
the question of how this system of production reproduces itself, every day, every month, every year. This will return us to the question of circulation.
Every social process of production is, at the same time, a
process of reproduction.
— Marx, Das Kapital
What must be in place for capitalism to successfully reproduce itself? One of the most important prerequisites for the reproduction
of capital is the reproduction of the worker’s dependence, for their
survival, on the market for labor power – i.e., their dependence on
capital. (p.78)
It must be acknowledged that our laborer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as his owner of the commodity “labor power” face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labor power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no “free agent”, that the time for which he is free to sell his labor power is the time for which he is forced to sell it.
— Marx, Das Kapital
Marx’s theory of cyclical crises has three elements:
1) That capitalism must expand or it enters crisis.
2) That its imperative to expand comes into conflict with the social inequalities it creates.
3) That the indifference of all the different parts of the socioeconomic system to one another caused by market competition creates breakdowns in the flow of value
The accumulation imperative, the separation of the worker from
ownership of the means of production, the resulting social inequalities, and the overall anarchy of the market combine to overthrow hopes that market equilibrium can be achieved by the harmonious interaction of supply and demand.
These contradictions can be summed up as a general or master
contradiction: on the one hand there are the forces of production
(with their huge productive capacity) and on the other hand there
are these social relations of production organizing these productive forces (where profit trumps use value and need).
1. It is a physical object believed to be inhabited by some
metaphysical power or spirit.
2. The person possessing it believes this power or spirit communicates through the physical thing.
3. This person also believes the object itself possesses some
form of independent consciousness, autonomy and
will.
4. The possessor of the fetish has an intense relationship with
it, as if it were alive, as if it were a being instead of a thing
What is the definite social relation that assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things? We saw earlier that the circuit of capital M – C – M+ is a circuit that is entirely outside any control by human beings. Even capitalists must obey its imperatives, or cease being capitalists. The basis of this circuit of accumulation is in the sphere of production. Under capitalism the free worker is separated from owning and controlling the means of production. The means of production and the goods they produce therefore acquire a life of their own, independent of the direct producer. It is the relationships between these “things” (money, capital, commodity, interest, price, value and so forth) that dominate human beings, not vice versa.
Although Marx does not use the term fetishism all that often in
Das Kapital, the idea informs much of the architecture of the work.
The opening chapters of Volume I are all about the sphere of exchange and circulation as the seedbed for the spontaneously generated notions, ideals, habits and consciousness which capitalist practices generate. This sphere of reality is what Marx calls the phenomenal form – how reality strikes us in its immediate presentation when we succumb to the power of fetishism.
This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both laborer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty,
of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists.
— Marx, Das Kapital
The capitalist marketplace appears to be a realm of liberation, freedom, empowerment and individual agency. This is the basis for free contractual exchange. But this can only be sustained by repressing the “actual relation.” For Freud, the sexual fetish was a way the male psyche coped with the threat of symbolic castration represented by the figure of the women. For Marx, the fetish is a way of coping with the very real social castration that men and women suffer under capitalism.
In fact, commodity fetishism makes abundant use of sexual
fetishism: barely a commodity can be advertised without implying
that with it the buyer will become more sexually potent, more sexually satisfied and more attractive to the opposite sex. (Same-sex relations have a more problematic place within an economy so dependent on the “natural” reproduction of future human labor power through the private family)
This is very clear in the growth of surplus labor time. As the productive forces grow more powerful, so the time workers must necessarily spend working to reproduce themselves declines. But their labor time does not fall as a result of a growth in productivity. Instead surplus labor time grows.
Only by suppressing the capitalist form of production could the length of the workday be reduced to necessary labor time. But, even in that case, the latter would extend its limits. On the one hand, because the notion of “means of subsistence” would considerably expand, and the laborer would lay claim to an altogether different standard of life. On the other hand, because a part of what is now surplus labor would then count as necessary labor; I mean the labor of forming a fund for reserve and accumulation.
— Marx, Das Kapital
The intensity and productiveness of labor being given,
the time which society is bound to devote to material
production is shorter, and as a consequence, the time at
its disposal for the free development, intellectual and social, of the individual is greater, in proportion as the work is more and more evenly divided among all the able-bodied members of society, and as a particular class is more and more deprived of the power to shift the natural burden of labor from its own shoulders to those of another layer of society. … In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole lifetime of the masses into labor time.
— Marx, Das Kapital
The relations connecting the labor of one individual with
that of the rest appear not as direct social relations between
individuals … but as what they really are, material relations
between persons and social relations between things.
— Marx, Das Kapital
The problem of capitalist labor-time (Foley figure 3.1) is whether commodities exchange at their labor values.
Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable worktime versus human labour as a particular activity that has a specific useful effect.
Marx published about the categories of abstract and concrete labour for the first time in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and they are discussed in more detail in chapter 1 of Capital, Volume I, where Marx writes:
"On the one hand all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labour power, and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is the expenditure of human labour power in a special form and with a definite aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it produces use values. ... At first sight a commodity presented itself to us as a complex of two things – use value and exchange value. Later on, we saw also that labour, too, possesses the same twofold nature; for, so far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to it as a creator of use values. I was the first to point out and to examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities. ... this point is the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns"[5]
en.wikipedia.org/...
The motion of money as capital binds the production process to the circulation process, in the means that commodity production becomes a phase or a moment (although the decisive moment for the whole valorisation process) of the total circuit of social capital: M—C ( = Mp + Lp) [→P→C΄]—M´ users.ntua.gr/...
Kliman:
The Path of Argument in Vol 1 of Marx's Capital, Harvey 2010 p109
In Capital, Marx develops further the ideas contained in the Grundrisse. Now value – and no longer money or exchange value – appears explicitly as the element which, through market mediation, gives the productive activity of individuals its social character. It is in this framework that the concept of fetishism will come to life. Impelled to drive their activities not by the results of their own material development and level of consciousness, but by the presuppositions of the commodities exchange, the producers themselves are caught up in a movement of things. Fetishism is the other name of labor alienation.
Footnote: In fact, Marx uses Entäusserung [alienation] and Entfremdung [estrangement] as synonyms. To pick up a single concept able to express the common content of alienation/estrangement [Entäusserung/Entfremdung], on the one hand, and fetishism [Fetischismus] on the other, we could also recur to a third concept, namely reification [Versachlichung or Verdingerung].
sdonline.org/...
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.
en.wikipedia.org/…
Instead, articulation plays upon two British senses of the word: to speak (not necessarily clearly) and to be connected as in the trailer and the load of a truck (or in England a Lorry) are articulated. At one level to claim to analyze articulation is simply to study the way different sorts of things are forced to be connected to each other.
- In actuality the word has a more specific meaning than that. It is specifically an analysis of how some person or group that has specific interests tries to connect other people, groups, economic arrangements (what Marx called means of production), ideas, and property to carryout their interests. Even more specifically it is an analysis of how such a person or group tries to force different sorts of objects to act or envision themselves as a group even though there are many indications that they are different.
- It helps to understand that articulation came out of Marxist theory as a way of avoiding “reductionism” (i.e., explaining everything as the cause of only one thing; in Marxism traditionally everything in the world happened because of class, class struggle and economic struggle). Rather than reducing everything to economics articulation examines how different elements are combined: race, economics, sexuality, and language, for instance.
- One other important aspect of articulation is that it is a focus on practice rather than just ideas or economics. There is always someone who is doing the articulation (speaking, organizing, advertising, etc.). It is not an abstract analysis in the same way that studies of ideology or economic systems can seem to involve no real, live, interested human beings. The importance of this is that it makes it much more usable for anthropological understandings of culture, in as much as it views culture as the acts of human beings (articulations) rather than as an abstract set of ideas that we are all marionettes of.
- Articulation as developed by Stuart Hall, one of the original activists and thinkers in cultural studies, is both an analytic tool and a means to help organize activism.
www.personal.kent.edu/…
Marx formulated and then developed the theory of capital on the basis of his concept of value. Capital is value which has been appropriated by capitalists. Precisely because it constitutes value, capital makes its appearance as money and commodities. But the commodities that function as capital are certain specific commodities: the means of production (constant capital) on one hand and labour power (variable capital) on the other.
The capitalist appears on the market as the owner of money (M) buying commodities (C) which consist of means of production (Mp) and labour power (Lp). In the process of production (P), the C are productively used up in order to create an outflow of commodities, a product (C΄) whose value would exceed that of C.
Finally he sells that outflow in order to recover a sum of money (M΄) higher than (M). In the Marxist theory of the capitalist mode of production both value and money are concepts which cannot be defined independently of the notion of capital. They contain (and are also contained in) the concept of capital. Marx’s theory, being a monetary theory of value, is at the same time a monetary theory of capital.11
The motion of money as capital binds the production process to the circulation process, in the means that commodity production becomes a phase or a moment (although the decisive moment for the whole valorisation process) of the total circuit of social capital: M—C ( = Mp + Lp) [→P→C΄]—M´
Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. (...)The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits’ (MEW 23: 167; 170; Marx 1872-Internet, Ch. 4).
The circuit of social capital attains its dynamics from the exploitation of labour power in the sphere of production. However, it is wider than the commodity production and circulation process, since it embraces also the spheres of credit and finance and the speculation associated with them.
users.ntua.gr/...
Summary of Capital Vol.1 by Harry Cleaver is also found in libcom.org.
The Path of Argument in Vol 1 of Marx's Capital, Harvey 2010 p109
Engels’s Synopsis of Capital
