short essay questions

EAS 248

Lecture #3

All quotes from Capital are taken from the Penguin edition.

Part One: Summary

Why begin with the form of the commodity? To grasp Value as a social relation of exchange.

Sphere of Circulation = sphere where value is “realized”

In Part 1 of Capital, the sphere of Production is “bracketed” out and presupposed. Part 1 begins with the form of the commodity, its appearance, after it has already been produced by an expenditure of human labour power in the activity of labour, which is the “substance” of the commodity, versus the “form” of the commodity, which is divided between “use-value” and “exchange-value”.

The significance of the “sale and purchase of Labour-Power”

It defines the specific epoch of the capitalist mode of production in world history.

Crossing the abyss between Circulation and Production

Marx: “Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice, ‘No admittance except on business.’ Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare.” 280

The consumption of labour-power allows the capitalist to produce new values well-beyond the value of the direct producers of new use-values in the production process, beyond the value of labour power, values that are above and beyond what the capitalist pays the workers daily.

Marx: “What Lucretius says is self-evident: ‘nil posse creari de nihilo’, out of nothing, nothing can be created. ‘Creation of value’ is the transposition of labour-power into labour. Labour-power is, above all else, the material of nature transposed into a human organism.” (Vol. 1, ch. 9, 323, footenote)

On Labour-Power: Dual Meanings

“useful labour”: creating use-values (products)

“abstract labour”: creating value

Marx: What was really decisive for him [the capitalist] was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. This is the specific service the capitalist expects from labour power…300-301

Surplus Value and the Differentia Specifica of the CMP:

Two methods of producing surplus value

Absolute surplus-value: extending the working day

Relative surplus-value: productivity within a shorter working day

Definition of surplus-value (from A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Second Edition, p.529)

The extraction of surplus value is the specific way EXPLOITATION takes place under capitalism, the differentia specifica of the capitalist mode of production, in which the surplus takes the form of PROFIT, and exploitation results from the working class producing a net product which can be sold for more than they receive as wages.

…Capitalist production is a form of, indeed the most generalized form of, COMMODITY production. Thus products are produced for sale as values, which are measured and realized in the form of price, that is, as quantities of money. The product belongs to the capitalist, who obtains surplus value from the difference between the value of the product and the value of the capital involved in the production process.

…The latter has two parts: constant capital, corresponding to the value laid out in means of production which is simply transferred to the product during the production process; and variable capital, which is used to employ workers, workers being paid the value of what they sell, their LABOUR POWER.

…Variable capital is so called because its quantity varies from the beginning to the end of the production process; what starts as the VALUE OF LABOUR POWER ends as the value produced by that labour power in action. Surplus value is the difference between the two, the value produced by the worker which is appropriated by the capitalist without equivalent given in exchange. There is no unfair exchange going on here; nevertheless the capitalist manages to appropriate the results of surplus unpaid labour.

The “differentia specifica” of the Capitalist Mode of Production

The production of surplus value via the “working day” = temporal difference, compared to surplus value in merchant’s capital = spatial difference

The commodification of labour power as source of “abstract labour” = “universality” and “fetishism” of the commodity-form

On the “impossibility” or “muri” (無理) of the commodification of labour power

Impossibility; “No Way!”

Force (“extra-economic coercion”)

Part II. From Capitalist Production to Capitalist Reproduction (i.e., the Accumulation process, Chapters 23, 24, 25)

Marx’s method: From Circulation to Production (…and back to Circulation and again back to Production…)

The transformation of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power is the first phase of the movement undergone by the quantum of value which is going to function as capital. It takes place in the market, within the sphere of circulation. The second phase of the movement, the process of production, is complete as soon as the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and therefore contains the capital originally advanced plus a surplus value. These commodities must then be thrown back into the sphere of circulation. They must be sold, their value must be realized in money, this money must be transformed once again into capital, and so on, again and again. This cycle, in which the same phases are continually gone through in succession, forms the circulation of capital. 709

Cyclicality = “periodicity” of capital-as-process

As a periodic increment of the value of the capital, or a periodic fruit borne by capital-in-process, surplus-value acquires the form of a revenue arising out of capital. 712

On “Wealth”

Marx quotes Sismondi’s Principes d’economie politique, 1819: ‘The rich, who consume the products of the labour of others, can only obtain them by making exchanges’ (purchases of commodities). ‘They therefore seem to be exposed to an early exhaustion of their reserve funds….But, in the social order, wealth has acquired the power of reproducing itself through the labour of others…Wealth, like labour, and by means of labour, bears fruit every year, but this fruit can be destroyed every year without making the rich man any poorer thereby. This fruit is the revenue which arises out of capital’, 712

On “Simple Reproduction” as “self-valorization”

Just as in the capitalist mode of production the labour process appears only as a means towards the process of valorization, so in the case of reproduction it appears only as a means of reproducing the value advanced as capital, i.e., as self-valorizing value. 711

…this reproduction is a mere repetition of the process of production, on the same scale as before

Capitalist reproduction as the reproduction of the capital-relation

thinking of the “starting point” from the perspective of repetition and separation of owners of money and owners of labour power

the ‘logic’ of capital-as-process, as “self-valorizing” and cyclical process

A division between the product of labour and labour itself, between the objective conditions of labour and subjective labour-power, was therefore the real foundation and the starting-point of the process of capitalist production.

But what at first was merely a starting-point becomes, by means of nothing but the continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the characteristic result of capitalist production, a result which is constantly renewed and perpetuated.

…. On the one hand, the production process incessantly converts material wealth into capital, into the capitalist’s means of enjoyment and his means of valorization.

….On the other hand, the worker always leaves the process in the same state as he entered it—a personal source of wealth, but deprived of any means of making that wealth a reality for himself. Since, before he enters the process, his own labour has already been alienated [entfremdet] from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him [fremder Produkt].

…Since the process of production is also the process of the consumption of labour power by the capitalist, the worker’s product is not only constantly converted into commodities, but also into capital, i.e., into value that sucks up the worker’s value-creating power, means of subsistence that actually purchase human beings, and means of production that employ the people who are doing the producing.

…Therefore the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the workers as a wage-labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production. 716

“Killing Two Birds with One Stone”: On the domination over owners of labour power

By converting part of his capital into labour-power, the capitalist valorizes the value of his entire capital. He kills two birds with one stone. He profits not only by what he receives from the worker, but also by hat he gives him. The capital given in return for labour power is converted into means of subsistence which have to be consumed to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence. 717

On the “indispensable means of production”: workers.

…Within the limits of what is absolutely necessary, therefore, the individual consumption of the workin class is the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by the capital in return for labour-power into fresh labour-power which capital is then again able to exploit. It is the production and reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: the workers.

Who is responsible for the reproduction of the workers?

…The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker’s drive for self-preservation and propagation. All the capitalist cares for is to reduce the worker’s individual consumption to the necessary minimum” 718

The Working class as “appendage of capital”

From the standpoint of society, then, the working class, even when it stands outside the direct labour process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the lifeless instruments of labour are. Even its individual consumption is, within certain limits, a mere aspect of the process of capital’s reproduction. That process, however, takes good care to prevent the workers, those instruments of production who are possessed of consciousness, from running away, by constantly removing their product from one pole to the other, to the opposite pole of capital.

…Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for the workers’ maintenance and reproduction; on the other hand, by the constant annihilation of the means of subsistence, it provides for their continued re-appearance on the labour-market. The Roman slave was held by chains; the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of a contract. 719

Openings onto the problem of capitalist crisis and “surplus populations”

The reproduction of the working class implies at the same time the transmission and accumulation of skills from one generation to another. The capitalist regards the existence of such a skilled working class as one of the conditions of production which belong to him, and in fact views it as the real existence of his variable capital. This becomes very clear as soon as a crisis threatens him with its loss.

…As a result of the American Civil War and the accompanying cotton famine, the majority of the cotton workers of Lancashire were, as is well known, thrown out of work. Both for the working class itself, and from other social strata, there arose a cry for state aid, or voluntary national subscriptions, in order to make possible the emigration of those who were ‘redundant’ to the English colonies or to the United States.

… ‘He’ (the man out of work) ‘may be told the supply of cotton-workers is too large…and…must…in fact be reduced by a third, perhaps, and that then there will be a healthy demand for the remaining two-thirds….Public opinion….urges emigration….The master cannot willingly see his labour supply being removed; he may think, and perhaps justly, that it is both wrong and unsound… 720

…The same Potter then proceeds to point out how useful the cotton industry is, how ‘it has undoubtedly drawn the surplus population from Ireland and form the agricultural districts,’ how immense is its extent, how it yielded 5/13ths of total English exports in the year 1860, how, after a few years, it will again expand by the extension of the market, particularly of the Indian market, and by calling forth a plentiful supply of cotton…. 720

Summary of Reproduction

Capitalist production therefore reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour power in order that he may enrich himself. 723

….It is no longer an accident that capitalist and worker confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the alternating rhythm of the process itself which throws the worker back onto the market again and again as a seller of his labour-power and continually transforms his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. 723

… In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist. His economic bondage is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market price of his labour. 723

…The capitalist process of reproduction, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e., a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer. 724

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