short essay questions

EAS 248

Lecture Notes #2

Part I: Once again on “Value” and the “forms of Value”

In Chapters 1 and 2 of Capital, Marx logically “unfolds” or “unfurls” the “forms of value”. The basic forms of value, which unfold out of the contradiction the commodity’s use-value and exchange value, are: “the simple, isolated, or accidental form of value”, the “total or expanded form of value”; the “general form of value”; and “the Money form”.

In Part I of Capital, Marx does not address the production of commodities, but rather their circulation. The question of how labour power was expended to produce these commodities was bracketed out and presupposed as having already taken place in the past. Marx already knew that the “substance” of value is “labour”, and that the measure of its magnitude was in “labour time”. These are problems that the classical political economists, especially Adam Smith and David Ricardo, formulated before Marx. What interested Marx in the opening chapters was the form of value, not the substance of value. Thus, Marx would write:

…we know the substance of value. It is labour. We know the measure of its magnitude. It is labour-time. The form, which stamps value as exchange value, remains to be analyzed. 131

To say that “forms of value” unfold, or unfurl, out of the contradiction of use-value and exchange value of the form of the commodity is to say that in capitalist society, value “itself” is a living contradiction, one that is incessantly moving between use-value and exchange value. Put differently, value never precedes the process of exchange, and there is no use-value of any particular commodity unless it is “represented” in the body of an other commodity, which stands outside the body of the commodity that is for sale, and thus there is never a guarantee of value in advance of the process of exchange. Value does not exist intrinsically to the substance of the commodity for sale; value is a process punctuated by a “salto mortale”, a leap of faith towards recognition from an unknowable Other (“money as money”) in the hands of particular others, who, while appearing as individuals, are also “bearers” of class relations in the process of exchange. This is the perspective from which Part I of Capital should be read, beginning with the concept of exchange, and through the appearances (Schein) of the commodity, then the dazzling appearances of money.

While “Book I” of Capital volume 1, is titled “The Process of Production of Capital”, it is clear that Marx begins with the “forms of intercourse (Verkehr) corresponding to” the capitalist mode of production. Thus, “exchange” for Marx is deeply related to the concept of “intercourse”, with all of its sexual innuendo. At the same time, Marx will discuss exchange to the point of reposing the notion of God in terms of the form of money, thereby giving us a spectrum of capital’s spectral forms, which lead to a specific kind of ethics and morality, especially as they pertain to the drive to get rich.

Exchange as intercourse has to do with “the body of value” (Wert-körper), as well as with the attraction and repulsion between bearers of value in the process or exchange. The process of exchange reveals how the value of a commodity does not reside internally to the commodity, but must rather be represented by—and in— the body of the other, in a process of exchange/intercourse. This reveals a kind of “desire” between “bearers” of commodities.

The “body of value” is not simply a thing but something that is split between its appearance and a “metaphysical” remainder, which Marx calls a spirit or soul.

Marx approaches this splitting by beginning with the “relative form of value,” or the perspective of “20 yards of linen” in the “equation” between “20 yards of linen = 1 coat.”

Following Karatani, another way to describe the “relative form of value” is the perspective of “the position of selling”. By contrast, the “equivalent form of value”, expressed here as “1 coat”, would be the “position of buying.” The position of buying will eventually develop into the “form of money”, but what I want to draw attention to is how Marx talks about money, which develops out of the form of the commodity. Marx began with the position of the linen, which was the “relative form of value,” and moves across the abyss of exchange to the position of the coat, the “equivalent form of value,” which stands in relation to the linen. In Marx’s words:

The coat counts qualitatively as the equal of the linen, it counts as a thing of the same nature, because it is a value. Here it is therefore a thing in which value is manifested, or which represents value in its tangible natural form. Yet the coat itself, the physical aspect of the coat-commodity, is purely a use-value. A coat as such no more expresses value than does the first piece of linen we come across. This proves only that, within its value-relation to the linen, the coat signifies more than it does outside it, just as some men count for more when inside a gold-braided uniform than they do otherwise.

This passage is a harbinger of Marx’s discussion of the “form of money”, but here, we are still in a pre-money-form stage of his logical exposition of the forms of value. Nonetheless, revealed here are the mysteries of money and its use-value as a means of exchange. Its use-value is in expressing and representing the value of the linen, “realizing” the use-value of the linen for the first time. Put differently, the use-value of the linen is expressed in the use-value of the coat. It is here, in this moment of the “realization of value”, that the “equivalent form of value” signifies more than it does outside of this relation, which has to do with the golden appearance of money, hinted at here by reference to the “gold-braided uniform” of the soldier.

The power of money is that it does not simply represent or signify value; it over-signifies, as an excess, but only insofar as it is in relation to the linen/other. Outside this relation, the coat is essentially nothing, just as the linen’s use-value is nothing unless it is expressed in the use-value of another commodity. The exchange then leads to the discovery of a “splendid kindred soul.”

In its value-relation with the linen, the coat counts only…as embodied value, as the body of value (Wertkörper). Despite its buttoned-up appearance, the linen recognizes in it a splendid kindred soul, the soul of value. (143)

The value of the commodity linen is therefore expressed by the physical body of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use-value of the other. (143)

…the linen itself, as soon as it enters into association with another commodity, the coat…

…the language of commodities. In order to tell us that labour creates its own value in its abstract quality of being human, labour, it says that the coat, insofar as it counts as its equal, i.e., is value, consists of the same labour as it does itself. In order to inform us that its sublime objectivity as value differs from its stiff and starchy existence as a body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and therefore that insofar as the linen itself is an object of value [Wertding], it and the coat are as like as two peas. (144)

“First peculiarity” of the equivalent form of value:

The first peculiarity which strikes us when we reflect on the equivalent form is this, that use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value. 148

…the body of the coat represents value alone. 149

…the coat represents a supra-natural property: their value, which is something purely social. 149

Value is social, a social relation, but it is one that reveals two asymmetrical positions in which the exchange process is never guaranteed in advance, only a “salto mortale.” Value is never separated from the social relation of exchange, as “intercourse,” which refers us always to the materiality of these bodies-of-value. Thus, Marx wrote:

Therefore, when Galiani said: Value is a relation between persons…he ought to have added: a relation concealed beneath a material shell. (167 note 29)

On the concept of intercourse (Verkehr), Marx depicts exchange as one in which “both parties consent”, but also as one in which force is used to take possession of the other if the other “resists man.” Marx’s footnote, which refers to poet Guillot de Paris, speaks of this in the case of female prostitutes in Paris.

Commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are the possessors of commodities. Commodities are things, and therefore lack the power to resist man. If they are unwilling, he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them.

Marx then interrupts himself with Footnote 1, which specifies how he is thinking of this forceful possession:

In the twelth century, so renowed for its piety, very delicate things often appear among these commodities. Thus a French poet of the period enumerates among the commodities to be found in the fair of Lendit, alongside clothing, shoes, leather, implementations of cultivation, skins, etc., also ‘femmes folles de leur corps’. [Which refers to “wanton women” from Dit du Lendit, a satirical poem by the medieval French poet Guillot de Paris. (178)

Marx continues:

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 alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent.

The point is that the value of commodity-A must be expressed in the body of an equivalent commodity-B. Marx’s point is that what distinguishes a commodity from its owner is that the commodity must always be ready to exchange with each and all other commodities, as if the commodity-form was the essence of a promiscuous person. Here, Marx again further elaborates on the commodity-form by reference to the notion of exchange-as-intercourse prostitute, as well as to the notion of attraction and repulsion.

It is always possible, in other words, for the exchange process to fail, for exchange is fundamentally accidental, and repulsion instead of attraction may prevent any realization of a particular use-value of a commodity that is for sale. In this way, Use-value is not something that can be grasped prior to the process of exchange with the owner of another commodity; rather, if there is an attraction, exchange activates use-value retrospectively.

In the exchange relation, therefore, there is a drive for intercourse with the body of another commodity, no matter how lacking the other is in its qualities. Here, Marx briefly refers to the episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which Don Quixote, in the middle of the dark night, unknowingly sleeps with the nearly blind hunchback servant, Maritornes, precisely when he thought he was sleeping with the beautiful daughter of the innkeeper.

What chiefly distinguishes a commodity from its owner is the fact that every other commodity counts for it only as the form of appearance of its own value. A born leveller and cynic, it is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with each and every other commodity, be it more repulsive than Maritornes herself. 179

For Marx, the point of this reference to Maritornes is that when we think of the commodity-form, there is a kind of blind or ignorant promiscuity built-into it, implying a risky, social, erotic relation towards the other that is unconscious or unaware of this relation to the other. Commodity owners (“us”) are different from the commodities that are being exchanged. The commodities themselves have a sociality that is distinct from the owner’s sociality; the sociality of the commodities dictates the behaviour of the owners. The owners of these commodities, however, often are not aware of this sociality of the commodities.

There is something fundamental about this intercourse as it happens “in the dark” and within a near “blindness” of the Maritornes character. First, the darkness conceals her physical qualities of being a hunchback; conceals the fact that she is not beautiful. From Don Quixote’s perspective, however, she may as well be the beautiful daughter of the innkeeper, and he is not aware who he’s sleeping with. Marx’s point about exchange is precisely this: in exchange, one unknowingly ends up “sleeping with the wrong person.” In exchange, the commodities do not realize they are sleeping with the wrong person, for it does not matter what the other’s body looks like in order for exchange to take place. Any body can be used so long as there is exchange/intercourse.

The accidental and arbitrary quality of the body of value ultimately reveals the arbitrariness of the form of money, as it emerges out of the circulation of commodities. At the same time, its arbitrariness governs our behaviour, dominating the owners of commodities by the drive for intercourse between commodities. It is as if we, the owners of commodities, allow the commodities themselves to socialize and have intercourse on their own and “on our behalf.”

Exchange, as an unconscious attraction towards the anonymous body of value of the other, points to a capitalist “drive” that is endemic to the process of exchange, yet unconscious to the owners of the commodities. Marx’s point is that commodities “socialize” in ways that are not identical to the owners of these commodities; the sociality of commodities rather dictates the sociality of the owners of the commodities, and yet the owners are not always conscious of the other; they may sleep with the wrong person as a result of the movement of attraction between commodities.

Generally speaking, the commodity-form, which unfolds or unfurls into the form of money, reveals the social intercourse inherent to the process of exchange, without which there can be no value.

All commodities are non-use-values for their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But this change of hands is what constitutes their exchange, and the latter puts them in relation with each other as values, and realises them as values. Hence commodities must be realised as values before they can be realised as use-values. 179

This passage highlights the process of exchange as a process of realizing use-values, which means that if there is no exchange, the use-value will not be realized; it would remain virtual, latent, the opposite of actual. This means that Marx’s point about value in a capitalist mode of production is that exchange can never be guaranteed in advance. Put differently, exchange is a social process requiring “consent” with the other. In some ways, what Marx is saying is that, “there is no exchange relation”, which would be comparable to Lacan’s point in psychoanalysis that, “there is no sexual relation”, i.e., exchange and sexual intercourse can never be assumed, as a completed process, in advance; there is always a risk of failure, of a non-relation. Use-value, therefore, never precedes exchange. Rather, it is a leap of faith that requires “consent”. Here, Marx is highlighting the legal and juridical aspects of a “contract”, which itself is based on the “economic relation”:

The guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property. This juridical relation, whose form is the contract, whether as part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills which mirrors the economic relation. The content of this juridical relation (or relation of two wills) is itself determined by the economic relation. 178

Here the persons exist for one another merely as representatives and hence owners, of commodities….[The] characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other. 179

In sum, Marx begins Capital writing about the strange relation called “value”, which takes the form of a commodity. I have especially emphasized what Marx might have meant by the term “intercourse” as the process of exchange. It is to highlight the social aspects of the commodity-form, how value is inherently an unstable—and unconscious— social relation. Whatever commodity assumes the “equivalent form of value” is already in the position of money, and thus it can represent all commodities directly. In this capacity, while the equivalent form of value can be likened to the repulsive Maritornes, Marx’s point is that the commodity also reveals a leap of faith into the body of gold. For Marx, money is God. Yet, insofar as the form of money itself emerged out of the exchange or circulation between commodities, the commodity is both a thing, but also something that becomes supra-sensible in the form of money. Marx thus discovered the secret of money in the secret of the commodity-form.

The commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. 163

Part II: On M-C-M’ or Merchant’s Capital and “Theological niceties” of the Commodity-form

M-C-M’: circuit of (merchant) capital

Merchant capital is the “antediluvian form” or “pre-capitalist” form of capital. Marx is saying that prior to the “capitalist mode of production,” there already existed the form of merchant capital, M-C-M’. It is the form that will engulf the process of production, subsuming labour under thte form of the commodity. But in these first two chapters of Capital, Marx is only concerned with presenting us with the strange appearance of capital, which oscillates and alternates between the form of commodity and money, but this alternation is treated like the alternations between “Jesus, the Son,” and “God-the-Father,” the alternation between which produces a “holy ghost” or spirit which will be the essence of capital: surplus value. Thus, for Marx, the commodity is a trivial thing, yet it also represents the theological essence of the appearance of capital, the metaphysical movement of value in the world of capital. For Marx, value is treated as a “monotheistic god” that begets its own Son.

Value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person; for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and as soon as this has happened, as soon as the son has been created and, through the son, the father, their difference vanishes again, and both become one, £110.[footnoteRef:1] [1: Marx, Capital, volume 1, 256.]

The logical unfolding of the forms of value must be understood as a way to approach the theological dimensions of money, which not only emerged through the circulation of commodities, but which is a peculiar “thing” that human history has created, only to be dominated by it as if it were a supra-sensuous God to fetishize and treat as an idol. This is a long-standing point of Marx’s thinking that goes back to his earliest writings before the 1848 revolutions, when he critiqued those who were critical of the Prussian feudal state and Church for failing to see how “religiosity” was not simply overturned with the bourgeois revolution. Rather, the bourgeois revolutions only displaced the conditions of religiosity into the relations of exchange, transforming money into God. All of the so-called enlightened and liberal critics of the Church’s metaphysical and theological mystifications failed to realize, Marx argued, that the conditions of religiosity were being re-created in the middle of “civil society”, precisely in the sphere of circulation, where value is “realized” in processes of exchange that bring strangers together in a social relation. In his 1843 text, On the Jewish Question, Marx writes:

Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand. Money debases all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore deprived the entire world—both world of man and of nature—of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and existence; this alien essence dominates him and he worships it.

Selling is the practice of alienation…As long as man is restrained by religion he can objectify his essence only by making it into an alien, fantastic being.

To conclude this summary of Part I of Capital (i.e., chapters 1-6), Marx essentially discusses “value” in a process of exchange, intercourse, and thus as problems of “circulation”. Production is bracketed out, assumed as completed, and in the background of the analysis of exchanges, which drives circulation. Circulation, based on exchange, reveals the “two metamorphoses” of the commodity:

The complete metamorphosis of a commodity, in its simplest form, implies four denouements and three dramatis personae. First, a commodity comes face to fae with money; the latter is the form taken by the value of the former, and exists over there in someone else’ pocket in all its hard, material reality. A commodity-owner is thus confronted with a money-owner. Now as soon as the commodity has been changed into money, the money becomes its vanishing equivalent-form, whose use-value or content exists here on the spot, in the bodies of other commodities. Money, the final stage of the first transformation, is at the same time the starting-point for the second. The person who is a seller in the first transaction thus becomes a buyer in the second, in which a third commodity-owner comes to meet him as a seller….

The two metamorphoses which constitute the commodity’s circular path are at the same time two inverse partial metamorphoses of two other commodities…Hence the circuit made by one commodity in the course of its metamorphoses is inextricably entwined with the circuits of other commodities. This whole process constitutes the circulation of commodities.

Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital: M-C-M’ and the question of Surplus Value

The “parallax” of circulation and production and the gap between them = “the sale and purchase of labour power”

Part III: The Sale and Purchase of Labour Power and the passage to Production

Marx argues that the mystery of surplus value, it source, cannot be found in the sphere of circulation. In processes of exchange, surplus value can be said to be “realized”, but not produced. Moreover, as Marx says, for there to be surplus value, there must be a special commodity that can produce new values in the process of being consumed as a commodity. This peculiar commodity is labour power.

The change in the value of the money which has to be transformed into capital cannot take place in the money itself, since in its function as means of purchase and payment it does no more than realize the price of the commodity it buys or pays for….

The change must therefore take place in the commodity which is bought in the first act of circulation, M-C, but not in its value; for it is equivalents which are being exchanged, and the commodity is paid for at its full value. The change can therefore originate only in the actual use-value of the commodity, i.e., in its consumption.

In order to extract value out of the consumption of a commodity, our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labour, hence a creation of value. The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour [arbeitsvermogen], in other words labour-power [arbeitskraft]. 270

We mean by labour power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind. 270

The conditions that allow for the sale and purchase of labour power

The ‘double freedom’ of the owner of labour power

….the free worker…must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e., he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization [Verwirklichung] of his labour-power. 272

Equality of buyer and seller

He and the owner of money meet in the market, and enter into relations with each other on a footing of equality as owners of commodities….both are equal in the eyes of the law.

Temporary alienation of LP (versus permanent selling of it = slavery)

For this relation to continue, the proprietor of labour power must always sell it for a limited period only, for if he were to sell it in a lump, once and for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. He must constantly treat his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and he can do this only be placing it at the disposal of the buyer, i.e., handing it over to the buyer for him to consume, for a definite period of time, temporarily. In this way he manages both to alienate [verassern] his labour-power and to avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it. 271

Seller of labour power is coerced or compelled to sell LP because they have no other commodity to sell

…the possessor of labour-power, instead of being able to sell commodities in which his labour has been objectified, must rather be compelled to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power which exists only in his living body.

In other words, Marx emphasizes how selling labour-power is not natural for human history; it is highly unnatural. It will be the result, ultimately, of a force of violence, which drove people to sell labour-power, preciselyi because they were dispossessed of all means of production and means of subsistence.

Why this free worker confronts him in the sphere of circulation is a question which does not interest the owner of money….One thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. 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 formations of social production. 273

The commodification of labour power as the defining process of the “capitalist epoch”

The capitalist epoch is therefore characterized by the fat that labour-power, in the eyes of the worker himself, takes on the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently takes on the form of wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the commodity-rorm o the products of labour becomes universal. 274 (footnote 4)

What is epoch-defining about capitalism is not that it is merely a “generic” commodity economy (defined by commodifying products of labour). Rather, specific essence of capitalism is that is based on the commodification of labour-power, which inheres in the mortal human body, bound to its finitude. To say that the commodity-form of the products of labour becomes “universal” means that for the first time, commodities are produced by means of commodities themselves, which now includes, for the first time, labour-power, which capitalist production must consume, but cannot produce directly.

On the “value” of LP, or the reproduction of LP by consuming means of subsistence

Labour-power exists only as a capacity of the living individual. Its production consequently presupposes his existence. Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence….[In] other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner. 274

The owner of labour power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous transformation of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself ‘in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation.’….Hence the sum of means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the workers’ replacements, i.e., his children, in order that this rae of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its presence on the market. 275

On the use-value of LP: it is nothing unless it is sold.

If his capacity for labour remains unsold, this is of no advantage to the worker. He will rather feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed neceity that his capacity for labour has required for its production a definite quantity of the means of subsistence, and will continue to require this for its reproduction. Then, like Sismondi, he will discover that ‘the capacity for labour….is nothing unless it is sold.’ 277

Selling LP as giving “credit” to the capitalist.

…the worker advances the use-value of his labour-power to the capitalist. He lets the buyer consume it before he receives payment of the price. Everywhere the worker allows credit to the capitalist. 278

The sale and purchase of labour-power is the exchange process that “bridges” the gap between the sphere of circulation and the sphere of production.

The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the market or the sphere of circulation. 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

Part V: The labour and valorization process

In Part I of Capital, Marx briefly mentions the problem of labour power, which only becomes value in an objective form, i.e., in a product of labour.

Human labour power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form. The value of the linen as a congealed mass of human labour can be expressed only as an ‘objectivity’ [Gegenständlichkeit], a thing which is materially different from the linen itself and yet common to the linen and all other commodities.

The labour process

Labour process as “metabolic” process between man and nature 284

Simple elements of the labour process

Purposeful activity of work itself

The object on which the work is performed

The instruments of work

In the labour process…man’s activity, via the instruments of labour, effets an alternation in the object of labour which was intended from the outset. The process is extinguished in the product….Labour has become bound up in its object: labour has been objectified, the object has been worked on. What on the side of the worker appeared in the form of unrest [Unruhe] now appears, on the side of the product, in the form of being [Sein], as a fixed, immobile characteristic. 287

2 characteristics of the labour process

“The worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs.” 291

“the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer.” 292

The valorization process

Let us examine the matter more closely. The value of a day’s labour-power amounts to 3 shillings, because on our assumption half a day’s labour is objectified in that quantity of labour-power, i.e., because the means of subsistence required everyday for the production of labour power cost half a day’s labour. But the past labour embodied in the labour power and the living labour it can perform, and thet daily cost of maintaining labour power and its daily expenditure I work, are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labour power, the latter is its use-value….300

….the fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore the value of labour power, and the value which that labour power valorizes [verwertet] in the labour process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing thet labour power. The useful quality of labour power by virtue of which it makes yarn or boots, was to the capitalist merely the neceswary condition for his activity; for in order to create value labour must be expened in a useful manner. 300

…What was really decisive for him 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…

…On the one hand the daily sustenance of labour power costs only a half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller.301

…Our capitalist foresaw this situation, and that was the cause of his laughter. The worker therefore finds, in the workshop, the means of production necessary for workin not just 6 hours but 12 hours. 301

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