sociology midterm

I Marx studies England because it is where capitalism occurs in its “most typical form and free from disturbing influence” (295)

I In Capital Marx deals with people as “personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests” (297).

I Marx distinguishes between two types of value in commodities: use-value and exchange-value.

I A commodity’s use-value is its utility, or what you can do with it. The use-value of a coat is to keep you warm, make you look good, etc. It is qualitative.

I Having use-value is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for being a commodity. Objects can have use-value without being commodities.

I Exchange-value is what we can trade a commodity for. It is quantitative. A computer, for example, could be worth maybe ten coats.

I Marx asks how it is possible that we can exchange two qualitatively different things (like a coat and a computer). On what basis can we say that a quantity of one is equivalent to a quantity of the other?

I Marx argues that for two qualitatively different things to be quantitatively exchangeable, they must be equal to a third thing.

I This third thing is labor.

I The fact that we can exchange things because of the amount of labor in them shows us that not only qualitatively different objects (like coats and computers), but qualitatively different types of human activity (like sewing and assembling), can be exchanged. Qualitatively distinct types of human activity become abstract labor.

I The idea that objects get their value based on the amount of labor it took to produce them is called the labor theory of value.

I For Marx, the value of a commodity is determined by the labor time it took to produce it.

I But the labor time is not the time it took an individual person to produce a commodity (because this would imply that slower workers produce more value than faster workers). Instead, it is the average amount of time it takes to produce a commodity. I The labor theory of value has been criticized for being incomplete. Certainly the labor that goes into producing commodities affects their value, but so does people’s demand for them.

I Marx argues that because we seldom come into direct relations with the people who produce the commodities we consume, we treat objects as if they have intrinsic value, when in fact they have value because of the labor that went into producing them.

I He calls this error commodity fetishism because it is similar to the practice of treating religious objects as if they have special intrinsic powers.

I We treat people as instrumental objects and enter into personal and emotional relations with things.

Review

Review

1 / 25

6 / 25

7 / 25

Types of circulation

I C-M-C: exchange of objects; exchange of use-values; undertaken by the worker

I M-C-M: exchange of money; exchange of exchange-values; undertaken by the capitalist

I “it is evident that the circuit M-C-M would be absurd and without meaning if the intention were to exchange by this means two equal sums of money, pound 100 for pound 100” (329)

I What kind of commodity would allow money to be turned into more money (M0)?

I “The minimum limit of the value of labour-power is determined by the value of the commodities, without the daily supply of which the labourer cannot renew his vital energy, consequently by the value of those means of subsistence that are physically indispensable” (341)

Where does profit come from?

8 / 25

10 / 25

9 / 25

I “The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power; his, therefore, is the use of it for a day; a day’s labour belongs to him. The circumstance, that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use during one day creates, is double what he pays for that use, this circumstance is, without a doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer” (359)

Twelve-hour day

reproduction surplus

I Need to pay the worker $100 per day so that they stay minimally healthy and productive.

I But a twelve-hour day of the worker’s labor produces goods worth double that ($200) so profit is $100.

I “The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one” (364) I “Hence it is that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class” (364)

Six-hour day

reproduction

I If the capitalist paid the same price for a six-hour day of labor, the worker would receive its full value.

I “By increase in the productiveness of labour, we mean, generally, an alteration in the labour-process, of such a kind as to shorten the labour-time socially necessary for the production of a commodity, and to endow a given quantity of labour with the power of producing a greater quantity of use-value” (379)

Twelve-hour day

reproduction surplus

I Need to pay the worker $100 per day so that they stay minimally healthy and productive.

I But a twelve-hour day of the worker’s labor, now with the aid of machine, produces goods worth triple that ($300) so profit is $200.

I “The surplus-value produced by prolongation of the working-day, I call absolute surplus value. On the other hand, the surplus-value arising from the curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working-day,

I call relative surplus-value” (379)

I “there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself” (383)

Twelve-hour day

reproduction surplus

I If a worker produces more commodities in less time, and the value of commodities is determined by the labor in them, then the commodities the worker needs to stay minimally healthy and productive are cheaper, so the capitalist can pay the worker less.

Where does profit come from?

Where does profit come from?

Where does profit come from?

1 / 26

16 / 25

17 / 25

Law of Capitalist Accumulation

I “the higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labour-power for the increasing of another’s wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital.” (430)

Review

I Capitalists buy labor (C) with money (M), but then sell the products of that labor for more than they paid for it (M’). I They do this by paying workers only what is needed for them to reproduce their labor, not what their labor is actually worth. This is called exploitation.

I Capitalists extend the working day without paying workers more and introduce machinery that makes workers more productive.

I If machines make workers more productive, there is less labor embodied in commodities. Thus, according to the labor theory of value, the price of commodities will fall. If the commodities workers need to consume to reproduce their labor cost less, capitalists can pay them less and extract an even greater surplus.

Surplus Population / Reserve Army

I “The expansion by fits and starts of the scale of production is the preliminary to its equally sudden contraction; the latter again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase in the number of labourers independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly ‘sets free’ a part of the labourers; by methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased production. The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed hands” (424)

I “It forms a disposable industrial reserve army” (423)

Capitalism is the product of history, not nature

I “Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production” (338)

1 / 26

22 / 25

21 / 25

I “It can spring to life, only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power” (339)

I “We have seen how money is changed into capital; how through capital surplus-value is made, and from surplus-value more capital. But the accumulation of capital pre-supposes surplus-value; surplus value presupposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production pre-supposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and labour-power in the hands of producers of commodities” (431) I “The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the pre-historic stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it” (432)

I “In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch making that act as levers for the capitalist class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour-market” (433) I “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power” (436)

1 / 26

24 / 25

23 / 25