Capital Volume I: Class 7

Reading: Capital I, ch. 12-14

Part 4, which covers relative surplus value, begins by first describing the basic economics of relative surplus value and then providing the reader with the historical background for its emergence as a key tool for capitalists to increase surplus value. I will skip the discussion of the economics because, while it may be a bit dense, it is fairly straightforward once understood. In the following chapters, however, Marx points to some important contradictions that arise as capitalist manufacture develops.

Marx defines the organization of production that predominates during early capitalism as “manufacture,” which involves the physical division of the labor necessary to produce commodities into its component parts. Whereas in pre-capitalist forms of production, individual workers made entire products themselves, in manufacture, several workers cooperate to make those products part by part. Manufacture is the precursor to mechanized industry, which defines modern capitalism.

But manufacture is already defined by a relationship of domination. Marx writes, “If capitalist direction is thus twofold in content, owing to the twofold nature of the process of production which has to be directed—on the one hand a social labour process for the creation of a product, and on the other hand capital’s process of valorization—in form it is purely despotic.” (450) So, while this book largely focuses on the economic processes involved in production, he makes it clear that those economics correspond to the existence of an authoritarian regime in every capitalist company. I would argue that in this sentence, he is pointing to a contradiction between the progressive nature of socialized labor and the reactionary nature of valorization, or the extraction of surplus value. It is the extraction of surplus value that corresponds to the despotism he observes.

The maintenance of the regime of exploitation and despotism is also dependent on the dehumanization of the worker, his reduction to a mere automaton. First, he is progressively deskilled because he is forced to no longer makes an entire product, but only a part of one. Second, he is stripped of any intellectual involvement in the labor. This is Marx’s first discussion in Capital of the split between mental and manual labor, which I believe is a crucial aspect of his theory. On this point, he writes, “It is a result of the division of labour in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him. This process of separation starts in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the individual workers the unity and the will of the whole body of social labour. It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. It is completed in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital.” (482)

Capitalism, then, essentially uses a divide-and-conquer strategy to gain dominance over labor. The individual laborer is divided into many laborers and he is also separated from his knowledge about production.

These chapters may begin to answer a question I posed to Harvey in an earlier post, namely, how can society transition from the dominance of bourgeois law and its empty notion of value to a notion of value that appreciates the full humanity of individuals? Perhaps the starting point is to build the unity of mental and manual labor. One aspect of this is for workers to fight for greater control over the labor process through class struggle, i.e. the ability to direct it democratically. Where this starts is a question for politics.

On a separate topic, I wanted to respond to another point raised by Harvey in last week’s class which covered chapter 10, “The Working Day.” Harvey pointed to a few sentences at the end of this chapter in which he argues that Marx is advancing “revolutionary reform.” Here Marx writes, “For ‘protection’ against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital. In the place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear ‘when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins’.” (416) It should also be noted that in 1866, Marx crafted a resolution in the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association (which passed) stating that the limitation of the working day to eight hours was the precondition for the working class to make any further gains.

By revolutionary reform, Harvey seems to think it is possible that Marx’s position here was that the working class should simply fight for a progressively shorter working day until it reached three hours at which point socialism would be achieved. In other words, he is saying that Marx was a reformist. Aside from the fact that Marx never said anything like that, Harvey has fallen into a typical reformist simplification of revolutionary politics. Revolutionaries aren’t maximalists who refuse to fight for reforms in the name of waiting for the final judgment day when capitalism collapses and the workers march in triumphantly.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a difference between fighting for reforms and being a reformist. Real revolutionaries will always stress the need to fight for reforms. The point is to fight for these reforms while relentlessly impressing upon the working class that reforms under capitalism are temporary at best and that capitalism itself cannot be reformed. This is the essence of Leon Trotsky’s Transitional Program (1938). The fight for reforms should point the way toward the need to overthrow capitalism.

Based on the bulk of Marx’s writings and political positions, it is clear that he was in this camp (although the period when he was alive was quite different from Trotsky’s or ours). In the Civil War in France (1871), Marx stated in reaction to the Paris Commune, that the working class “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” In other words, while laws to regulate the working day may be essential for the progress of the working-class movement, the capitalist state has to go.