Readings: Capital II, ch. 18, 19, 20 (sections 1-5)
Part Three of Volume II develops in greater detail the concept of reproduction, originally introduced in Volume I. In my notes on Volume I, I wrote that reproduction refers to how the capitalist system is sustained. In this section of Volume II, Marx delves into exactly how capitalism is reproduced from the economic and social standpoints. In the process, he outlines a series of hypothetical value circulation scenarios whose details I will not discuss yet because I believe he develops them further later in chapters 20 and 21.
In Volume I, Marx writes, “No society can go on producing, in other words no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production, or elements of fresh products. All other circumstances remaining the same, the society can reproduce or maintain its wealth on the existing scale only by replacing the means of production which have been used up—i.e. the instruments of labour, the raw material and the auxiliary substances—with an equal quantity of new articles.” (711) Here, we have the economic definition of reproduction—the physical materials that sustain capitalist production must be reproduced.
He continues: “The capitalist process of production, 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) This is the second aspect of reproduction—that of the social relations of capitalism.
In chapter 20 of Volume II, Marx focuses mostly on the economic aspects of reproduction and only briefly on the social aspects. They are, however, interrelated.
In dealing with the economic process, Marx lays out a key guiding question at the start of chapter 20: “How is the capital consumed in production replaced in its value out of the annual product, and how is the movement of this replacement intertwined with the consumption of surplus-value by the capitalists and of wages by the workers?” (469) The means of production, whose use-values are consumed during the production process, must be replaced or reproduced for production to continue. Similarly, the labor-power of the workers that has been used up in production needs to be reproduced. Marx writes that it is the production of different “departments” of the capitalist economy that reproduces these use-values. Department I, which produces capital goods, reproduces the used-up means of production. Department II, which produces consumer goods, reproduces the used-up labor-power. Production in these two departments consumes the commodities that eventually need to be replaced, but it also produces (i.e. reproduces) those commodities by way of its consumption. In this way, it is a circuit that constantly repeats itself, with the products of certain industries exchanged with those of other industries where the exchange itself reproduces each productive circuit.
The question of how the social relations of capitalism are reproduced is not laid out in as detailed a way as is economic reproduction. The best description I found in this series of chapters is the following: “On the one hand, therefore, the constant purchase and sale of labour-power perpetuates the position of labour-power as an element of capital, and in this way capital appears as the creator of commodities, articles of use that have a value; this is also how the portion of capital that buys labour-power is regularly restored by the product of labour-power itself, so that the worker himself constantly creates the capital fund out of which he is paid. On the other hand, the constant sale of labour-power becomes a source of maintaining the worker’s life that he perpetually has to repeat, and his labour-power thus appears as the means by which he draws the revenue from which he lives.” (457)
This rather clinical description begs the question, why does the worker have to re-engage the capital labor relation? Yes, there is a labor market where labor-power is bought and sold constantly, but what compels the workers to continue to sell their labor-power? They are free individuals after all, just as Adam Smith said.
In order to better understand this, we need to go back to Volume I, where Marx lays out in much more vivid detail what the reproduction of the capital-labor relation entails. He writes, “This constant sale and purchase of labour-power, and the constant entrance of the commodity produced by the worker himself as buyer of his labour-power and as constant capital, appear merely as forms which mediate his subjugation by capital.” (1063) So, the real point here is that there is a power relationship at the heart of capitalist production and that the workers do not have a choice. Marx develops this later in Volume I with his general theory of capitalist accumulation, which lays out how the capitalist class controls the labor market by using the unemployed to hold down wages. The life of the worker is governed by the constant fear of losing his livelihood, family, health and ultimately life itself. The fear and vulnerability that comes from poverty allows the wealthy capitalists to make it seem as if workers should be grateful to have a job.
But in addition, as Marx describes in Part Eight of Volume I, the process of primitive accumulation destroys all other modes of production and forces the masses into conditions of urban poverty where their only chance at reproducing their lives is to work for the capitalists. The circuit of C-M-C is imposed on them by brute force. This power dynamic is what drives the reproduction of the capital-labor relationship.
World of Lenidzky 