The Silesian Weavers (1846) by Carl Wilhelm Hübner
“I am a city by the sea sinking into a toxic tide. I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown had poisoned my mother as she carried me.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours II,2. Translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.
Beginning with the organic composition of capital and its relation to accumulation can itself appear presumptuous, a taking-out-of-place that requires its own navigation through the movements of Capital in order to properly contextualize its point of arrival. This post and those to come will set out to do this, emphasizing particular aspects that relate most directly to this particular conceptual development in the text. I do not claim here to represent an authoritative interpretation, but am conducting the practice of interpreting Capital in the interests of methodological development for further writing. The primary aim here is to investigate what Marx states at the outset to be the most important factors in the consideration of “the influence of the growth of capital on the fate of the working class”,1 the composition of capital and the changes it undergoes in the course of accumulation.
This introduction to the movements of capitalist accumulation and the composition of capital arrive just following the determinants of the transformation of surplus-value into capital, the completion of a movement that began with the development from the capital-relation of surplus-value, itself completing a movement that extends from the appearance of capital’s expansionary movement in circulation given by the general formula for capital (M-C-M’), and arrives at the manner by which the social form of production relations in the subsumption of labor to capital produces and reproduces this social form of wealth, and in turn the conditions for its apparent perpetual motion. This derivation of the self-expanding appearance of value in the circulation of so many exchanges, in which capital as value-in-process is imbued with the appearance of an automatic subject,2 however ends up revealing contradictions within this general formula. Where there is no determination in the relative position of buyer and seller, and with the determination of the magnitude of value by labor-time3 rendering impossible any continual development of surplus-value absent the equivalent exchange of commodities, “[c]apital cannot therefore arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation.”4
I. Deriving Labor-Power
The contradictions in the general formula for capital best captures the peculiar dynamics of the value-form and the abstract movements by which this social form governs and is governed by the social practices within which it immediately appears. Distinctions in categories may be developed, yet there determinations are always just shy of capital proper. The earliest chapters of Capital take the dual character of the commodity in its simultaneous expression as a use-value and an exchange-value to develop the dual character of labor as abstract and concrete, where a divergence in the character of such sees only abstract labor as the social substance of value, of which not an ounce of matter enters into its constitution, yet it is inseparable from a particular arrangement and positing of extant matter.5 Abstract labor is not generalized as value-forming labor by the calculation of all labor by a universal standard evaluating its physical tasks, but the historical organization of people engaged in the social production and reproduction of material life which gives rise to this relation of labor to itself as abstract in its particular mode of appropriation. This enfolds simultaneously a movement of the reduction of many concrete labor tasks into this general form, indicating a higher degree of socialization of production implicit in this historical realization of the instrumentality of human labor in and through its abstraction.
Yet while the investigation of the form of value and the phantom-like objectivity that pertains amongst the social relations of commodity production yields many insights into the establishment of the critique of political economy, these form the preliminary stages of the analysis, indicating rather the limits that result from the movements of value and the relations of surplus-value in the immediate appearances of their directly constitutive mediations of this form of social production. Where money is the adequate representation of abstract labor and thus the starting-point and result of the social form of the production of capital as commodity production, the determination of form is still left wanting from the examination of the dimensions of the form of exchange which are assumed in capital’s social metabolic activity in circulation. The mediating determination of labor-time, and the manner in which its mediation with all other labor-times is socially-validated by the successful exchange, realizes value as it in turn also realizes socially necessary labor-time as an operative regulation of and constraint upon the direction of labor’s productivity in commodity production. Thus the appearance of impersonal constraints that appear to guide the capitalist economy in the invisible hand of the market, a web of social interdependencies that becomes successively alien and sovereign over and above the direct agents involved in the process itself, from which the phenomenon of commodity fetishism results.
Throughout these earlier chapters, there is then a possibility to interpret Marx as, in the interest of establishing a foundation for the critique of political economy, developing this exposition in order to establish the contours of indeterminacy and the internal logical contradictions of this plane of the economic, at the level of taking political economy’s claims of scientifically rational objectivity at their word. It is where the final understanding of surplus-value that “[t]he change in value cannot take place in the money itself” reveals the importance of the sale and purchase of labor-power, “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”6 and the determination of the value of which, in contrast with other commodities, “contains a historical and moral element.”7 Only through the sale and purchase of labor-power, the commodified form of labor as the alienable capacity to labor itself appropriated as the property of the purchaser for a definite duration of time, is the production of surplus-value possible.8 Yet this movement itself exists within the sphere of circulation as an exchange, from which we know capital cannot itself arise but it cannot arise without. Thus, for labor-power to appear on the market as a commodity, Marx establishes certain conditions which must first have been fulfilled, an abstracted deployment of historical time that indicates a specific practical determination of form.
First, “labour-power can appear on the market as a commodity only if, and in so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale or sells it as a commodity.”9 In order for this to be the case, that such action may be voluntary in its immediate appearance, “he must be the free proprietor of his own labour-capacity, hence of his person”, engaging with the purchaser “on a footing of equality as owners of commodities,” treating his “labour-power as his own property [...] 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 his labour-power and to avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it.”10 Second, it is essential that “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.”11 This delineation of the specificities of the commodity labor-power must not confuse their degree of abstraction for an abdication of critique to the principles of political economy. That the person’s own capacity to labor becomes an object to which they relate as property, that an equal footing exists between two agents engaged in a relation where only one is compelled to present themselves as a temporary instrument of the alien process of another, remains to be investigated. For it is this constitutive dynamic of the social relations of commodity production that brings Marx to an important point of clarity amidst the indeterminate movements of the logical interrelations of political economy’s categories:
“[N]ature 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.”12
This constitutive relation in the organization of production “only happens on the basis of one particular mode of production, the capitalist one” which requires a “development of the division of labour within society such that the separation of use-value from exchange-value [...] has already been completed.”13 Though it becomes important here to note that Marx is clear that such a degree of development is common to many past economic formations, the full scope “diverse of historical characteristics” poses another crucial insight, that the categories of bourgeois political economy alone, though they themselves bear a historical imprint, do not alone make for the capitalist mode of production or the production of capital. Thus he says of the specificity of capitalism “[t]he historical conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power. And this one historical pre-condition comprises a world's history. Capital, therefore, announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production.”14
Marx then proceeds to outline the determination of the value of the commodity labor-power. This persists in the complex of social determinations given by the definite quantity of the means of subsistence required to reproduce labor-capacity, and through the manner in which such a presupposition operates within the determination of commodity value through the labor-time necessary for the production of a given labor-power. Thus Marx presents us with the openness that abstraction offers to both fix certain determinations, while also revealing the extent to which doing so still remains limited at the present arrival of analysis, and must continue to develop itself within this opening. Further, it becomes the case that such abstract determinations indeed exist concretely, even if they do not make themselves readily apparent at the outset. Where political economy may seek definite answers and mechanistic causal linkages to every categorial derivation, Marx’s movement continually suspends determination as it arrives, where the social necessity of value relations and their constitutive exploitation of labor are both flexible within while constrained by their own limits, and from which the temporal specificity of the process of capital’s production remains obscured by the determinations of history, from which all practice receives its concrete determinations and presuppositions.
It is important here that, after the categorial expositions of the dual character of labor, the form of value, the forms of money, commodity, surplus-value, and labor-power, have all been developed in relation to each other, only now begins the direct analysis of how capital is produced. Marx famously ends the chapter on the sale and purchase of labor-power in order to “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.”15 The immediacy of the sphere of circulation and its appearance in the form of the market, a category that appears as an autonomous object rendered alien from and to those agents which constitute its very existence, conceals both a further process of more direct determination in the production of capital, from which circulation is animated as much as its animation is essential to this production. These movements by which Marx conducts his critique possess a quality of tearing asunder the claims of political economy by means of the identification of social production as a historical process in the reproduction of material life. Thus it is in the integration of the analysis of the production of capital as the complex and antagonistic unity of material production and social necessity, from and within which the material necessities of this form of social production arise, that reveals the particular character of this society:
“When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the ‘free-trader vulgaris' with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but - a tanning.”16
The distinct class polarity of the capitalist mode of production appears in this process as both in and of these previously examined movements of circulation, their appearances from this level of immediacy requiring a further development of the concrete practices by which this historical form of social production reproduces itself in and through the production of capital. The arrival at this point brings forth a tension that persists throughout these first two parts of Capital, that the objective totality of social labor has been revealed in the appearance of particular forms of its mediation between agents, yet there is no trace in the initial realm of their appearance of the precise determination of their historical development. Relations appear as they are, yet their realization cannot be accounted for within the constraints of this immediacy. “In the commodity economy,” as Isaak I. Rubin so eloquently puts it, “things, the products of labor, have a dual essence: material (natural-technical) and functional (social). How can we explain the close connection which is expressed in the fact that ‘socially-determined labor’ takes on ‘material traits,’ and things, ‘social traits’?”17
II. The Labor & Valorization Processes
Marx’s resolution follows the further development of this historical form of social production, the manner in which a definite process of social practice constitutes the conditions of existence of abstract social forms as they in turn influence the determination of the contours of practice. Through this we encounter the tension of the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production’s constitutive social relations of production, and the continuity in historical time implicit in the capacity to evaluate a qualitative distinction that such specificity implies. Where the very concept of social form itself introduces the requirement of an aspiration towards totality, the reciprocal determination of abstract and concrete then introduces social production as the historical process of a practical Becoming. It is from the vantage point of its realization in the capitalist form of social production that Marx reflexively develops a conception of historical time in which the particular form of the modern appearance of production relations and their articulation in the science of bourgeois political economy serve as historical mediations turned against themselves, revealing the immanence of a practical overcoming of this historical form.
To further develop this complex unity of historical and transhistorical time as an objective dialectic in Capital, we now look forward into Marx’s concept of the organic composition of capital, and its initial relation to accumulation, in order to turn back once again to the development of these components. What is essential at the outset to grasp here is that, once again, Marx reproduces the interrelation of abstract and concrete in the distinct yet co-constitutive dimensions of the social and material aspects of the composition of capital. What is developed here is not an inherently material determination to the composition of capital, but a specific and dynamic relation of determinations between the social and the material that is organic to the continual reproduction of the capital-relation as the capitalist form of the process of social production:
“The composition of capital is to be understood in a twofold sense. As value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and capital, or the value of labour-power, the sum total of wages. As material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. This latter composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other. I call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical composition of capital. There is a close correlation between the two. To express this, I call the value composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter, the organic composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital, without further qualification, its organic composition is always understood.”18
The specificity of this correlation is the key to understanding the dynamic internal to the movement of this production process determines it as one organic to capital. This is necessarily a complex relation and problem, that is only aided towards its resolution by a close attention to the dimensions of the social and material considered here in their presentation. Where a technical composition of capital is identified, it is the relation between the non-living elements of the production process in their immediate appearance as means of production, encompassing elements as diverse as the raw materials, instruments, machines, and infrastructure, and the living human labor that must be deployed to operate it. The value composition of capital maps onto these material components, but as mediated in the form of values, expressed in proportions of monetary sums as constant and variable capital, dictating a specific function that these material components are to fulfil and be composed as in the capitalist form of the production process. The organic composition of capital is expressed by Marx as the value composition in so far as it maintains a correspondence between its successful operation through the social constitution of its material components. Put another way, while value exists as an objectivity in a purely social manner, it is still dependent upon and operates within the constitution of these material constraints, and only replicates its social validity in so far as it is capable of subordinating limits social and material to the conditions of its realization, and thus in turn shaping materiality in the image of its historical form of social necessity.
Thus the conditional aspects enumerated above of the appearance of labor-power on the market as a commodity are developed here as a continuity in the movement of capital’s accumulation in and through time that also comes to successively establish itself and the conditions of its reproduction historically. The determinations of the form of surplus-value require the continual and successive instantiations of the seller of labor-power in order to preserve this temporal flexibility of socially necessary labor-time, allowing for the universal exploitation and particular appropriation of surplus labor-time to always be incorporated into the objectivity of this social form. Through this, Marx is able to establish the logical and practical connection between simple and expanded reproduction, where the former “constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e.: the presence of capitalists on the one side, and wage-labourers on the other side,” the latter sees the composition of capital and the social-material constitution of value relations in process as the movement of accumulation, which “reproduces the capital-relation on an expanded scale, with more capitalists, or bigger capitalists, at one pole, and more wage labourers at the other pole. The reproduction of labour power which must incessantly be re-incorporated into capital as its means of valorization, which cannot get free of capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, forms, in fact, a factor in the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat.”19
What we wish to draw attention to here is that Marx establishes an explicit and direct identification between the organic composition of capital and its accumulation to the conditions of existence for the continual reproduction of the capital-relation in and through the multiplication of the proletariat. The full movement of surplus-value comes to reveal itself in a de-fetishized form as a class relation not intrinsic to social production, but a moment of this historical form of social production which continually reproduces itself through the establishment of this class antagonism, thus always establishing the limits that it must transcend.
Before we fully elaborate the movements of the accumulation of capital and the organic composition of capital in this context, however, a parsing out of the components to the composition of capital reveals specific elements of the social constitution of this process which may be examined more closely, as they form the foundation of Marx’s understanding of the production process of capital. In this we can identify the social-material character of the value and technical compositions by way of their respective components. What is of importance here is the interrelation between the material components of means of production and living human labor, and their coming to be as expressions and functions of value relations in constant and variable capital. The tension between a dialectic of the social and material reveals here also a tension between the transhistorical continuity of any social form of the production process existing as an engagement between human labor and the means of production it develops to guarantee its conditions of existence, and the historically specific functions that these play in their subsumption to and expression as forms of capital.
Prior to the introduction to and conceptual determinations of constant and variable capital, the initial stage of Marx’s analysis following the elaboration on the sale and purchase of labor-power begins with the understanding that the capitalist mode of production operates as a specific unity of two distinct processes that are unified in their movement: the labor process and the valorization process. Between these two dimensions of capitalist production, the tension between the transhistorical continuity of social production and the historical determinations of the capitalist mode of production is first established, a moment that will serve as a basis to illuminating the dynamic movement of capital’s subsumption and development of class antagonism as a productive force of society and the de-fetishized movement animating the contours of its laws of motion. At the outset, Marx establishes a definition of the labor process “independently of any specific social formation” in order to understand the concrete determinations of the labor process as one unto itself, of which “[t]he fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf does not alter the general character of that production.”20 It is not that the capitalist form of the production process does not alter significantly the quality of the labor processes involved, but that the general qualities of a labor process in the abstract can be apprehended independently of the manner in which it operates as one subsumed to capital. Thus we begin then with labor as a category independent of labor-power:
“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power. We are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labour which remain on the animal level. An immense interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity from the situation when human labour had not yet cast off its first instinctive form. We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic.”21
Labor is understood here as a category that encompasses a species-specific activity of metabolic interaction with nature as the inorganic conditions of existence. The transhistorical activity of labor in this capacity is sharply distinct from the manner in which labor appears as determinate of the social form of wealth, as developed in the labor theory of value of classical political economy. Here, Marx abstracts from the problem of labor and value to articulate an understanding of labor in the material function of appropriating external nature to the needs of man’s species-being, in turn transforming the species itself through such successive appropriations which condition the ongoing transformation of objective conditions of existence that material reproduction brings. The metabolic interrelation thus reveals an operative and intrinsic unity between the human species and a nature posed here in its externality as object, where the process itself is reciprocally conditioning yet within which neither fully collapses into the other.
In marking the distinctively human qualities of a labor process, Marx develops its simple elements. These are the traits of labor as purposeful activity, that an object is apprehended upon which that purposeful activity as work is performed, and the instruments of that work.22 Within this framework, Marx elaborates an abstract conception of the dynamics of social production across history, specific elements of its construction by which historically specificity alone cannot be discerned, but are conceptual determinations of analysis that allow for the intelligibility between epochs of production to be apprehended, in order to precisely locate that which is specific to the capitalist mode of production, and the modes of practice internal to its constitution by which it posits its own historical transience. For instance, in the development of instruments of labor, “characteristic of the specifically human labour process,” possess an “importance for the investigation of extinct economic formations of society as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals.”23 In the course of the development of these instruments, labor and the temporal mediation of history reveal all production which establishes such continuity of and within itself as social production, which themselves “indicate the social relations within which men work.”24 For, as Marx says, “[i]t is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs.”25 The constitution of any material conditions of existence is a social act, from within which the transformative dialectic of the social and the material is revealed in its movement of becoming, and informs the opening of history to its critical evaluation, and thus the present to its own transience as the practical mediation of past and future.
It is in the labor process that “man’s activity, via the instruments of labour, effects an alteration in the object of labour which was intended from the outset”, conditioning a realization that also existed ideally in the mind of the agent at the outset of the process, a living unity of thought and practice in conscious self-objectification.26 Through this, in which “[t]he process is extinguished in the product”, labor becomes “bound up in its object”, where 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. The worker has spun, and the product is a spinning.”27 We see that in the process that is apprehended here as that of labor, its precise role distilled as a mediator of historical time, the foundations of a method where the distinctions of historical specificity can be discerned through the temporal rhythms of continuity and discontinuity in the social actions of material production. This is brought forth clearly by Marx in the footnote that addresses the social relations articulated in the instruments of labor, where it is said that the “writers of history have so far paid very little attention to the development of material production, which is the basis of all social life, and therefore of all real history.”28 The engagement with history through material production is a movement in and through the challenge immediately posed by the phenomenon of fetishism, where the appearance of the mediation of social relations through things can, through the movements of the things themselves, reveal the sociality within that which reification obscures through formal independence. Past labor is the objectification through which this intercourse of the species with itself through historical time is mediated.
Throughout this first section of the chapter in which the analysis of the labor process is elaborated upon, Marx develops the categories of the production process which will become essential to the identification of the specificities of the capitalist mode of production. Functions of instruments of labor, raw materials, and other such elements of the labor process are developed here as the concept of means of production in so far as they are consumed by labor in the process of producing use-values. This is not, however, in the interest of preserving use-value itself as a category across all of time, but, as with these other categories, a conceptual development from the standpoint of the immanent critique of political economy, teasing out the web of confusion that this dismal science traps itself within. Thus, as Marx completes this dimension of material production in its simple and abstract elements, the attention to its limits precedes the turn towards the capitalist, as “[t]he taste of porridge does not tell us who grew the oats, and the process we have presented does not reveal the conditions under which it takes place, whether it is happening under the slave-owner's brutal lash or the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus undertakes it in tilling his couple of acres, or a savage, when he lays low a wild beast with a stone.”29 We have explored the material elements of social practice, but the determination of the form of social relations is not present at this level.
Turning to the conditions that constitute the necessary mediations that characterize the immediate appearance of the capitalist as a social agent consuming labor-power, Marx tells us that first it is that “the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs; the capitalist takes good care that the work is done in a proper manner, and the means of production applied directly to the purpose, so that the raw material is not wasted, and the instruments of labour are spared, i.e. only worn to the extent necessitated by their use in the work.”30 Secondly, it is that “the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer.”31 In the capitalist’s subsumption of the labor process, this dimension of social production becomes not primarily as the direct mediation between the species and nature, but “a process between things the capitalist has purchased, things which belong to him.”32 Thus we arrive at the analysis of the other distinct aspect that is essential to the unity of the capitalist form of the production process in tandem with the role and functions of labor: the valorization process.33
What is specific to the valorization process as it relates to the labor process as presented above is that the labor process is an essential presupposition to the process of valorization, and within which a specific form of the labor process is constituted as a socialization of production according to the determinations of value in correspondence with labor-time. In the example of the production of yarn of a determinate value, the combination of cotton and its spinning demonstrates this temporal synthesis of past labor which occurs as the active socialization brought about in the valorization process. In the determination of “the value of the yarn, or the labour-time required for its production, all .the special processes carried on at various times and in different places which were necessary, first to produce the cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle, and then with the cotton and the spindle to spin the yarn, may together be looked on as different and successive phases of the same labour process.”34 Distinct labor processes of a single products enter as a combinatory complex of labor processes which are social in the form of value. “All the labour contained in the yarn is past labour; and it is a matter of no importance that the labour expended to produce its constituent elements lies further back in the past than the labour expended on the final process, the spinning.”35 Thus in this socialization of labor in the form of value, a historical logic of temporality appears disrupted and flattened in its determination of labor-time synthesizing distinct, concrete processes. Where it is the case in the valorization process that the cotton and the spindle must produce a use-value, even if value is itself independent of any particular use-value, and the constraint of socially necessary labor-time operates as a mediating constraint on the direction of production, Marx tells us that:
“We have now to consider this labour from a standpoint quite different from that adopted for the labour process. There we viewed it solely as the activity which has the purpose of changing cotton into yarn; there, the more appropriate the work was to its purpose, the better the yarn, other circumstances remaining the same. In that case the labour of the spinner was specifically different from other kinds of productive labour, and this difference revealed itself both subjectively in the particular purpose of spinning, and objectively in the special character of its operations, the special nature of its means of production, and the special use-value of its product. For the operation of spinning, cotton and spindles are a necessity, but for making rifled cannon they would be of no use whatever. Here, on the contrary, where we consider the labour of the spinner only in so far as it creates value, i.e. is a source of value, that labour differs in no respect from the labour of the man who bores cannon, or (what concerns us more closely here) from the labour of the cotton-planter and the spindle-maker which is realized in the means of production of the yarn. It is solely by reason of this identity that cotton planting, spindle-making and spinning are capable of forming the component parts of one whole, namely the value of the yarn, differing only quantitatively from each other. Here we are no longer concerned with the quality, the character and the content of the labour, but merely with its quantity. And this simply requires to be calculated. We assume that spinning is simple labour, the average labour of a given society.”36
Where in the labor process the constant transformation from the form of unrest into being articulated the form of motion of a practical Becoming in the social production of material life, where these aspects of the subjective engagement with objective conditions of existence, we see here a specific constraint imposed in the temporal determinations of value which arrest transformation within that which “is necessary under the given social conditions.”37 Value indicates the development of labor’s socialization to a level of the interchangeable and flexible quality of purely quantifiable average social labor, an extension and development of the conceptual determination of abstract labor as the social form of value-creating labor.
Essential to this entire edifice is the relation by which this formal determination of the production process as a unity of labor and valorization operates to produce surplus-value for the capitalist. Proceeding to develop the practical deployment of this mediation of social production, Marx takes for example a spinner that works the means of production in a manner that reproduces exactly the wage for which his labor-power was purchased.38 What immediately comes of this, to what “[o]ur capitalist stares in astonishment”, is that, in this case, the “value of the product is equal to the value of the capital advanced.”39 Therefore, valorization has not taken place, as surplus-value has not been created. The humorous pages that follow this, the indignation of the capitalist that has not earned a reward for his role in the organization of the production process, is a satirical detour by which Marx comes to reveal the concrete fact of the matter, in which the “whole litany he has just recited was simply meant to pull the wool over our eyes. He himself does not care twopence for it. He leaves this and all similar subterfuges and conjuring tricks to the professors of political economy, who are paid for it. He himself is a practical man, and although he does not always consider what he says outside his business, within his business he knows what he is doing.”40
What must then be discovered here is the manner in which the sale and purchase of labor-power, as the mediation of the labor and valorization processes in the unity of the capitalist form of the production process, incorporates the creation of surplus-value into the social form of this process itself. Of importance here specifically are the differences at play between value determination in the commodity labor-power. As Marx identifies, “the past labour embodied in the labour-power and the living labour it can perform, and the daily cost of maintaining labour-power and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things.”41 As it relates to labor-power’s in its existence here as a commodity, the former determination is its exchange-value, and the latter its use-value, for the capitalist. Thus it is the case that “the value of labourpower, 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 the labour-power.”42 What is of importance to the capitalist is that the commodity labor-power’s use-value is primarily that of being a source of more value than it itself possesses. This is borne out here in a manner which combines the previous steps of Marx’s procedure into a logical arrival at the flexibility of labor-time afforded in this specific relation of the exploitation of labor-power by the capitalist, within which the command of surplus labor that forms the social substance of surplus-value still satisfies the equivalent exchange of commodities:
“By turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to 'work', 'as if its body were by love possessed'”43
The valorization process is revealed in continuity with the prior categorial expositions of Marx’s critique as merely the continuation of the process of value’s creation beyond a definite point, a means within which the continual material necessity of the labor process is incorporated into a social form of the mediation of this essential intercourse with itself and nature to which the species must enter to satisfy the conditions of its own existence. The initial antinomy of the commodity as an object of utility and a bearer of an abstract value in exchange is reproduced here in the capitalist form of the production of commodities, as on the one hand a labor process producing utilities, and on the other hand the creation of value, all of which resolves itself into the practical unity of the production process of capital. The transhistorical continuities of labor in its simplest and most abstract elements illuminates that which is specific to the historical form of the production of capital, and the key to this all appears in the historical actuality of labor-power’s appearance as a commodity which may be purchased as any other, but from which social production takes on the appearance of so many average simple labors, the expansionary dynamic of surplus-value in this form producing a time which annihilates space in the reduction of quality to a single quantitative expression of time.
The fetishism of history then can begin to become clear. The reproduction of the conditions for capitalist social relations requires the continual production of labor-power, though this occasions a historical process by which labor-power comes to appear on the market, like any other commodity. The specific function of this commodity is essential. Where Marx introduces to us the first stages of an analysis of the production of capital, it is as a temporal subordination of the continuity of historical time, conditioned by the practical transformations of the labor process, to the internal constraints of a historical form of social necessity in its immediate identity with the valorization process, through which these social forms come to identify the extant social relations of material production. From here, however, we have only identified these two aspects of the process, and have not yet arrived at the particular functions of capital’s forms of appearance in the production process, merely its initial and distinct aspects, their complex unity.
In order to fully articulate the elements of the organic composition of capital and its determinations, we must examine the forms of constant and variable capital, which we will do in next week’s post. Thank you for reading and following along!
Marx, Capital Volume I (1976) p. 762
Ibid, p. 255
It should be said here that “determination” is not synonymous with an exact equivalence between directly calculable labor-times, and much less is this aspect of Marx’s determination of the composition of the value-form capable of being rendered incapable of concrete application despite its high degree of abstraction.
Ibid, p. 268
On the interpenetration of opposites through which this relation of abstract and concrete labor is expressed: “On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values.” Ibid, p. 137
Ibid, p. 270
Ibid, p. 275
“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.” Ibid, p. 270
Ibid, p. 271
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 272
Ibid, p. 273
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 274. Emphasis added.
Ibid, pp. 279-80
Ibid, p. 280
Isaak I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (2008) p. 12
Marx (1976), p. 762
Ibid, pp. 763-4
Ibid, p. 283
Ibid, pp. 283-4
Ibid, p. 284
Ibid, p. 286
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 287
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 286
Ibid, pp. 290-1
Ibid, p. 291
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 292
“It must be borne in mind that we are now dealing with the production of commodities, and that up to this point we have considered only one aspect of the process. Just as the commodity itself is a unity formed of use-value and value, so the process of production must be a unity, composed of the labour process and the process of creating value [Wertbildungsprozess].” Ibid, p. 293
Ibid, p. 294
Ibid.
Ibid, pp. 295-6
Ibid, p. 296
Ibid, p. 297
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 300
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 302