Dead Leaves (1956) by Remedios Varo
“One might, if one chose, describe it as a deliberate rebarbarization.” - Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
Marx’s distinction between the labor process and the valorization process, as we previously discovered, reveals the capitalist form of the production process as being composed of abstract conceptions of human social practice that both precede it and become determinations of the contours of its social forms. Where the labor process can be distilled into its essential elements across time, independent of any social formation, the valorization process is a specific subordination of the active ideation of human labor’s purposive activity to a quality of being abstract social labor. Within this form, all material determinations of any concrete labor are subsumed under the temporal constraints of socially necessary labor-time as the mediation of value between separate sites of commodity production, an impersonal compulsion dictating the boundaries of exploitation’s successive development. This arises from the indirect relation of commodity producers to each other as a historical form of social production mediated in and through the private appropriation that is conditioned by the sale and purchase of labor-power as the mediation of the labor and valorization processes in their unity in the capitalist form of the production process. The forms of exchange and the constitutive modes of social practice which comprise the sphere of circulation reveal a historical form of social production that animates this immediate appearance of social mediation, the internal relations of which condition and articulate the social form of wealth that commercial agents communicate through and as value.
At this stage of Marx’s Capital, the transhistorical continuities of the labor process have been examined in their abstract and simple elements, while the historical form in which they operate as a valorization process, through the determinations of labor-time and the constitution and imposition of value’s characteristic social necessity, demonstrates the particular form within which the labor process operates as an element of the capitalist form of the production process as a unity of the totality of commodity producers. The manner in which the labor process becomes identical in practice to the valorization process, while a distinct form of the production process, initiates our understanding of the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production, as one in which the social mediation of labor to the production process through the sale and purchase of labor-power as a commodity is the raison d'être of the social form of capital. What then remains is the further development of these aspects of the capitalist form of the production process in their unity as the production of capital, where the initial separation and distinction of the labor and valorization processes are brought together once more to discover the material movement of the social forms of value relations as functions of capital. These formal determinations of the elements of the production process lead us to Marx’s conceptual determination of constant and variable capital.
Constant and variable capital are crucial elements of the organic composition of capital, a further development of the dialectical interpenetration of social and material forms that animates Marx’s presentation, and opens the historical conditions of social production to practical transformation. The passage through which the social necessity of value’s articulation as the mediating form of social production relations in active movement comes to bear the potentiality of transforming into a material necessity is borne through constant and variable capital as concepts within which the open antinomy between labor and valorization is resolved decidedly through the formal determination of capital’s production, a transformation of the space of social life’s objective conditions of existence through this form of living labor’s exploitation.
While these will prove to be simple coordinates of the capitalist production process to understand, the simplicity of a function’s identification belies the importance of constant and variable capital to the particular manner in which capital proves itself capable of arresting and imprisoning historical movement to its laws of time and self-preservation through self-expansion. These will only become clear after this exposition is established and its relation to the organic composition of capital, the movements and transformations of accumulation, in their concrete historical development are brought forth, where the capital-relation and the capitalist mode of production are fully opened to historical time in the revelation of the constitutive social antagonism that animates and institutionalizes the social reproduction of material life as the species’ continuously self-alienating objectification. History’s petrification in the preservation of capital’s class relation is the necessary condition of value’s particular annihilation of space by time, where time becomes space and within which this social-materiality opens time to history through the engagement with space.1
The derivation of constant and variable capital arises from the point at which the unity of the labor and valorization processes are revealed as distinct aspects of the capitalist form of the production process, and specifically develops from the problem of their social-material antinomy. As the labor process can be held apart from valorization, it provides the presupposition to value’s operation through the subsumption of the concrete, the abstract and simple elements of its reduction of all labor to an average social labor, abstract labor, as the substantialization of value’s social material. From this then the procedure must develop to account for the role that these factors of the labor process play in forming the value of the product.
Let us reconstruct this from a position of knowing the destination. The roles of constant and variable capital are simple to understand in their relation to the formation of value. At the end of the chapter, Marx makes the designations quite clear. “That part of capital, therefore, which is turned into means of production, i.e. the raw material, the auxiliary material and the instruments of labour, does not undergo any quantitative alteration of value in the process of production. For this reason, I call it the constant part of capital, or more briefly, constant capital.”2 Those elements of a capital that enter into a production process and do not undergo a change in their own value in the production process are a constant quantity, thus constant capital. “On the other hand, that part of capital which is turned into labour-power does undergo an alteration of value in the process of production. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value and produces an excess, a surplus-value, which may itself vary, and be more or less according to circumstances. This part of capital is continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude. I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or more briefly, variable capital.”3 The active capacity of living labor as harnessed and temporally-situated in its exploitation through the commodity form labor-power is the sole means by which extant values of a capital can expand in the process of production, and thus transform the labor process into a simultaneous valorization process. This is given in the manner through which labor-power’s sale and purchase incorporates the division of necessary and surplus labor-times into the socially necessary labor-time of commodity production, where the flexibility of abstract social labor is given in the wage-form’s self-reproduction in the valorization process as that new labor performed which is conditional of surplus-value’s potentiality. Thus, this living and subjective element of the production process is variable capital, for the intrinsic capacity for quantitative alteration within this form of social production. Summarizing the distinction, Marx declares:
“The same elements of capital which, from the point of view of the labour process, can be distinguished respectively as the objective and subjective factors, as means of production and labour-power, can be distinguished, from the point of view of the valorization process, as constant and variable capital.”4
The sociality of the valorization process finds concrete expression in the material determinants of the labor process, and from this reciprocal determination of the dynamics of the social-material constitution of the capitalist form of the production process we also discern the categorial limits of capital’s production and expansion. Through these designations, we also come to understand the internal dynamics of the capitalist production process as a unity of the processes of labor and valorization as product and result of the twofold character of labor as abstract and concrete. Where the “worker adds fresh value to the material of his labour by expending on it a given amount of additional labour, no matter what the specific content, purpose and technical character of that labour may be”, it is also the case that “the values of the means of production used up in the process are preserved, and present themselves afresh as constituent parts of the value of the product.”5 The movements of the capitalist production process operate in a manner that sublates the processes of labor and valorization in their unity, within which the social form of value as a temporal relation of labor-power’s exploitation both preserves and transforms the elements of the production process as capital through their mediation as representations of values and their function as such. The antinomy of labor as general human activity and the abstract and simple form of the elements of its process in their representation, and function in and as valorization, is constitutive of that which resolves itself in the form of capital, through which this antinomy is once again reproduced in order to continue anew.
Marx tells us how the twofold character of labor is expressed through this process, within which a simultaneous movement of preservation and transformation occurs through the function of the factors of the labor process in the formation of a product bearing a value expression. “The worker does not perform two pieces of work simultaneously, one in order to add value to the cotton, the other in order to preserve the value of the means of production [...] by the very act of adding new value he preserves their former values.”6 Yet as we are able to discern here, the preservation of existing value and the addition of new value to this material of labor “are two entirely distinct results” that arise from the one simultaneous process.7 Thus, “this twofold nature of the result can be explained only by the twofold nature of his labour; it must at the same time create value through one of its properties and preserve or transfer value through another.”8
We then may understand the particular question of how this twofold character of labor as abstract and concrete both produces this dual character of the capitalist form of the production process as a sublation of the labor and valorization processes. The worker adds new value through the addition of new labor-time to the materials they work by the fact that their labor contributes to a new use-value in the transformation of extant material.9 The labor is performed in a concretely productive manner toward a definite end that fulfills the use-value articulation of the commodity form. Even if the particular utility of an item is an indifferent quality to its capacity to perform the function of use-value, it is still an essential concrete requirement of this social form. In accordance with this distinction is the aspect of the process in which existing value is preserved by the concrete act of labor. The worker “preserves the values of the already consumed means of production or transfers them to the product as portions of its value, not by virtue of his additional labour as such, but by virtue of the particular useful character of that labour, by virtue of its specific productive form.”10 Where labor performed is productive activity directed to a single purpose, “it raises the means of production from the dead merely by entering into contact with them, infuses them with life so that they become factors of the labour process, and combines with them to form new products.”11
Yet this only accounts for the preservation of value through the concrete transformation of materials of labor. That is to say, value as abstract social form does pertain in the elements of the labor process when received as values through their entrance via purchase into the production process, yet these objective factors of capital themselves only transmit the value they bear through their contact with the living subjectivity of the labor that acts upon them. However, if this is merely concrete labor of a specific useful character, then there is nothing distinct about this process as valorization on its own. “We see therefore that the addition of new value takes place not by virtue of his labour being spinning in particular, or joinery in particular, but because it is labour in general, abstract social labour; and we see also that the value added is of a certain definite amount, not because his labour has a particular useful content, but because it lasts for a definite length of time.”12 What follows is an echo of Marx’s original formulation of the twofold character of labor as abstract and concrete as an interpenetration of opposites13:
“On the one hand, it is by virtue of its general character as expenditure of human labour-power in the abstract that spinning adds new value to the values of the cotton and the spindle; and on the other hand, it is by virtue of its special character as a concrete, useful process that the same labour of spinning both transfers the values of the means of production to the product and preserves them in the product. Hence a twofold result emerges within the same period of time.”14
From this distinction the precise limits of valorization as they correspond to the factors of the labor process from which the social form is organized can be developed. For the objective elements of the labor process, the means of production, raw materials, etc., their value is transferred to a product only in so far as they lose their exchange-value along with the independent use-value with which they entered the process. It is an element that does not itself transform quantitatively in and through the process, but only functions as a value of the process to be preserved in and through that process, transformed only in so far as its specific form becomes independent of its form as a value through the results of the production process. These objective factors of the labor process do not all behave in the same way, as Marx makes a distinction between the changes in form that raw materials totally-consumed undergo and the gradual depreciation of instruments of labor through their use, however they are still unified as constant capital through the absence of a quantitative expansion of their value induced by their entrance into the production process. They are rather presuppositions, only bearing value in so far as they themselves are the products of past human labor. “Thus it appears that one factor of the labour process, a means of production, continually enters as a whole into that process, while it only enters in parts into the valorization process. The distinction between the labour process and the valorization process is reflected here in their objective factors, in that one and the same means of production, in one and the same process of production, counts in its totality as an element in the labour process, but only piece by piece as an element in the creation of value.”15
Thus in the distinction between constant and variable capital, that element of the capitalist production process that is constant in its relation to the movement of the valorization process “is determined not by the labour process into which it enters as a means of production, but by that out of which it has issued as a product. In the labour process it serves only as a use-value, a thing with useful properties, and cannot therefore transfer any value to the product unless it possessed value before its entry into the process.”16 In its relation to the sublation of the antinomy of labor and valorization, of the unity of the social and the material that must be retained if capitalist production is to operate successfully as a mode of social production, the “worker is unable to add new labour, to create new value, without at the same time preserving old values, because the labour he adds must be of a specific useful kind, and he cannot do work of a useful kind without employing products as the means of production of a new product, and thereby transferring their value to the new product. The property therefore which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of nature which costs the worker nothing, but is very advantageous to the capitalist since it preserves the existing value of his capital.”17
An important discovery then results from this understanding of the simultaneity of preservation and transformation, and the specific means by which value is expressed in and through its reproduction. As it is the case that all that is truly consumed in the labor process of the means of production is their use-value, their exchange-value is not reproduced in the product.18 The exchange-value is preserved through the material transformation of these objective factors into a new product. This conditions the vital distinction of the subjective factor of living labor-power in the reproduction of value as a social form of relations of production. The value of the capital that is allocated towards the purchase of labor-power operates differently through the manner in which its form as labor-power, thus valorizing activity, enters into the capitalist production process in which it “sets itself in motion independently”, and through which a new value is generated.19 As Marx tells us:
“It is the only original value formed during this process, the only portion of the value of the product created by the process itself. Of course, we do not forget that this new value only replaces the money advanced by the capitalist in purchasing labour-power, and spent by the worker on means of subsistence. With regard to the three shillings which have been expended, the new value of three shillings appears merely as a reproduction. Nevertheless, it is a real reproduction, and not, as in the case of the value of the means of production, simply an apparent one. The replacement of one value by another is here brought about by the creation of new value [...] The activity of labour-power, therefore, not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above this. This surplus-value is the difference between the value of the product and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of the product, in other words the means of production and the labour-power.”20
The identification of value as a social form of wealth thus sees the actual reproduction of itself only in the living agents that relate to their own activity and through the form within which that activity occurs as social production. Value is only reproduced through that which can act, and is not an intrinsic property of the material constituents of the production process, though it successively operates in a manner which preserves and transforms them according to the formal determinations of value relations. Labor-power is the reproduction of value proper, not only for the reproduction of a monetary equivalent of the wage expended for the purchase of labor-power, but for its capacity to operate as the activity which preserves the social edifice of value relations and transforms them within the constraints of this being of capital, where becoming is subordinate to the abstract form within which surplus-value is a social potentiality between commodity producers due to the given relations of labor-power’s exploitation.
Capitalist production, through this prism of the operation of value relations in their objective and subjective determinations, is then still purely of the social relation wherein the sale and purchase of labor-power is the foundation of mediating social production, a logic of separation undergirding the social reproduction of material life. Yet we also see here a dynamic relation between these factors of the labor process as functions of valorization in which the sociality of form acts as a preservation and transformation of material content in accordance with the temporal coordinates of value relations inscribed by their social determination. It is with this foundation that Marx proceeds to develop at-length the various modes of surplus-value’s production as this expansive possibility, internally generated through a form of social production within which labor-power is formally enclosed as already-surplus labor-time. While the sphere of capital’s circulation is the necessary correlate to this organization of social activity and is the location of the necessary realization of exchange that imbues this form with social validity, exchange as the form of sociality is already conditioned by the social form of commodity production as social production, and exchange as the realization of a surplus-value in monetary form is the interrelation of commodity producers as producers of the capital-relation itself, a society in which material life is reproduced through a form of social labor which continually objectifies itself in alien form.
This articulates the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production as constituted by definite social relations of production which correspond to the particular class antagonism of capitalist society, in and through the practical means by which agents reproduce these conditions of their existence as the form of social labor. The form of which capitalist social life consists is that of a polarity of proprietary ownership dictating appropriation, and dispossession conditioning producers to produce that which may only be theirs as mediated within proprietary constraints alien to their own being as formally independent owners of the commodity labor-power. It is not the case however that this is the doing of a social form, it is rather that such practice is constitutive of the social forms in and through which these modes of social practice condition and articulate social relations of production as the reproduction of material life.
This question then of the historical character of capitalism must also relate to the particular fetishism of its immediate apprehension, wherein the identification of these forms of the production process as the production of capital in the sublation of the labor and valorization processes can be identified in the specific modes of social practice which determine the form historically. This is what Marx sets out to do in the many chapters that follow, illustrating the absolute and relative dimensions of extending the surplus labor-time of the production process as modes of producing surplus-value, decidedly of specific social-material transformations of the production process which reproduce the capital-relation in their preservation of the means to guarantee the sale and purchase of labor-power as a condition of the social reproduction of material life. Labor-power as commodity is thus a condition of social production that necessitates the practice of class struggle as its determinate movement in history. While these chapters are detailed and deserving of examination, we must do so at another time, when our analysis will move to encompass these aspects of Marx’s Capital within a broader framework of social-historical practice in the development of the capitalist mode of production. For now, the aim is to take these formal elements of the capitalist mode of production, value and surplus-value, the processes of labor and valorization, means of production and labor-power, constant and variable capital, and find the dynamic movement of capital’s development in historical time that they take in the process of the accumulation of capital and its organic composition.
Next week we will be diving into the movements of the accumulation process. Thank you for reading!
“The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange – the means of communication and transport – become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.” Marx, Grundrisse (1973) p. 524
Marx, Capital Volume I (1976) p. 317
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 307
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“Now how does every worker add fresh labour-time and therefore fresh value? Evidently, only by working productively in a particular way. The spinner adds labour-time by spinning, the weaver by weaving, the smith by forging. But although these operations add labour as such, and therefore new values, it is only through the agency of labour directed to a particular purpose, by means of the spinning, the weaving and the forging respectively, that the means of production, the cotton and the spindle, the yarn and the loom, and the iron and the anvil, become constituent elements of the product, of a new use-value.” Ibid, pp. 307-8
Ibid, p. 308
Ibid.
Ibid, pp. 308-9
“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, pp. 308-9
Ibid, p. 312
Ibid, p. 314
Ibid, pp. 314-5
“There is in fact no consumption of their value and it would therefore be inaccurate to say that it is reproduced. It is rather preserved; not by reason of any operation it itself undergoes in the labour process but because the use-value in which it originally existed vanishes (although when it vanishes, it does so into another use-value).” Ibid, p. 315
Ibid, p. 316
Ibid, pp. 316-7