Britain at Play (1943) by Lawrence Stephen Lowry
“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.” - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
At this point of the analysis we have arrived back at a position from which we may turn to the organic composition of capital and its relation to the process of capitalist accumulation as Marx examines and elaborates upon in Chapter 25 of Capital. We did so initially through a close-reading of the chapters within which Marx first identifies surplus-value from the form of value, and the original derivation of the commodity labor-power, and the importance of its sale and purchase, as the mediation of labor with the production process it animates, to the formation of conditions social and material that are generative of surplus-value. From this we followed Marx from these conceptual derivations of value, surplus-value, and labor-power within the sphere of circulation, where their precise determination of capital as a distinct form remained limited, to their determinations within the production process as the production of capital. This led us to a close reading of the distinct aspects of the capitalist form of the production process as a unity of the labor process and the valorization process, two distinct yet reciprocally-conditioning registers of social determination, within which the functions of human labor independent of historical time operate within the determinate constraints of social necessity as articulated in and through labor-time, in accordance with the value form of social mediation between commodity producers. The capitalist form of the production process as a unity of the processes of labor and valorization then led us to the specific forms of the elements of the labor process as functions of capital in the concepts of constant and variable capital, designations corresponding to the role these specific elements of the labor process play in the movement of value-in-process that is the valorizing activity that produces capital.
Through this analysis thus far, we have continually come to the practical determination of the twofold character of labor as abstract and concrete in relation to these functions of capital’s formation, and through this the historical specificity of the commodity labor-power as the practical form of appearance of the twofold results of labor that derive from its dual character, the logic of separation that produces a divided world.1 We have seen that the sale and purchase of labor-power is the more precise category within which the social form of abstract labor is animated as social substance, the phantom-like objectivity of value that results from a form of social production wherein the precondition of the worker’s self-alienation from means of production and subsistence is incorporated into the metabolism of capitalist sociality. The impersonal constraints of labor’s development of productivity within the determinant of socially necessary labor-time is the result of the arrangement of the capitalist form of social production as the production of commodities, wherein private appropriation mediates social labor. This form of labor’s exploitation results in and is produced by a temporal dynamic of value’s social constitution within which the practical form of abstract labor’s social substantialization is achieved in and as the production and reproduction of the commodity labor-power. These serve as the temporally and historically-situated components of capitalist social relations of production, giving rise to the particular form of class society that is capitalist sociality and from which develop the social form of wealth in the pure value form of money that is constituted by a universalized exploitation that is simultaneously obscured by the fetishism that results from the practical structuration of these formal determinants.
The approach towards moving with Marx’s method of de-fetishization is conducted here through attention to the role of historical time in Capital, an interwoven dialectic of the historical and transhistorical that appears throughout the text, as a means of identifying the practical continuities of human labor and the social reproduction of material life that are preserved and transformed within their subsumption to the form of capitalist social relations. What is hoped to be achieved through this vantage point of history is the import attributed to it by Marx, through which the historical-situation of the critique of political economy contra the eternalization of capital by political economy reveals the ultimate historical transience of the capitalist mode of production. At the heart of this historical critique is the social constitution of the form of social labor as abstract labor and its instrumentalized exploitation as the commodity labor-power, a product not of nature but of history and social practice. In the movements of Capital, we follow from the beginning the immediate appearance of capitalist social relations and the form of the commodity through a successive development of de-fetishization that comes to reveal the form of exploitation, its constitutive social antagonisms in the personifications of capital that perform and condition its imperatives, and the methods of its development in the construction of time as surplus-value’s production in the processes of social production that reproduce the form of capital.
What is then distinct to the historical operation of the development of the capitalist mode of production is its particular mode of reproduction, as given in the process of the accumulation of capital. Simple reproduction (i.e. reproduction without/prior to accumulation) is indeed analyzed by Marx, but for the capitalist form, within which the “production of surplus-value, or the making of profits, is the absolute law of this mode of production”, simple reproduction cannot be relied upon as a basis for determining the precise contours of capital’s practical operation, and we must instead study accumulation as its form of expanded reproduction.2 Crucial to understanding the accumulation process as the continual formation of capital in its successive reconstitutions in the production and re-capitalization of surplus-value is the composition of capital, as Marx begins the chapter thus:
“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 variable 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.”3
Within the determination of the organic composition of capital, we have here a recapitulation of the operative dialectic of social form and material content (perhaps even an interpenetration of material form and its social content) that we have emphasized in the examination of the labor and valorization processes as the moving preconditions for the determination of constant and variable capital, as these concepts play important roles in determining the organic composition of capital. The twofold character of a given capital’s composition rests on both abstract-social terms in its constitution of a proportion of value relations expressed in a monetary representation of quantity (value composition) and in concrete-material terms as the proportion of definite masses of elements of the labor process in relation to each other (technical composition). Where these form a unity of these distinct aspects of a capital, as determinate of the form of capital, is in so far as they are expressed in a value composition that is determined by and reflects the movement of its technical composition, thus a given operative correspondence between the social relations of the form of value and the material constituents of the production process.
We have in this conceptual dynamic an understanding of the necessity by which the social determinations of the value form of capital require a concrete expression through the social organization of material production, within which the elements of the labor process function as a valorization process, thus as constant and variable capital. That the technical and value compositions of capital can be apprehended as independent dimensions of a capital in the process of production is a reproduction of the antinomy of the labor process and valorization process, resolved in the determination of the form of capital. Here, their resolution lies in their definite relation to each other in a direction that is organic to the progression of capital’s development as the continual re-instantiation of its objective conditions of existence. Essential to this is the continual reproduction of social labor in the form of abstract labor through the commodity labor-power. Thus, we can already follow the coming unfolding of the accumulation of capital as a social engine of dispossession and exploitation, and the movements of capital in the course of accumulation as those relations that guarantee the formal coherence of this engine as the determinate coordinates of dominating social conditions of existence to the objectivity of the capital-relation’s expanded reproduction. We will now follow these movements according to the structure of the chapter in which Marx presents them, in doing so paying attention to the formal determinations of capital’s organic composition and the relation to accumulation.
“A Growing Demand For Labour-Power Accompanies Accumulation if the Composition of Capital Remains the Same”
As stated, the objective of the first section involves a constant organic composition of capital, thus a fixed ratio between its value relations and technical components that does not preclude their movement, that places the determination on accumulation’s procedure on the operation of labor-power deployed in the production process. Beginning this section, Marx makes a remark regarding the scale of the organic composition of capital as we are to understand it in this analysis. He says:
“The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch of production have compositions which differ from each other to a greater or lesser extent. The average of their individual compositions gives us the composition of the total capital in the branch of production under consideration. Finally, the average of all the average compositions in all branches of production gives us the composition of the total social capital of a country, and it is with this alone that we are concerned here in the final analysis.”4
We are then dealing with an analysis of the deployment of labor-power on the terrain of an organic composition at the level of the total social capital. This aggregate of capitals and the possibility of such an operative abstraction’s intelligibility to us allows Marx here to describe these movements as possible methods of accumulation given prevailing conditions in the composition of capital on the scale of a social formation. The level of abstraction adhered to in this analysis allows Marx to trace a dynamic at the outset by which the identity of the accumulation of capital with the “multiplication of the proletariat” can be made.5
Where the relations determinant of capital’s organic composition are established as a control, we begin with a movement of accumulation purely on the backs of labor-power. “If we assume that, while all other circumstances remain the same, the composition of capital also remains constant (i.e. a definite mass of the means of production continues to need the same mass of labour-power to set it in motion), then the demand for labour, and the fund for the subsistence of the workers, both clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and with the same rapidity.”6 What comes of this first movement is that the imperative for accumulation is first placed upon the laborers employed within a fixed composition of capital, as the requirements of successful accumulation “may exceed the growth in labour-power or in the number of workers; the demand for workers may outstrip the supply, and thus wages may rise.”7 The focus of this initial section comes into focus as taking this initial movement of accumulation to demarcate a limit of both the foothold that the wage-laborers of the total social capital may secure for themselves, and of the formation of capital in this passage of accumulation as the movement of its reproduction. “The more or less favourable circumstances in which the wage-labourers support and multiply themselves in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist production.”8 Thus, in establishing this initial movement of accumulation, wherein the growth of surplus-value falls upon a capital of constant composition, the preservation of the capital-relation is established in and through the movement of the laboring classes’ reproduction in this form, a movement within which a definite formal limit conceals the gains of a temporarily heightened demand for labor-power in that which will come to undermine such an advance:
“As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e.: the presence of capitalists on the one side, and wage-labourers on the other side, so reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. accumulation, 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.”9
This forms the basis for a foray into the “insights” of the classical political economists that “grasped this fact so thoroughly” that they “inaccurately identified accumulation with the consumption, by productive workers, of the whole of the capitalized part of the surplus product, or with the transformation of the surplus product into additional wage-labourers.”10 What Marx distinguishes in the subsequent passages culled from the works of Bellers, de Mandeville, and F.M. Eden is that it is not the expansion of capital in the form of a surplus product that makes necessary the growth of a laboring poor, but that this expansion of a pool of potential labor-power is the foundation of possibility for capital itself. “What Mandeville, an honest man with a clear mind, had not yet grasped was the fact that the mechanism of the accumulation process itself not only increases the amount of capital but also the mass of the 'labouring poor', i.e. the wage-labourers, who turn their labour-power into a force for increasing the valorization of the growing capital, and who are thereby compelled to make their relation of dependence on their own product, as personified in the capitalist, into an eternal relation.”11 The conditions of accumulation here, those that are the most favorable to the workers of a capital, start from an initial moment of intensive exploitation upon the immediate labor-power, yet this maneuvers necessarily into an extensive dependence as the growth of capital requires that “the sphere of capital’s exploitation and domination [...] extends with its own dimensions and the number of people subjected to it.”12
The initial strength of the position of labor to capital here results in a moment of accumulation, within which only the “length and weight of the golden chain the wage-labourer has already forged for himself allow it to be loosened somewhat”, andwhere even “at the best of times an increase in wages means only a quantitative reduction in the amount of unpaid labour the worker has to supply”, for this relation of exploitation remains intrinsic to the capitalist form of the production process and the full scope of mediating labor’s relation to production as its subordination to the valorization of capital.13 This specific constraint then implies definite movements of accumulation that can accommodate this potential reduction of surplus labor-time as mediated in and by the wage-form, absent the direct conflicts and struggles by which the very limits of the form itself could be contested. Marx tells us that the price of labor may either continue to rise, as in the instance it does not interfere with the progress of accumulation, and as such a reduction in the quantity of unpaid labor can be accommodated, or that accumulation slows as a result. Yet the latter possibility means that “the primary cause of that lessening itself vanishes, i.e. the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour-power. The mechanism of the capitalist production process removes the very obstacles it temporarily creates. The price of labour falls again to a level corresponding with capital's requirements for self-valorization, whether this level is below, the same as, or above that which was normal before the rise of wages took place.”14
In the first case then, it is the growth of capital that makes the available labor-power for exploitation insufficient, in the second the reduction of capital that made the available labor-power excessive to the needs of accumulation. There is the appearance of determination in the independent movement of labor-power. However, this promotes a further maneuver in this de-fetishization of capital’s process of accumulation that has taken us from the immediacy of the priority of capital as a pure object fetishized as surplus product to its conditions of existence in the availability of the commodity labor-power. This is the potentiality of labor-power’s exploitation as the condition for the command of surplus labor-time enclosed in valorization’s form of social necessity, expressed as unpaid labor that simultaneously cannot be paid. “The law of capitalist production which really lies at the basis of the supposed 'natural law of population' can be reduced simply to this: the relation between capital, accumulation and the rate of wages is nothing other than the relation between the unpaid labour which has been transformed into capital and the additional paid labour necessary to set in motion this additional capital.”15 Marx tells us that the capital-relation is not one between mutually independent magnitudes of capital and labor in various expressions, but, “at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the same working population.”16
Thus with a given organic composition of capital, wherein the determinate movement of accumulation occurs within the demand for labor-power, for capital to accumulate a definite limit is asserted in the capitalist form of the production process wherein its preservation is not reliant upon a specific rate of wages, but the preservation of that relation in which exploitation is not diminished to such an extent as to render the system inoperable. Therefore, accumulation is not solely reliant upon an inflexible wage-relation, but the flexibility of a broader complex of relations in and through which the capital-relation may expand on an increasing scale. “It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing values for valorization, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker's own need for development. Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”17
In this specific movement of accumulation, Marx has taken us from a given fixed organic composition of capital on the scale of the abstraction of total social capital, to the intensive exploitation of available labor-power that this brings through the increased demand for labor-power. That the organic composition is fixed means that in turn the growth of constant capital in relation to variable can develop and keep pace with that of variable capital, but this is a dynamic of the consideration within which the technical composition remains constant, and the variable component of the value composition is altered. As the strengthened position of labor in this situation asserts itself, the constraints of the capitalist form in turn becomes rigid and asserts only an accommodation of reducing the share of surplus or unpaid labor within definite limits. Given the motive force of surplus-value as an objective and formal requirement of the continuity of the capitalist production process, this relation remains untenable without general expansion and displacement of that which is absorbed, and the proletariat must multiply. Within the organic composition of capital, constant and variable capital start to form internally-constituted determinations of the positions of class struggle over the terms of exploitation, wherein the placing of the impetus of growth on the subjective component of living labor cannot guarantee uncontested accumulation. The process of capitalist accumulation and the movements of capital’s organic composition then lead to reveal another level of dynamism in the means of expanding the capital-relation and its functions.
“A Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Occurs in the Course of the Further Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration Accompanying It”
From the revelation of the process of capital accumulation as one in which the determinate relation of expanded reproduction lies in the capital-relation, as the identical form of the commodity labor-power in the mode of surplus labor’s extraction and exploitation from the collective wage-laborer, the focus of the next movement of accumulation rests upon this relation of paid to unpaid labor as necessary to surplus labor-time. As we have already determined that rising wages are only a product of accumulation proceeding within definite constraints, the process goes beyond this expression. “Given the general basis of the capitalist system, a point is reached in the course of accumulation at which the development of the productivity of social labour becomes the most powerful lever of accumulation.”18 The means of cultivating this availability of surplus labor-time both in the social-material constitution of the production process and as labor-power on the market becomes the focus of this development of the productivity of social labor.
The development of the productivity of social labor in its capitalist forms carries with it key points of understanding the concrete operation of Marx’s theory of fetishism as a critique of both political economy and capitalist sociality. Understanding labor productivity as a concept in its abstract and simple movement, Marx tells us that “the level of the social productivity of labour is expressed in the relative extent of the means of production that one worker, during a given time, with the same degree of intensity of labour-power, turns into products. The mass of means of production with which he functions in this way increases with the productivity of his labour.”19 The means of production in this instance play a dual role, where their relative increase in relation to the labor worked can be in the form as either consequence or condition of increased productivity. As examples, we are given the division of labor under manufacturing production and the application of machinery as consequences of the increased productivity of labor. Conversely, the growing addition of a mass of machinery, raw materials, the concentration of such in a more robust infrastructure of production can serve as a condition for the increased productivity of labor. “But whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the labour power incorporated into them, is an expression of the growing productivity of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour process as compared with the objective factor.”20
These transformations of the technical composition of capital as the growth in the means of production at the expense of living labor, in service of increasing the productivity of labor, is reflected in value composition as an increase in constant capital over variable. As we have learned from the movement of value-in-process through its forms of constant and variable capital, this development of productivity has important consequences for both the growth of the commodity product of the production process and the formation of its price in competition with other producers on the market. As Marx tells us of this growth in constant capital relative to variable:
“This law of the progressive growth of the constant part of capital in comparison with the variable part is confirmed at every step (as already shown) by the comparative analysis of the prices of commodities, whether we compare different economic epochs or different nations in the same epoch. The relative magnitude of the part of the price which represents the value of the means of production, or the constant part of the capital, is in direct proportion to the progress of accumulation, whereas the relative magnitude of the other part of the price, which represents the variable part of the capital, or the payment made for labour, is in inverse proportion to the progress of accumulation.”21
While it may be accommodated, the growth of the variable constituent of capital is more directly antagonistic to the progress of accumulation. The productivity of labor then is, within the capitalist form, flexible within value relations as the continual flexibility of labor’s exploitation, and favors a form of materially-resistant infrastructure to the social necessities of the subjectivity of labor subsumed within it. Here we can ascertain a hint of the expanded reproduction of capital’s means of domination in the technological development of means of production operated by living labor as a guarantor of continual exploitation. Within value relations, the relative proportions between constant and variable capital can change while also maintaining a greater material mass of productive infrastructure.
Illustrating this strange process of non-linear growth as given by the movements of value relations, Marx compares the greater rate of growth in the material-technical mass of means of production involved in spinning labor compared to the relatively more measured growth in its constant capital as value expression relative to variable capital. Of this quandary, Marx tells us that “[t]he reason is simple: with the increasing productivity of labour, the mass of the means of production consumed by labour increases, but their value in comparison with their mass diminishes. Their value therefore rises absolutely, but not in proportion to the increase in their mass. The increase of the difference between constant and variable capital is therefore much less than that of the difference between the mass of the means of production into which the constant capital, and the mass of the labour-power into which the variable capital, is converted. The former difference increases with the latter, but in a smaller degree.”22 The relative magnitudes between constant and variable capital may vary, but this does not preclude absolute increases, nor does this necessarily correspond in an identical relation of increase to their material-technical forms. Again, we are brought to a more dynamic interpretation of the organic composition of capital as the correspondence between value relations in their viable subsumption of material content, and the organization of material production in correspondence with the social form of surplus-value’s production and valorization.
But this organic composition of capital as the formation of capital in the course of accumulation makes definite movements in the development of the material production process in its relation to the living labor that is to work its means. This leads us to the direction of accumulation’s movements as it pertains to the organization of constant capital between individual capitals in their context as total social capital. These movements are named by Marx as concentration and centralization, two closely related but distinct operations in the accumulation process. Important to their determination is the historical basis of accumulation, only to be elaborated in full by Marx in the final part of Capital though mentioned here as we near it:
“Where the basis is the production of commodities, large-scale production can occur only in a capitalist form. A certain accumulation of capital in the hands of individual producers therefore forms the necessary pre-condition for a specifically capitalist mode of production. We had therefore to presuppose this when dealing with the transition from handicrafts to capitalist industry. It may be called primitive accumulation, because it is the historical basis, instead of the historical result, of specifically capitalist production. How it itself originates we need not investigate as yet. It is enough that it forms the starting-point. But all methods for raising the social productivity of labour that grow up on this basis are at the same time methods for the increased production of surplus-value or surplus product, which is in its turn the formative element of accumulation. They are, therefore, also methods for the production of capital by capital, or methods for its accelerated accumulation. The continual re-conversion of surplus-value into capital now appears in the shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters into the production process. This is in turn the basis of an extended scale of production, of the methods for raising the productivity of labour that accompany it, and of an accelerated production of surplus-value. If, therefore, a certain degree of accumulation of capital appears as a pre-condition for the specifically capitalist mode of production, the latter reacts back to cause an accelerated accumulation of capital. With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the specifically capitalist mode of production develops, and, with the capitalist mode of production, the accumulation of capital. These two economic factors bring about, in the compound ratio of the impulses they give to each other, that change in the technical composition of capital by which the variable component becomes smaller and smaller as compared with the constant component.”23
This historical movement is that in which capital’s originary formation by expropriation gives birth to the movements by which accumulation takes shape, the basis for its internally constitutive practical logic of surplus-value’s production by way of the extraction of surplus labor. This movement is that which in turn conditions the determination of capital’s organic composition as the growth of constant capital at the expense of variable capital as a value expression of the social-material composition of the production process as the technical means of reproducing value relations of exploitation. This growth of social labor’s productivity in the more accelerated development of means of production, as an application of the technical and scientific knowledge of society to the objectification of determinate social relations, occurs across every individual capital in the complex of sites of commodity production that comprise the totality of social capital’s operation.
The historical development of relations between means of production and labor as functions of constant and variable capital in the movement of a capital’s development constitutes the concentration of capital under the command of a capitalist. “Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation. With the increasing mass of wealth which functions as capital, accumulation increases the concentration of that wealth in the hands of individual capitalists, and thereby widens the basis of production on a large scale and extends the specifically capitalist methods of production.”24 Social capital’s growth is formed of and through this froth of individual capitals. Where the concentration of means of production is the movement of constant capital’s primacy in the determinate direction of accumulation’s process, the cellular form of the capital-relation takes shape in the form of labor productivity as an accelerating and intensified self-alienating objectification, and thus command over the workforce through the infrastructure of production. From this tumultuous movement forms the basis of both intensifying domination and exploitation of the workforce, as well as the dynamic of competition between capitals as the intercourse of social production. Marx develops this movement through the observation of the limits it makes apparent in operation:
“Two features characterize this kind of concentration, which grows directly out of accumulation, or rather is identical with it. Firstly: the increasing concentration of the social means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is, other things remaining equal, limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Secondly: the part of the social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided among many capitalists who confront each other as mutually independent and competitive commodity-producers. Therefore not only are accumulation and the concentration accompanying it scattered over many points, but the increase of each functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new capitals and the subdivision of old. Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over labour; and on the other hand as repulsion of many individual capitals from one another.”25
Following this, the movement from the cellular level of accumulation in the concentration that occurs within individual capitals and is intensified through the intercourse of competition that repels them gives birth to centralization as a lever of capital accumulation. Centralization is initiated as the “fragmentation of the total social capital into many individual capitals, or the repulsion of its fractions from each other, is counteracted by their attraction”, and the “destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals” constitutes this aspect of their consolidation.26 As the “battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities”, this aspect of commodity price formation depends on the productivity of the labor consumed in the course of their production, and this is in turn conditioned by the scale of production.27 The ongoing intercourse of capitalist producers as the mutually-conditioned reciprocal expropriation of capital by capital places ever-greater consolidations in the hands of ever-shrinking consortiums of capitalists. This gives birth to distinct modes of centralization, as Marx gives the examples here of the credit system and competition. From the first three German editions of Capital, Marx’s original formulation of the credit system and its administration of capital in money form follows as such:
“Not only is this itself a new and mighty weapon in the battle of competition. By unseen threads it also draws the disposable money, scattered in larger or smaller masses over the surface of society, into the hands of individual or associated capitalists. It is the specific machine for the centralization of capitals. The centralization of capitals, or the process of their attraction, becomes more intense in proportion as the specifically capitalist mode of production develops along with accumulation. In its turn, centralization becomes one of the greatest levers of this development. It shortens and quickens the transformation of separate processes of production into processes socially combined and carried out on a large scale. The increasing bulk of individual masses of capital becomes the material basis of an uninterrupted revolution in the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production continually conquers branches of industry not yet wholly, or only sporadically or formally, subjugated by it. At the same time there grow up on its soil new branches of industry, which could not exist without it Finally, in the branches of industry already carried on upon the capitalist basis, the productivity of labour is made to ripen as in a hothouse. In all these cases, the number of workers falls in proportion to the mass of the means of production worked up by them. An ever increasing part of the capital is turned into means of production, an ever decreasing part into labour-power. The degree to which the means of production are means of employment for the workers lessens progressively as those means become more extensive, more concentrated, and technically more efficient. A steam plough is an incomparably more efficient means of production than an ordinary plough, but the capital-value laid out in it is an incomparably smaller means for employing men than if it were laid out in ordinary ploughs. At first, it is the mere adding of new capital to old which allows the objective conditions of the process of production to be extended and undergo technical transformations. But soon these changes of composition, and technical transformations, get a more or less complete grip on all the old capital that has reached the term of its period of reproduction and therefore has to be replaced. This metamorphosis of old capital is independent, to a certain extent, of the absolute growth of social capital, in the same way as is its centralization. But this centralization, which only redistributes the social capital already to hand, and melts a number of old capitals into one, works in its turn as a powerful agent in the metamorphosis of old capital.”28
Thus we see that the function of the credit system in this instance as a centralizing force that forms a lever for the accumulation process is its quality of socially combining production processes in such a manner as to guarantee an expansion of their scale of operation, transforming the materiality of production in an expression of capital’s organization of instrumentalizing social labor’s self-alienating subjectivity. Efficiency is a social end to the dictums of capital accumulation and the capacity to ensure the form of relations within which surplus-value is produced and realized. This procedure of centralization, however, is a moment of the broader process of accumulation that determines its limits and contours of action, where only “quantitative groupings” of the parts of social capital are consolidated, within which centralization “intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation” and “extends and speeds up those revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus diminishing the relative demand for labour.’’29
Centralization is then a movement that is itself not dependent upon any positive growth in the direct magnitude of the total social capital, but another means by which it increases its scale of operation through evolving methods of coordinating the command of surplus labor. Concentration is differentiated as the model direction in the movement of accumulation of any given capital as its expanded reproduction. The movement of attraction and repulsion between capitals that characterizes this interrelation of concentration and centralization as moments in the accumulation process is an expression on the level of total social capital, as the abstracted aggregate of many individual capitals, of the characteristic movement of capitalist accumulation as the expanded reproduction of the capital-relation. “On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of further accumulation attracts fewer and fewer workers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand, the old capital periodically reproduced with a new composition repels more and more of the workers formerly employed by it.”30
“The Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus Population or Industrial Reserve Army”
The dynamic interrelation of technical and value compositions of capital that produces a capital’s organic composition have so far been demonstrated to constitute and continually instantiate the formation of capital, in and through its process of accumulation, as the expanded reproduction of the capital-relation. The organic composition of capital is a determinate direction of the progress of accumulation’s movements such that the productivity of labor within the complex of capital’s value relations continually induces the exploitation of labor as the commodity labor-power to the formal requirements of an always given command of surplus labor. The mode of concentration that is the “rising” movement of an organic composition of capital in the growth of its constant component at the expense of its variable constituent is the adequate direction of capital accumulation that guarantees the reproduction of the capital-relation and thus the conditions for the continuity of the capitalist form of the production process. The materiality of the production process is constituted as capital through the specific social organization of its relations, and its sociality is in turn materialized in the specific manner in which labor is objectified in a form of self-alienating productive activity.
This point of arrival in the chapter leads us to these next two sections, within which the de-fetishization of capital’s accumulation as a mere quantitative expression has given way to “a progressive qualitative change in its composition”, where “[i]t is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of the total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of workers, or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already performing their functions. This increasing accumulation and centralization also becomes in its turn a source of new changes in the composition of capital, or in other words of an accelerated diminution of the capital's variable component, as compared with its constant one.”31 Yet this diminution of the proportion of variable capital is not identical to the quantity of laborers themselves, but an expression of the share of capital allocated that their exploitation occupies as the element generative of surplus-value. This growth of the absolute size of the workforce occurs more rapidly than that of the variable capital of a given composition. The accelerating relative diminution of variable capital given by the movements of concentration and centralization, these levers of accumulation, produces an increase in the working population, at the same time as it expels more of them from the production process. Thus capitalist accumulation “constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital's average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.”32
This relative surplus population, as will be seen below, is for Marx the characteristic result and condition of the capitalist accumulation process, the actuality of the expanded reproduction of the capital-relation and the continual precondition of a valorization process that substantializes surplus labor-time. For now, the specific function of this tendency of redundancy in the working population as a lever of accumulation is examined. This section of the chapter takes this law of population against the various theories of the political economists that naturalize such as a universal law of population, and thus what becomes central to understanding the specific law of capital’s generation of a surplus population is the function it serves in relation to this historical form of social production. In the summary movement of all of the previously examined movements that are distinct aspects of the accumulation process of capital and the determinate dynamic of its organic composition, this production of a surplus population is given as the result of the form of the production process and the value relations that constitute it. “The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.”33
What then must be accounted for is the question of to what end does this special law of population that is determined in and by the development of social wealth on a capitalist basis serve in the accumulation process? The excess itself is only generative if such superfluity acts as a lever of accumulation in a distinct manner. That function is fulfilled as it “forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.”34 This “mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements” serves as the necessary accompaniment to the movements of concentration and centralization in the swelling dimensions of the material-technical conditions of the production process, as this expansion of the branches of production and markets into new nodes of the totality of capitalist social production requires “the possibility of suddenly throwing great masses of men into the decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production in other spheres. The surplus population supplies these masses.”35 The logic of separation that is the basis for the mediation of labor to production, in the alienating form of the sale and purchase of labor-power, comes also to determine this disjunctive movement in accumulation between the separate and disparate expansions and subsequent combinations of the material-technical requirements of the production process in the appearance of an ever greater mass of these means against a pool of growingly redundant social labor that only works this apparatus in so far as its waged subsistence is manageable in a given relation of variable capital as a function of the capitalist production process.
Marx attributes to this arrhythmia of accumulation’s procedure the peculiar movement of capital’s characteristic “cyclical path of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of human history”, where the “expansion by fits and starts of the scale of production is the precondition for its equally sudden contraction”.36 What has come to be understood in the fetishized parlance of industry as “the business cycle” or the “boom and bust” movement of crises endemic to the historical development of capitalist economies can be apprehended as a moment of the accumulation process, not as an always foreseen and planned element, but as one in which determinate levers of accumulation present their viability in the concrete movement of capital’s complex of determinations in motion. The constant availability of a supply of “disposable human material” is the result of that characteristic mode by which parts of the working class are “set free” from production, made ever more casual to the exploitation they must sell themselves to in order to survive.37 “Modern industry's whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed 'hands'.” Where political economy attributes this movement to the superficial instruments of credit and other mechanisms that operate on the administrative terrain of capital’s distant proprietors, Marx makes clear that this is a mere confusion of effect for cause, where the determination of such violent fluctuations and their endemic presence to capitalist production is given by the prior determinations of labor’s exploitation in the forms constitutive of the valorization process’ reproduction as accumulation. “Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it has been flung into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction.”38
The doctrines of Malthus and Merivale that follow show political economy’s relative consciousness of the formation of a relative surplus population’s necessity to capitalist industry, but as the exposition of thought which merely naturalizes and extends as a general law of human history this burden, flattening history into an eternity absent a qualitative dimension. This very naturalization of the social necessity of capitalist forms of wealth is conducted as the theoretical articulation of that practice by which capital aims to act beyond the limits of the material world it is constantly transforming to its ends. “Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour-power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits.” This social malleability of labor’s abstract-social form as labor-power that is a purchased expenditure of a time both of and beyond its requirements for reproduction conditions that element of labor’s form of productivity that “enables the capitalist, with the same outlay of variable capital, to set in motion more labour by greater exploitation (extensive or intensive) of each individual labour-power.” Thus we have a flexible capacity to act on and in time, as the relative surplus population as industrial reserve army allows for an instance where on the one hand “a larger variable capital sets more labour in motion without enlisting more workers” can be accommodated in the progress of accumulation, while on the other “a variable capital of the same magnitude sets in motion more labour with the same mass of labour-power”, all while skilled labor-powers are successively disembedded from the process of production.39
Through this relation of mediations between the size of the workforce deployed to industry and that in excess to its needs, the function of this labor as labor-power and thus variable capital of varying quantities, we come to see the particular manner in which the production of a relative surplus population exists as both condition and consequence of the command of surplus labor in the pressure it exerts on the so-called demand for labor-power as its supply exceeds it, and thus the formation of constraints that produce the wage-form as surplus labor’s vehicle. Marx sets his sights on this notion of a law of supply and demand that applies to labor-power, and instead draws from this dynamic of the accumulation process a temporal exploitation where “the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other part, and vice versa, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists, and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the progress of social accumulation.”40 This process through which the increase of capital is not accompanied by an increase in the general demand for labor is part and parcel of the peculiar movement of capital, its capacity to act “on both sides at once”, where the displacement of labor’s relative position and that intensification of the capitalist’s desired concentration are not independent, but simultaneous movements of the social form of capital-relation in its social-material metabolism.41 Even the apparently discarded labor serves a potential function, its immiseration a strategy of accumulation’s progress in practice, as the social combination of intensive overwork against extensive idleness materializes the logic of surplus-value. This simultaneous movement of relative surplus population and industrial reserve army and its ultimate functions are succinctly stated here, where Marx in turn exposes political economy to its procedure of the fetishization of capital’s movements into alien laws, and thus revealing its role as ideological entrenchment in the ongoing class struggle of this social process:
“The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active army of workers; during the periods of over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions. The relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work. It confines the field of action of this law to the limits absolutely convenient to capital's drive to exploit and dominate the workers.”42
“Different Forms of Existence of the Relative Surplus Population. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”
This final section that we will concern ourselves with, for the time being, brings together all previous movements of the accumulation process into the formation of Marx’s general law. This culmination precedes the further historical illustrations of the general law in actuality, but this aspect of the chapter and other such materials will be dealt with in future writings. For now, we will conclude here at the summit of accumulation, where the general law of capitalist accumulation comes to be a direct succession of the movement’s of capital’s expanded reproduction in its social and material existence, laying asunder the notions of political economy to which this is a matter of mere quantitative additions and extensions of alien forms. The continuation of the relative surplus population into its various forms of existence leads us to the conclusion of capitalist accumulation’s dual movements of amassing greater social wealth alongside and through the intensifying expansion of social misery.
Marx identifies three forms of this relative surplus population that lead into the formulation of the general law. These are the “floating, the latent, and the stagnant” forms of the relative surplus population, all forming various removes from the capacity to act as an industrial reserve army and the relegation of these masses of the working class into a pauperized condition immanent to the proletarianization that produces the commodity labor-power. A summary of these forms can be given here briefly. Where “the workers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses, so that the number of those employed increases on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the scale of production”, the relative surplus population exists in a floating form.43
This movement undergirds a living contradiction of capital, where “the natural increase of the number of workers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet, at the same time, exceeds those requirements”, where the simultaneous shortage of hands can be complained of while at the same time many more still exist outside of work, because “the division of labour chains them to a particular branch of industry.” This movement then comes to characterize the next form of relative surplus population, the latent, where its existence is not readily apparent, but “the extent of which only becomes evident at those exceptional times when its distribution channels are wide open.” Marx deploys the example of capital’s industrial transitions from agriculture to urban consolidations in manufacturing, as the concentration attending capital’s accumulation in agricultural production generates the very same dynamic in which “the demand for a rural working population falls absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital employed in agriculture advances, without this repulsion being compensated for by a greater attraction of workers,” and a portion of this agricultural population “is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on the lookout for opportunities to complete this transformation.”44 The latent surplus population exists in and through the spatial transfers of capital’s concentrations in the social accumulation at the scale of total social capital.
This then leads Marx to his final form of existence, the stagnant relative surplus population, which “forms a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it offers capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class, and it is precisely this which makes it a broad foundation for special branches of capitalist exploitation.” Its life is that of a “maximum of working time and a minimum of wages”, forming “at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements.” This reveals the “sphere of pauperism” that Marx defines as “the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population”, the absolute condition of that pool of social surplus labor that exists in the interregnums of poverty’s hellish conditions while also existing as the always available industrial reserve army to be absorbed and deployed in exploitation as capital deems fit. “Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity is implied by their necessity; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth.”45 Thus, following this exposition and its synthesis with all movements of accumulation as studied above, Marx gives us his formulation for the general law of capitalist accumulation:
“The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.”46
The general law of capitalist accumulation then summarizes the full movement of the process of capital’s production as the basis for the form of social production. The unity of the labor process as valorization process, the dynamic constitution of its reproduction through the movement of value-in-process as capital through its social-material expressions of function as constant and variable factors of the production process of surplus-value, and the determinate direction in the accumulation process of capital’s organic composition produce this law of capital’s movement as the social metabolic order of material life. It is here that Marx fully articulates the movements of total social capital, and conducts the de-fetishization of political economy’s ideal construction of capital as absolute. “On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labour, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital.”47 Thus in the very same movement, capital also undermines its own conditions of existence, establishing a self-imposed limit that it will once more seek to transcend while preserving its form and subordination of social labor as the command of all once and future labor.
Marx’s reference back to Part IV of Capital, on the production of relative surplus-value, is conducted to again hammer in the “antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation” as the necessary appearance of the expanded reproduction of this historical form of the social production process where “all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker”.48 The full elaboration is worth quoting here at length:
“[A]ll means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate [entfremden] from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”49
Following this, Marx subjects the words of the political economists themselves to the relative degree of cognizance they show of this antagonism, and the means by which they cannot distinguish the conditions of their own existence and that of their peculiar science from any pre-capitalist modes of production that came before. The antagonism for them is eternal, for it must be for capital. The object of this extensive formulation of the movements of capital’s accumulation process, revealed to be the expanded reproduction of the capital-relation, and operating through such levers as concentration, centralization, and social immiseration, has been to demonstrate the historical tendencies of development and social consequence specific to the capitalist form of the production process. This mode of production’s formation in an organic composition is such that capital’s continual formation relies upon just such a determinate dynamic of development, and the continual subordination of social and material life’s economic movement to this direction. The antagonism appears here on an abstracted level of the impersonal movement of social and historically constituted laws, but it is importantly not where Marx concludes Capital. The necessary foundation through which the appearance of class antagonism as constitutive of capitalist social relations of production in process, the logic of their formal coherence in historical action and development, have been established. Their historical origins have already been hinted at here as determinate of their continual development, the progressive construction of this form that produces this determinate endpoint of capital’s reproduction.
We will then begin to establish this consideration of historical struggles in line with, while also going outside, of Marx, following an effort at synthesis to initiate the transition in next week’s post.
“A division between the product of labour and labour itself, between the objective conditions of labour and subjective labour-power, was therefore the real foundation and the starting-point of the process of capitalist production.” Marx, Capital Volume I (1976) p. 716
Ibid, p. 769. All subsequent citations are from Marx, Capital Volume I (1976)
p. 762, emphasis added
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