Capital Vol.1
Part 3
Chapter 7
The Labor-Process and the
Process of Producing Surplus-Value
(Summary)
Ish Mishra
“The change of value that occurs in the case of
money intended to be converted into capital, cannot take place in the money
itself, since in its function of means of purchase and of payment, it does no
more than realize the price of the commodity it buys or pays for; and, as hard
cash, it is value petrified, never varying.
……..”[i] (Ch 6) Therefore to add
value to it something else is needed, the labor power or the capacity to labor,
as a commodity, though a qualitatively different, not produced in the capitalist
production process, available for sale in the market that is called
objectification or commoditization of labor (chapter 6)[ii]. The
interaction between the 2 commodities, inanimate (land, machines, raw material
etc) and the animate (the labor power), bought by the capitalist, is called the
labor process that adds value to the commodity to change the M-C-M circuit into
M-C-(The labor process) -C’-M’. (M’>M and M’-M =surplus value). Chapter 7[iii]
vividly explains the intricacies of the expending of the labor power that
effectively is labor itself and uncovers the contradiction between necessary
and surplus labor corresponding to the dual character of the commodity—the use
value and the exchange value and appropriation of the surplus value (the
product of the surplus labor) by the capitalist.
The prelude:
Beginning
with the dual character of the commodity in terms of its use value and the
exchange value or simply the value and its definition (Ch 1)[iv] in the
simple exchange of commodities (Ch 2)[v] the Part 1 of the volume concludes
with the explanation of the emergence of money as the “universal measure of
value …. that by necessity must be assumed by that measure of value, which is
immanently innate in commodities, labor-time”[vi], on the one hand; and as the
medium of the circulation of commodities”, C-M-C, on the other. (Chapter3)[vii]. With the beginning of
“the modern history of capital” dating
back from “the creation in the 16th century of a world embracing
commerce and a world embracing market.”[viii], the circulation
circuit is inverted, leading to the transformation in the character of the
circulation and of the money that becomes an end from the means. Part 2 of the volume
begins with the analysis of this new transformation of money into capital with
the inversion of the circulation circuit from C-M-C into M-C-M. The end points
in simple circulation of commodities are C-C, selling for buying whereas in the
inverted circuit of the circulation, the end points are M-M, buying to sell.
This inversion inaugurates a new paradigm of analysis in Political Economy. (CI,
Ch4)[ix]. Chapter 5[x], Contradictions in the General Formula of the Capital explains the
contradiction between use value and the exchange value and generation of the
surplus value, i.e. the expansion of the value advanced in the form of money,
the merchant’s capital that paved the way for the development of the industrial
capital. The Adam Smiths – the bourgeois political economists – unable to
explain the generation of surplus in the exchange of equivalents conceal under
the mysterious jargon “the invisible hands of the market”. “The conversion of
the money into capital has to be explained on the basis of the laws that
regulate the exchange of commodities in such a way that the starting point is
the exchange of equivalents”[xi]. Adam Smiths do not
explain, probably in the ‘collective’ interest of the “Wealth of Nation”, the
mystery of the profit making ‘universal individual’, “only an embryo capitalist
must buy his commodities at their value, must sell them at their value, and yet
at the end of the process must withdraw more value from the circulation than he
threw into it at the starting.”[xii] This mystery is revealed
in the concluding chapter of this part (Chapter 6)[xiii] by introducing another
commodity that the “Money bag” buys “a special commodity in capacity for labor
or labor power” – “aggregate of those mental and physical abilities existing in
a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use value of any
description.”[xiv]
Thus one of the necessary conditions for conversion of money into capital is
availability of ‘free labor’ to add value to the commodity, prior to and
outside circulation. For this the owners of the labor power needed to be freed
from the means of labor to make him “free laborer, free in the double sense,
that as a free man he can dispose of his labor-power as his own commodity, and
on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything
of realization of his labor-power”[xv]. The capitalist, the
buyer of this peculiar commodity, sets it in motion to valorize the value of
the C of the M-C-M circuit and change it to M-C-C’-M’. The transformation of
the use value of C into another, qualitatively different use value, C’ with the
valorized Value, M’ takes place by expending the labor power on C.
This
process of valorization of the value, is called labor process, under which
labor power and means of production mutually consume each other to create surplus
value to be appropriated by expenditure of surplus labor over necessary labor
realized in the form of wages, is the starting point of the Part 3 (The
Production of Absolute Surplus Value)[xvi]
of the volume and is the subject matter of Chapter 7[xvii] divided in 2 sections –
The Labor Process Or The Production of Use value; & The Production of
Surplus Value. The 1st section defines and describes the
labor and the labor process, the 2nd section defines and
demonstrates the value in terms of labor time and surplus value in terms of the
product of surplus labor and its appropriation by the capitalist.
SECTION 1
THE LABOUR-PROCESS OR THE PRODUCTION OF
USE-VALUES
“The
capitalist buys labor-power in order to use it; and labor-power in use is labor
itself. The purchaser of labor-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to
work. By working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was
potentially, labor-power in action, a laborer. In order that his labor may
re-appear in a commodity, he must, before all things, expend it on something
useful, on something capable of satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the
capitalist sets the laborer to produce is a particular use-value, a specified
article. The fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on
under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf, does not alter the general
character of that production. We shall, therefore, in the first place, have to
consider the labor-process independently of the particular form it assumes
under given social conditions.”[xviii]
Beginning
with the purchase of 2 commodities, the means of production -- the work place,
the instruments of labor the raw materials etc – and the labor power from the
market, Marx alludes to the history of the evolution labor process as the
continuing common link between various historic epochs and defines with
familiar examples, the constituents of the means of production. As pointed in
the above quote, the labor process is expenditure of the labor power on the
means of production to produce some use value on behalf and in the direction of
the capitalist. It should be noted that this transformation took place not with
the change in the methods of production but with the change in the relations of
production – the private ownership of the means of production and the “free
wage labor”. Change in the methods of production took place subsequently with
transformation of mercantile capitalism into full-fledged industrial capitalism
and is dealt with in a subsequent chapter[xix].
Humans
began to distinguish themselves from the animal kingdom by the human-specific
attribute, the ability to produce and reproduce their means of survival by
labor. “Labor is, in the first place, a process in which
both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts,
regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He
opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and
legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate
Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants.”[xx]
Thus the limbs, particularly the hands became the first implement human labor.
Hence any human action is no labor, only purposive human action that produces
objects of satisfaction of some human wants. “An immeasurable interval of time
separates the state of things in which a man brings his labor-power to
market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labor was still
in its first instinctive stage”[xxi].
Thus the labor process is the process of the application of the labor power on
the subject of labor, one of the three elementary factors of the labor process,
the other two being the action itself – the work and the instruments of labor. [xxii] “All those things which labor merely
separates from immediate connection with their environment, are subjects of
labor spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch and take
from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest and ores
which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand, the subject of labor
has, so to say, been filtered through previous labor, we call it raw material;
such is ore already extracted and ready for washing. All raw materials are the
subject of labor, but not every subject of labor is raw material: it can only
become so, after it has undergone some alteration by means of labor”.[xxiii]
Thus the raw material that has gone through some alteration in form from that
of its natural existence is one constituent of the means of the production.
Another
elementary element of the labor process and the constituent of the means of production
is the instrument of labor, “which the laborer interposes between himself and
the subject of labor and which serves as the conductor of his activity.”[xxiv]
With application of mind and creative assumption, human beings have been
continuously developing the instruments of labor to make the labor more
productive/effective. “No sooner does labor
undergo the least development, than it requires specially prepared instruments.
Thus in the oldest caves we find stone implements and weapons. In the earliest
period of human history domesticated animals, i.e., animals which have
been bred for the purpose, and have undergone modifications by means of labor,
play the chief part as instruments of labor along with specially prepared
stones, wood, bones, and shells. It is not the articles made, but how they are
made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different
economic epochs.”[xxv] The application of the labor power on
the subject of labor with the help of the instrument alters the subject of
labor. “The process disappears
in the product; the latter is a use-value, Nature’s material adapted by a
change of form to the wants of man. Labor has incorporated itself with its
subject: the former is materialized, the latter transformed.”[xxvi]
The instrument of labor and the subject of labor together constitute the means
of production.[xxvii] “…whether a use value
is to be regarded as raw material, as instrument of labor or as product, this
is determined entirely by its function in the labor process, by the position it
acquired: as this varies so does its character”[xxviii]
To sum up, the labor process is the application of labor power on the means
of production – the subject and the instruments of labor – to add value to it.
“…; it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of
matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition
of human existence; and therefore is independent of every social phase of that
existence, or rather, is common to every such phase. ……….. no
more does this simple process tell you of itself what are the social conditions
under which it is taking place, whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or
the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus carries it on in tilling
his modest farm or a savage in killing wild animals with stones.”[xxix]
Under capitalism, the
capitalist buys objective factor -- the means of production -- and the
subjective factor – the labor power for his selected trade from the market.
Labor process in capitalist production acquires two particularly peculiar attributes. Firstly the
labor power (for a agreed time) bought by the capitalist does no more belong to
the laborer but to its buyer in the same way as horses or oxen. Secondly the
product belongs to the capitalist and not to the producer except for the value
she/he has sold the labor to be received at the end of the process. “Labor
process is a process between the things that the capitalist has purchased, the
things that have become his property. The product of this process therefore
belongs to him.”[xxx]
Section
2
THE PRODUCTION OF SURPLUS-VALUE
The 1st Section
of the chapter concludes with the control over the labor process and right over
its product of the capitalist in the capitalist production, i.e. commodity
production system. The 2nd section deals with the valorization of
the capital, i.e. production of the surplus value and its appropriation by the
capitalist. The
capitalist “wants to produce a use-value that has a value in exchange, that is
to say, an article destined to be sold, a commodity; and secondly, he desires
to produce a commodity whose value shall be greater than the sum of the values
of the commodities used in its production, that is, of the means of production
and the labor-power,... His aim is not to produce only a use value but a
commodity also; not only use value but value; not only value but at the same
time surplus value.”[xxxi].
And the “value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of the labor
expended and materialized in it, by the working time necessary, under given
social conditions, for its production.”[xxxii]
The skilled labor time is calculated in terms of the multiples of simple labor.
“In every process of creating value, the reduction of skilled labor to average
social labor, e.g., one day of skilled
to six days of unskilled labor, is unavoidable”[xxxiii]
Marx takes up familiar examples to define concepts and to
demonstrate the laws governing them. In order to define the value in terms of
labor time and creation of surplus value with surplus (unpaid) labor time, he
cites the example of manufacture of yarn from the cotton. The capitalist buys
the cotton the spindle and the labor power of spinner at their equivalent
values. The values of the first two, the raw material and the instrument of
labor – the means of production -- is determined
by the labor embodied in the them in the previous labor processes and that of
labor power by its productivity. The value of the yarn is determined by the
expenditure of means of production, the constant capital, as shall be described
as the constant capital in the next chapter added with the labor time expended
in the labor process, the variable capital that alters the character of the
constant capital by adding value to it. “The labor required for the production
of the cotton, the raw material of the yarn, is part of the labor necessary to
produce the yarn, and is therefore contained in the yarn. The same applies to
the labor embodied in the spindle, without whose wear and tear the cotton could
not be spun.”[xxxiv]
Marx distinguishes the labor producing the use value and the
value. “The process of production, considered on the one hand as the unity of
the labor-process and the process of creating value, is production of
commodities; considered on the other hand as the unity of the labor-process and
the process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist process of
production, or capitalist production of commodities.”[xxxv]
The bourgeois political economists explain it in terms of
exchange of equivalent but the capitalist draws more money from the circulation
than he had thrown in, remains a mystery. Marx solves this mystery by
introducing the concept of surplus value, as mentioned above, created surplus
labor over the necessary labor needed for the survival of the laborer to be
able to reproduce himself that he received in terms of wages. Thus the surplus
value is created not in the process of circulation but prior to circulation, in
the labor process and is realized in process of circulation in the form of the
profit.
[i] P
164
[ii]
Pp 165-72
[iii]
PP 173-192
[iv]
Pp 43-75
[v] Pp
76-87
[vi]
P.88-96
[vii]
Pp 97-144
[viii]
P 146
[ix]
Pp 145-153)
[x] Pp
154-163
[xi] P
163
[xii]
Op cit
[xiii]
Pp 164-172
[xiv]
P.164
[xv] P.166
[xvi]
Pp.173-295
[xvii]Pp.
173-192
[xviii]
P.173
[xix]
P.180
[xx]
P. 173
[xxi]
Pp. 173-74
[xxii]
P.174
[xxiii]
P.174
[xxiv]
P. 174
[xxv]
P. 175
[xxvi]
P. 176
[xxvii]
P. 176
[xxviii]
P.178
[xxix]
P. 179
[xxx]
P.180
[xxxi]
P. 181
[xxxii]
P.181
[xxxiii][xxxiii]
P.192
[xxxiv]
P.190
[xxxv]
P.191
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