A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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previous chapter, for example, that the value of labor-power is not a fixed magnitude but varies according to physical needs, the degree of civilization in a country, the state of class struggle and all the rest of it. So the value of labor-power in Sweden is radically different from that in Thailand or China. But Marx, in order to simplify the analysis, here assumes the value of labor-power is a fixed datum. And in a given society at a given time, we can say roughly what the value of labor-power is. This allows Marx to presume that capitalists will pay the full value of that labor-power (even though they may struggle mightily in practice to pay their workers less) and still use it, whatever that full value is, to create surplus-value by milking the gap between what labor gets and the value that labor makes. This gap can be procured because the capitalist has control over (a) what the laborer does in the factory and (b) the product. But hidden within this argument is another variable that Marx has yet to analyze explicitly: how long is the laborer contracted to work during the day? If laborers produce the equivalent value of their labor-power in six hours, then plainly the capitalist can procure surplus-value only by contracting them to work more hours than that. If the workday is ten hours, then the capitalist gains four hours’ worth of surplus-value. This is what permits the extraction of surplus-value in a way that does not in any way violate the rules of exchange.
It is at this point that we need to remind ourselves of the duality of Marx’s project. What he wishes to show here is that even in a perfected liberal society where all the rules of exchange are perfectly obeyed, capitalists have a way of extracting surplus-value from laborers. The liberal utopia turns out to be not so utopian after all, but potentially dystopian for the laborers. Marx is not saying that wage determination actually works this way, but that the theses of classical liberal political economy (and this carries over to our neoliberal times) are seriously warped in favor of capital. The world of freedom, equality, property and Bentham is a mask, a ruse, to permit the extraction of surplus-value from laborers without violating the laws of exchange.
Marx, having set out his fundamental theorem—that surplus-value originates from the difference between what labor gets for its labor-power as a commodity and what the laborer produces in a labor process under the command of capital—immediately states a host of caveats. He observes, for example, that “the time spent in production counts only in so far as it is socially necessary for the production of a use-value,” and this depends on labor-power functioning under “normal conditions.” This raises the question: what is normal? The labor-power should, moreover, be of “normal effectiveness,” again leaving open the question of what normal is, except to say that this will vary from one trade to another and that it means possessing “the average skill, dexterity and speed prevalent in that trade.” The labor must also
be expended with the average amount of exertion and the usual degree of intensity; and the capitalist is as careful to see this is done, as he is to ensure that his workmen are not idle for a single moment. (303)
The casual introduction of the question of “usual intensity” here is significant, for it erupts later as a crucial aspect of labor control because “moments” are “the elements of profit” (352). In all this, the capitalist “insists on his rights” under the law of exchanges, to full use of the commodity that has been purchased and the right to penalize those who do not cooperate fully with his desires. These rights include that labor not be wasted, that
all wasteful consumption of raw material or instruments of labour is strictly forbidden, because what is wasted in this way represents a superfluous expenditure of quantities of objectified labour, labour that does not count in the product or enter into its value. (303)
What we here see outlined is a charter covering the capitalist control over the labor process, and it is through the implementation of these controls that the question of what is socially necessary in the labor process becomes more clearly defined. The outcome is, surprise, a duality!
The production process, considered as the unity of the labour process and the process of creating value, is the process of production of commodities; considered as the unity of the labour process and the process of valorization, it is the capitalist process of production, or the capitalist form of the production of commodities. (304)
Again, Marx distinguishes between the production of commodities in general and the specific capitalist form which uses commodity production to gain surplus-value, thus establishing a different kind of unity.
Finally, he returns to the fraught question of how to account for the impact of skill differentiations within the labor process. Skilled labor is considered as simple labor “with a higher specific gravity as it were.” This is labor of “a more costly kind, labour-power whose production has cost more time and labour than unskilled or simple labour-power, and which therefore has a higher value,” and in turn “becomes objectified, during an equal amount of time, in proportionally higher values” (304–5). In the footnote (305), however, he points out that many of these skill distinctions are illusory or arbitrary and themselves determined socially and historically. There is a long history of this, which Marx briefly alludes to but which could do with some elaboration. I found in my own work on Second Empire Paris, for example, that the definition of “skill” was highly gendered. Any work that women could do was viewed as unskilled, so when women began to enter a trade, the effect was to deskill the labor. This partly accounts for the hostility of some artisanal groups to women’s employment and for Proudhon’s insistence that women did not belong in the workshop but should stay at home. The issue of women’s employment then became a major source of tension within the First International in the 1860s. This does not help, however, with the issue of how to account for labor which is highly trained and therefore costly to produce and maintain. Marx again bypasses this thorny issue by assuming that “in every process of creating value,” the “higher type of labour” can be reduced to “average simple labour” and that we can thereby assume “that the labour of the worker employed by the capitalist is average simple labour” (306). There are in fact some serious difficulties with this argument, which is known as the reduction-from-skilled-to-simple-labor problem. But I, too, will bypass it here, leaving you with a question mark to be examined later.
The lengthy footnote on the relationship between slavery and wage labor (303–4) deserves some comment. When the two labor systems collide and become competitive with each other, the effects are particularly pernicious. Slavery becomes more brutal under the competitive lash of market integrations into capitalism, while, conversely, slavery exerts strong negative pressures on both wages and conditions of work. Any kind of human relationship that might have previously existed between master and slave will likely be destroyed. Of course, slavery varies a great deal in what it is about, but it is not about the production of value in the sense that Marx means it. It entails a different kind of labor process. There is no abstract labor in a pure slave system. This was why Aristotle could not formulate a labor theory of value—because this theory only works in the case of free labor. Remember, value for Marx is not universal but specific to wage labor within a capitalist mode of production.
CHAPTERS 8 & 9: CONSTANT CAPITAL, VARIABLE CAPITAL AND THE RATE OF SURPLUS-VALUE
In the next two chapters, Marx seeks to both clarify and consolidate his theory of surplus-value, a theory that, as Engels notes in his introduction to Volume II of Capital, “struck home like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.” These chapters are not complicated, so I will go over them fairly lightly.
Marx first establishes a distinction between what he calls constant and variable capital. Constant capital is past labor already congealed in commodities that are used as means of production in a current labor process. The value of the means of production is already given, and so the question is what happens to that value when it is incorporated into the new labor process. Marx argues that the value simply gets transferred into the new commodity. This value varies according to the productivity of those industries producing raw materials, machinery, etc., so to call this capital “constant” is not to regard it as fixed. All Marx wants to signal here is that the value of the means of production flows through the labor process to be congealed in the new commodity. The value remains constant as it flows.
The actual process of transfer of value is complicated by a variety of special circumstances. Cotton goes into a shirt, and in this instance