A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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it directly arises, and whose change in value it represents, but also to the sum total of the capital advanced, is economically of very great importance. We shall therefore deal exhaustively with this ratio in our third book. (323)
In Volume III, Marx seeks to show that this is one of the mechanisms that drives capitalism into periodic crises of falling rates of profit. I cannot elaborate on this here any more than Marx can, so all I want to emphasize at this point is that you should carefully note the distinction between the rate of profit, s/(c + v), and the rate of exploitation, s/v.
For Marx, and for the workers, it is the rate of exploitation that really matters. Furthermore, an understanding of the dynamics of capitalism requires an analysis of the rate of exploitation rather than the rate of profit. So this is what Marx concentrates on in this chapter. The rate of exploitation can, he says, be looked at in a number of different ways. You can think of it as the relationship between surplus-labor (appropriated by the capitalist) and necessary labor (the labor required to reproduce the value of labor-power), as necessary labor-time in relation to surplus labor-time or, more formally, as the ratio of the value laid out to purchase labor-power versus the total value produced minus that paid for labor-power. The problem, however, is that while all these ratios make sense, there is no way we can observe them in practice. It is not as if a bell rings the moment in the working day when laborers have reproduced the value of v (or spent the time necessary to produce v), so they know that thereafter they are producing surplus-value for (or giving over their time free to) the capitalist. The labor process is a continuous process which ends with a commodity whose value is composed of c + v + s.
While the different elements of value congealed in the commodity are invisible to the naked eye, Marx is going to make the claim, which you may not like, that this mode of analysis actually produces a far better science of political economy precisely because it gets beyond the fetishism of the market. The bourgeoisie had produced good enough science from the standpoint of the market, but they don’t understand how the system works from the standpoint of the labor process, and to the degree that they do, they plainly want to disguise it. They have a vested interest in saying to the workers that labor is just one factor of production that you bring to market, and that is your contribution, for which you will receive a fair remuneration at the going wage rate. They cannot possibly concede that labor is the form-giving, fluid, creative fire in the transformation of nature that lies at the heart of any mode of production, including capitalism. Nor can one imagine the capitalist praising workers for all the value they produce, including, of course, the surplus-value that underpins capitalist profit.
Marx ends this chapter with a fantastic piece critiquing a typical bourgeois representation of the world of laboring. This arose when
one fine morning in the year 1836, Nassau W. Senior … a man famed both for his economic science and his beautiful style, was summoned from Oxford to Manchester, to learn in the latter place the political economy he taught in the former. (333)
The Manchester industrialists were upset at the political agitation to limit the length of the working day to a “civilized” ten hours, after the shallow and not very effective Factory Act of 1833 had shown that the state apparatus was at least in principle prepared to legislate the legal hours of laboring. Senior argued in a detailed pamphlet that what the worker had to do during the first eight hours of the day was to produce the equivalent value of all the means of production used up (constant capital, in Marx’s terms). So Senior had no concept that the worker might be transferring the values already congealed in commodities and took the ludicrous view that the worker had to actively reproduce those values. The next three hours were taken up reproducing the value of the labor-power employed (the variable capital), and only in the final hour was the profit of the capitalist (the surplus-value) produced. Therefore, a twelve-hour day was absolutely essential to gaining a profit. If the length of the working day were reduced from twelve to eleven hours then all the profit would disappear, and industry would cease to function. Marx’s response is scathing: “and the professor calls this an ‘analysis’!” he exclaims (334). “Senior’s last hour” is a vulgar economic argument, solely designed to promote the interests of the manufacturers.
In a funny kind of way, however, Senior confirms Marx’s own theorization. It is the workers’ time that is of crucial value to the capitalists, and that is why they so desperately need that twelfth hour. The struggle to command the worker’s time lies at the origin of profit, which is exactly what Marx’s theory of surplus-value posits. This reaffirms the relevance of Marx’s definition of value as socially necessary labor-time. What, then, is socially necessary about the temporalities of laboring? Not only must capitalists command the labor process, the product and the time of the laborer, but they must also strive to command the social nature of temporality itself. Senior recognizes this fundamental truth, and Marx, using his critical tools and his situatedness on the side of the workers, turns the dross of Senior’s argument into a revelatory moment. The critique of Senior’s last hour therefore acquires a double significance. On the one hand, it allows Marx to depict the depths to which the economists can sink in trying to create apologetic arguments for the capitalist class, while on the other it neatly positions Marx to take on the fundamental truth revealed by Senior’s polemic: that command over time is a central vector of struggle within a capitalist mode of production. The examination of Senior’s last hour therefore makes for a crafty transition to the next chapter, which is all about capitalist time.
CHAPTER 10: THE WORKING DAY
Chapter 10 is constructed in a different way and written in a different style than are the preceding chapters. It is light on theory and laden with historical detail. Yet it also invokes abstract categories not yet encountered. This is so because Marx here focuses on the history of class struggle over the length of the working day. I have commented before on the complex interweaving of logical and historical argumentation in Capital and for the most part argued that we are on safer ground with the logical argument. But here it is the historical narrative that counts—though it is not bereft of theoretical significance. We here encounter a deep theorization of the nature of time and temporality under capitalism at the same time as we more clearly see why a capitalist mode of production is necessarily constituted through and by class struggle.
Marx begins by reminding us that there is a world of difference between the labor theory of value and the value of labor-power. The labor theory of value deals with how socially necessary labor-time is congealed in commodities by the laborer. This is the standard of value represented by the money commodity and by money in general. The value of labor-power, on the other hand, is simply the value of that commodity sold in the market as labor-power. While this commodity is like other commodities in certain respects, it also has some special qualities because there here enters in a historical and moral element. A failure to distinguish between the value of labor-power and the labor theory of value can generate fundamental misunderstandings.
“We began with the assumption,” writes Marx, “that labour-power is bought and sold at its value” and that “its value, like that of all other commodities, is determined by the labour-time necessary to produce it” (340). This is equivalent to the labor-time taken to produce those commodities needed to reproduce the laborer at a given standard of living. Marx assumes that this value is fixed, even though we know (as does he) that it is perpetually changing, depending on the costs of commodities, the state of civilization and the state of class struggle.
As workers add value to commodities in the labor process, there arrives a point in the day when workers will have created the exact equivalent of the value of their own labor-power. Let us suppose, says Marx, that this occurs after six hours of laboring. Surplus-value arises because workers labor beyond the number of hours it takes to reproduce the value equivalent of their labor-power. How many extra hours do they work? That depends on the length of the working day. This length is not something that can be negotiated in the market as a form of commodity exchange in which equivalent exchanges for equivalent (as is the case with wages). It