A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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live on bread alone, and the cost of bread is cut in half because of increases in productivity. Suppose that capitalists cut wages by a quarter. They gain the collective form of relative surplus-value, thus increasing the general rate of exploitation. But at the same time, the workers can buy more bread and raise their physical standard of living. The general question this poses is, how are gains from increasing productivity shared between the classes? One possible result, which Marx unfortunately neglects to emphasize, is that the physical standard of living of workers can rise, as measured by the material goods (use-values) they can afford, at the same time as the rate of exploitation, s/v, increases. This is an important point, because one of the criticisms frequently heard about Marx is that he believes in a rising rate of exploitation. How can that be, ask the critics? Workers (at least in the advanced capitalist countries) now have cars and all these consumer goods, so obviously the rate of exploitation cannot be increasing! Are not the workers so much better off? One part of the answer is that it is perfectly feasible, in the terms postulated in Marx’s theory, for steady increases to occur in the standard of living of labor at the same time as the rate of exploitation either increases or remains constant. (The other part might be to point to the benefits that accrue to one portion of the global working class as a return on imperialist practices of exploitation of the other portion, but that cannot be appealed to here.)
I say it was unfortunate that Marx did not emphasize this point in part because it would have easily forestalled an erroneous, spurious line of theoretical and historical criticism. But it would have also made us focus more clearly on the question of how benefits from gains in productivity get shared as a crucial aspect of the history of class struggle. In the case of the United States, some share of the gains from higher productivity went to the workers from the Civil War period onward. A typical union bargaining strategy is to agree to collaborate with increasing productivity in return for higher wages. If the benefits from technological dynamism are spread around, then opposition to that technological dynamism becomes muted even as capitalists are cheerfully raising the rate of exploitation. Political opposition to capitalism in general also may become less strident, even if the rate of exploitation is increasing, because workers are at least gaining a higher physical standard of living. The odd thing about the United States is that it is only in the past thirty years or so that workers have failed to gain from rising productivity. The capitalist class has appropriated almost all the benefits. This lies at the core of what the neoliberal counterrevolution has been about and what distinguishes it from the Keynesian welfare-state period, when gains from productivity tended to be shared more evenly between capital and labor. The result has been, as is well documented, a tremendous increase in levels of social inequality in all those countries that have moved down neoliberal lines. In part this has to do with the balance of class forces and the dynamics of class struggle in different places, while in the United States, cheaper imports (and imperialist practices) have also helped workers maintain an illusion that perhaps they may be benefiting from capitalist imperialism. But all this lies way beyond what Marx’s text is proposing. I find it helpful, however, to extend his key insights in these directions.
CHAPTER 13: CO-OPERATION
The three chapters that follow deal with the various ways in which capitalists can procure relative surplus-value of the individual sort. The overall focus is on whatever it is that raises the productivity of labor, and it is clear that this depends on organizational forms (cooperation and divisions of labor), as well as on machinery and automation (technology, as we usually think of it). This can create some confusion, since Marx sometimes bundles all these strategies together under the heading “productive forces,” but then on occasion uses the term “technology” as if it were the same thing. He is clearly as interested in organizational form (the software, as it were) as he is in the machines (the hardware). I think it best to assume that Marx’s theory of technology/productive forces is machinery plus organizational form. I find his stance on this particularly relevant since, in recent times, transformations in organizational form—subcontracting, just-in-time systems, corporate decentralization and the like—have played a major role in the quest to increase productivity. While the profitability of Wal-Mart has its basis in the exploitation of cheap Chinese labor, the efficiency of its organizational form sets it apart from many of its competitors. Similarly, the Japanese conquest of the US auto market at the expense of Detroit had as much to do with the organizational form (just-in-time and subcontracting) of the Japanese car companies as with the new hardware and automation they deployed. Indeed, ever since time-and-motion studies (and what became known as Taylorism) became fashionable around 1900, there has always been a strong link between the hardware and the software of capitalist production systems.
Marx begins by examining how two organizational forms—cooperation and divisions of labor—can be used by capital under existing technological conditions of artisanal and handicraft labor to increase productivity. Innovations in these two aspects of organizational form have been integral to the acquisition of relative surplus-value throughout the history of capitalism, and we should never forget them. As in the chapter on the labor process, however, where the potential nobility of the process is stressed in contrast to its alienated form under capitalism, Marx casts neither cooperation nor division of labor in an inherently negative light. He views them as potentially creative, beneficial and gratifying for the laborer. Cooperation and well-organized divisions of labor are wonderful human capacities that add to our collective powers. Socialism and communism would presumably have great need of them. What Marx will seek to show is how these positive potentialities are seized on by capital to its own particular advantage and thereby turned into something negative for the laborer.
“When numerous workers work together side by side in accordance with a plan, whether in the same process, or in different but connected processes, this form of labour is called co-operation.” Note the word “plan” here, since it’s going to become an important idea. Cooperation permits, for example, an increasing scale of production, and the resultant economies of scale can generate increases in labor efficiency and productivity. This is made much of in conventional economic theory, and Marx does not demur. “Not only do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one” (443). This collective power
begets in most industries a rivalry and a stimulation of the ‘animal spirits’, which heightens the efficiency of each individual worker. This is why a dozen people working together will produce far more, in their collective working day of 144 hours than twelve isolated men each working for 12 hours. (443–4)
Furthermore, “co-operation allows work to be carried on over a large area” while rendering
possible a relative contraction of its arena. This simultaneous restriction of space and extension of effectiveness, which allows a large number of incidental expenses … to be spared, results from the massing together of workers and of various labour processes, and from the concentration of the means of production. (446)
There is an interesting tension here between geographical expansion (work conducted over a large area) and geographical concentration (bringing workers together for purposes of cooperation in a particular space). The latter, as Marx points out, can have political consequences as workers get together and organize.
He insists, however, that “the special productive power of the combined working day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power arises from co-operation itself.” Furthermore, “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species” (447). This is one of those instances where Marx reverts to some notion of universal species being, which was an important theme in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. At this point, it is hard to view this discussion of cooperation in a negative light. We strip off the fetters of our individuality and develop the capability of the species. To the degree that this capability has not been realized, we have yet to realize the potentiality of our species being.
But what happens when we return to the world of “our would-be capitalist”? First off, the capitalist needs an initial mass of capital in order to organize cooperation. How much, and where does it come from? There are what we now usually refer to as barriers