everything that exists—with reality as it’s experienced, as well as with all available descriptions of that experience by political economists, philosophers, novelists and the like.” Marx then subjects this material to “rigorous criticism” from which he forms “simple but powerful concepts that illuminate the way reality works.” This method, which became central to Marx’s work in the mid-1840s when he began his studies in political economy, involved two main steps: conceptualizing empirical evidence and then using those concepts as the basis for discovering the myriad deceptions that abound in the capitalist world. In the first volume of Capital, Marx began with the concepts, especially those he believed made sense of capitalist realities and the historical forces that created them.16 Marx’s conceptual arguments about production were derived from his knowledge of Great Britain in the 1850s and 1860s, then the most advanced capitalist nation, as well as in other parts of Europe and North America where similar conditions existed but were not as highly developed.17
Marx’s masterwork is a detailed and complex treatise that reveals how capital as accumulated wealth in many forms—most importantly as money—must always expand, thereby enlarging the mode of production, which raises the magnitude of the total product. This is how growth and prosperity are sustained across the capitalist system, and it must occur to offset what Marx viewed as a tendency toward stagnation and an eventual crisis. This would become a general condition of capitalism with the further development of technology operating on the basis of monopoly and finance capital. Marx had expounded this tendency in Capital. What concerns us here, however, is how he explains that sustained growth depends on the ability of capitalists to produce and sell commodities as efficiently as possible in order to maximize profits—and to do this exponentially. This is their sole purpose as capitalists. Their success always comes at the expense of the workers, whose laborpower is the one thing workers own and, therefore, must sell to the capitalists to survive. For Marx, this contradiction between capital and labor, between the capitalist and the worker, was evident in certain laws of motion peculiar to industrial capitalist production, revealing why economic growth created wealth and poverty together, and how the capitalist assumed even greater control and domination over the worker.
CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION AND THE PERMANENT DIVIDE OF CAPITAL AND LABOR
One of Marx’s most important laws of motion, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” is the title of a chapter in Capital. Here Marx explicates why the sole purpose of accumulation is forever to raise the value of capital. This involves the drive to increase productivity—the rate of output per hour—by replacing human labor with machines, making production more efficient and thereby sustaining the rate of profit required for further capital investment. The consequence of this is not only the growth of output but the chaining of the vast majority of society, the working class, to the systemic imperatives and dictatorial powers of capital. As capital expands, so does the power of those who own and control it. Two major contradictions occur. Accumulation, which generates fierce competition between capitalist enterprises, drives the less efficient and profitable out of the market, resulting in the greater concentration of capital. This then widens and deepens the gap between fewer and wealthier capitalists and a growing mass of impoverished workers. The laborpower that the capitalist buys from the worker at the lowest price, the so-called minimum or subsistence wage, is the ultimate source of the capitalist’s wealth. Marx shows that each step in the process of creating more wealth among fewer and fewer capitalists is accompanied by the increasing diminution of workers and their disposability in capitalist production. Simply put, the march of capital tramples those who initially create it, the working class.
Marx begins the chapter by recognizing how the growth of capital impacts the working class as the result of processes that govern capitalist accumulation and determine the composition of capital, which is always determined by the ratio between constant capital—buildings, machinery, land, raw materials, etc.—and variable capital, human labor-power. Once capitalism enters its industrial stage, the drive for greater efficiency in production always causes constant capital to grow—with greater reliance on technological innovation—relative to variable capital. Marx posits the relation between these two variants as the organic composition of capital. Simply put, as greater wealth is produced on the basis of more machines employed throughout production, an increase in constant capital, the more that living labor, or variable capital, is diminished in production. Every technological advance aimed at greater efficiency in production to maximize profits also disposes more workers who thereby become impoverished.18
At the risk of reducing complex formulations to simplest terms, we can say that Marx aims at a scientifically based argument that demonstrates how the value of capital at any moment is based on the amount of labor-power extracted from workers by capitalists in the course of expanding production. It can be extracted because the capitalists own what the workers must have access to, the nonhuman means of production. This fundamental inequality is what allows employers to take from workers more than what they are paid in wages. Put simply, workers produce all of the output but, in effect, get only part of it back, just enough to sustain their lives. For the capitalist, the appropriation of labor-power from the worker translates into surplus-value, or unpaid labor, which is the basis of capitalist profit. Human labor, therefore, is the dynamic force in production that creates more capital through its appropriation by those who already own it. As the political economist Harry Braverman wrote, “The working class is the animate part of capital, the part which will set in motion the process that yields to the total capital its increment of surplus-value.”19
Marx argues that all growth in capital is based on the productiveness of labor, specifically, the necessary levels of productivity supplied by the labor-power of workers. For capital to accumulate within the framework and mechanisms of industrial production requires that part of the surplus-value generated by it must be “re-transformed” into additional labor-power.20 When this occurs, capitalists must employ more workers to accumulate more capital. On the surface, this seems like a good thing for workers since their numbers rise. Given the degree to which the requirements of accumulation may exceed the supply of labor, wages might even rise. But the “favourable circumstances in which the wage-working class supports and multiplies itself, in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist production.”21
Why is this so?
As stated above, Marx explains that the enlarged scale of production requires capitalists to employ more workers. Yet the increase of employed workers must always benefit the owners of capital since their sole aim is to raise productivity by whatever means and methods necessary to maximize profits. Marx emphasizes that the bottom line for every capitalist is the “augmentation” of his capital. This means ensuring that the production of a commodity contains more labor-power than is paid to the worker in wages. For the capitalist, this is the source of surplus-value; in other words, the amount of unpaid labor-power that is realized as profit when the commodity is sold. On this basis, Marx concludes that the “production of surplus-value is the absolute law” of the capitalist mode of production.22
At any given moment, the capitalist must acquire as much surplus-value as necessary to offset the wage he pays the worker. This will vary depending on specific conditions and circumstances in production and exchange. For example, a burst of accumulation and growth dictates a corresponding need for additional labor. Capitalists suddenly need more workers to boost production. It could even lead to higher wages, so long as the cost does not impede the rate of surplus-value required to sustain accumulation and more profits. This is beneficial to workers but only in the short term. As Marx says, an immediate reaction sets in as soon as the amount of paid labor impedes the production of surplus-value. This means there is less profit that can be invested in furthering the means of production. The bottom line is that any rise in wages diminishes surplus-value and impedes accumulation, which is why capitalists must check rising wages at some point.
This is why Marx says that “the rise of wages therefore is confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalistic
