of the product, which also belong to him” (292).
These two conditions, however, permit the capitalist to so organize production as
to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it; namely the means of production and the labour-power he purchased with his good money on the open market. His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-value.
So the capitalist brings together the “labour process and the process of creating value” to create a new kind of unity (293). This is what the capitalist has to do, this is the capitalist’s conscious aim, because the origin of profit lies in surplus-value, and the role of the capitalist is to seek profit.
“Every condition of the problem is satisfied,” says Marx,
while the laws governing the exchange of commodities have not been violated in any way. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. For the capitalist as buyer paid the full value for each commodity, for the cotton, for the spindle and for the labour-power. He then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities: he consumed their use-value.
In so doing, he is enabled to produce commodities with more value than those purchased at the outset, hence the production of surplus-value. “This whole course of events,” Marx concludes, involves “the transformation of money into capital,” in such a way that it “both takes place and does not take place in the sphere of circulation” (301–2). The materials and labor-power are bought in the marketplace at their value but put to work to congeal more value in the commodities produced in the process of production, out of sight of the marketplace. The conditions that are “satisfied” are those set out at the end of chapter 5: that the money owner “must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at the beginning” (269). The result appears magical, because not only does capital appear able to lay golden eggs but
by incorporating living labour into … lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if its body were by love possessed’ [here Marx quotes Faust]. (302)
The form of circulation looks like this:
Let us look more closely at the different steps in this process. The capitalist has to buy means of production (MP): raw materials, machinery, semimanufactured items, all products of past labor (congealed values). The capitalist has to pay for those commodities at their value according to the rules of exchange. If a spindle is needed, then the socially necessary labor-time embodied in spindles fixes value. If somebody uses a gold spindle, then that is not socially necessary. For the labor process to work, the capitalist requires adequate access to means of production in the marketplace. What the purchase of labor-power (LP) enables is the reanimation of these “dead” means of production through the process of laboring (P).
During the labour process, the worker’s labour constantly undergoes a transformation, from the form of unrest … into that of being …, from the form of motion … into that of objectivity … At the end of one hour, the spinning motion is represented in a certain quantity of yarn; in other words, a definite quantity of labour, namely that of one hour, has been objectified in the cotton. We say labour, i.e. the expenditure of his vital force by the spinner, and not spinning labour, because the special work of spinning counts here only in so far as it is the expenditure of labour-power in general, and not the specific labour of the spinner. (296)
In other words, it is abstract labor which is being incorporated into this act of spinning, it is value being added in the form of socially necessary labor-time congealed in the yarn. The result is that
definite quantities of product, quantities which are determined by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of crystallized labour-time. They are now simply the material shape taken by a given number of hours or days of social labour. (297)
Furthermore, “in the process we are now considering it is of extreme importance that no more time be consumed in the work of transforming the cotton into yarn than is necessary under the given social conditions” (296).
But at the end of the workday, if all goes well, the capitalists find themselves, magically, in possession of surplus-value. The “capitalist stares in astonishment,” writes Marx with heavy irony. Should not the value of the product be “equal to the value of the capital advanced,” a simple adding up of all the values of the inputs (297)? Where does the surplus-value come from, given the law of equivalence in exchanges? “The road to hell,” writes Marx with equal irony, “is paved with good intentions” (298).
So the capitalists look for virtuous reasons to explain the surplus-value. First off, consider abstinence. Capitalists abstain from present consumption and invest the money they save. Do they not deserve some reward for their abstinence? This is a theme that echoes loudly in the long debate over the role of the Protestant ethic in the rise of capitalism. Second, capitalists provide employment to people. If capitalists didn’t invest their money, there would be no employment. Poor workers! Capitalists are doing them a favor by investing their money. Don’t the capitalists deserve some rate of return for that? This is a pretty general and on the surface rather convincing argument—does not investment create jobs? I used to have this argument with my mother all the time. She’d say, “But of course we need capitalists!” I’d say, “Why, why?” And she’d say, “Who would employ workers if we didn’t have capitalists?” She could not imagine that there might be other ways in which you could employ people. “Capitalists are vital,” she would say, “and it is very important we keep them around and treat them nicely, because if they didn’t employ laborers, the world would become a terrible place—look what happened in the 1930s!” The third argument is that capitalists say they work hard. They set up the production process, manage things, put in their own labor-time and take all this risk. Yes, indeed, many capitalists work, and some of them work hard, but when they work they usually pay themselves twice over, i.e., they pay themselves the rate of return on the capital they invest and they pay themselves as managers. They pay themselves as CEOs and then take stock options.
Marx regards all these explanations as subterfuges and conjuring tricks:
The whole litany [the capitalist] has just recited was simply meant to pull the wool over our eyes. He himself does not care twopence for it. He leaves this and all similar subterfuges and conjuring tricks to the professors of political economy, who are paid for it. He himself is a practical man, and although he does not always consider what he says outside his business, within his business he knows what he is doing. (300)
Capitalists may indeed be frugal and abstain, and they may also sometimes exhibit a benevolent attitude toward their workers (desperately trying to maintain their workforce in employment when times are bad, for example). Marx’s point is that capitalists could not possibly sustain the whole system by appeals to virtue, morality or benevolence, that the individual behavior of capitalists, varying from benevolence to vicious greed, is irrelevant to what capitalists must do in order to be capitalists, which is, quite simply, to procure surplus-value. Furthermore, their role is defined, as Marx will later point out, by “coercive laws of competition,” which push all capitalists to behave in similar fashion no matter whether they are good people or proverbial capitalist pigs.
The full answer to the problem of explaining surplus-value follows. You pay the value of labor-power, which is set, recall, by the value of the commodities needed to reproduce the laborer
