and clippings from respectable newspapers (the New York Times, etc.) describing working conditions in plants producing Gap clothing in Central America, Nike plants in Indonesia and Vietnam or Levi Strauss products in Southeast Asia and describing how that great lover of children Kathy Lee Gifford was shocked to find that her line of clothing for Wal-Mart was produced either in plants in Honduras employing young children at almost no wages or in sweatshops in the New York region where people had not been paid for weeks. The students wrote great essays, though they balked when I suggested they might like to send them home.
Regrettably, conditions have grown worse. In May 2008, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on an Iowa meatpacking plant netted 389 suspected illegal immigrants, several of whom were underage and many of whom worked twelve-hour days six days a week. The immigrants were treated as criminals; many of the 297 convicted were jailed for five months or more prior to deportation, while the authorities only began slowly to move against the company for its appalling labor practices as the moral outrage began to build through public exposure. As the students in my class had also concluded, it is all too easy to insert any number of contemporary accounts of labor practices into Marx’s chapter on the working day without noticing the difference. This is where the neoliberal counterrevolution and the loss of power on the part of the labor movement have brought us. Sad to report, Marx’s analysis is all too relevant to our contemporary condition.
CHAPTER 11: RATE AND MASS OF SURPLUS-VALUE
Chapter 11 is a typical link chapter. It moves out of one set of questions in order to pose another. Marx’s method returns to the somewhat dryly algebraic before taking a substantive twist. Capitalists, he suggests, are most interested in maximizing the mass of surplus-value because their individual social power depends on the total money power they command. The mass of surplus-value is given by the rate of surplus-value multiplied by the number of laborers employed. If the number of laborers employed diminishes, the same mass of surplus-value can be gained by increasing the rate of surplus-value. But there is a limit on the rate of surplus-value given not only by the twenty-four hours in a day but also by all the social and political barriers discussed earlier. Faced with this limit, capitalists can increase the number of laborers employed. But at some point, another limit is encountered, which is the total variable capital available and the total supply of the laboring population. The outer limit here would be, of course, the total population, but again there are reasons why the available workforce is far less than this. Faced with these two limits, capital has to come up with an entirely different strategy for increasing the mass of surplus-value.
As often happens in transitional chapters, Marx provides us, in capsule form, with a conceptual map as to where we have been and where we are going:
Capital developed within the production process until it acquired command over labour, i.e. over self-activating labour-power, in other words the worker himself. The capitalist, who is capital personified, now takes care that the worker does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity … [But] capital also developed into a coercive relation, and this compels the working class to do more work than would be required by the narrow circle of its own needs. (424–5)
Capital personified, in its thirst for surplus labor and its incessant pursuit of surplus-value,
surpasses all earlier systems of production … in its energy and its quality of unbounded and ruthless activity … [But] at first capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions within which labour has been carried on up to that point in history. It does not therefore directly change the mode of production. The production of surplus-value in the form we have so far considered, by means of simple extension of the working day, appeared therefore independently of any change in the mode of production itself. (425)
But all that is about to change, both logically and historically. When “we view the production process as a process of valorization,” then the means of production are changed into “means for the absorption of the labour of others. It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker.” This historical and logical reversal lies at the core of an astonishing transformation in how a capitalist mode of production has to be understood. “Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity,” the means of production “consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value” (425). This all follows from the simple fact that the only way in which the value of the means of production (the dead labor congealed in factories, spindles and machines) held by the capitalists can be preserved (let alone augmented in the form of surplus-value) is by the absorption of fresh supplies of living labor. To the “bourgeois brain” it then follows that laborers exist only to valorize capital through the application of their labor-power!
Capitalism abhors limits of any sort, precisely because the accumulation of money power is in principle limitless. Capitalism perpetually strives, therefore, to transcend all limits (environmental, social, political and geographical) and to convert them into barriers that can be bypassed or circumvented. This gives a definite and special character to the capitalist mode of production and imposes specific historical and geographical consequences on its development. We now turn to consider how the limits encountered in this chapter—of total available labor force and rate of exploitation—are converted by capital into a barrier that can be overcome.
CHAPTER 12: THE CONCEPT OF RELATIVE SURPLUS-VALUE
Chapter 12 proposes a simple argument with a few complicated wrinkles. Yet it is a chapter that it is all too easy to get wrong. The initial argument goes like this:
The value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor-time congealed in it, and this value diminishes with increasing productivity. “In general, the greater the productivity of labour, the less the labour-time required to produce an article, the less the mass of labour crystallized in that article, and the less its value” (131).
The value of labor-power as a commodity is affected by all manner of historical, cultural and social circumstances. But it is also tied to the value of the commodities that laborers need to reproduce themselves and their dependents at a given standard of living.
The value of labour-power can be resolved into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of the means of subsistence, i.e. with the quantity of labour-time required to produce them. (276)
Other things remaining equal, therefore, the value of labor-power will decline with rising productivity in those industries producing the goods laborers need to reproduce themselves.
In order to make the value of labour-power go down, the rise in the productivity of labour must seize upon those branches of industry whose products determine the value of labour-power, and consequently either belong to the category of normal means of subsistence, or are capable of replacing them. (432)
For the capitalists, this means that they can lay out less in the way of variable capital because the workers need less money to meet their needs (as fixed by a given standard of living). If capitalists have to lay out less for variable capital, then even if the length of the working day is fixed, the ratio s/v, or the rate of exploitation, rises. A greater mass of surplus-value thereby accrues to the capitalist even though the length of the working day is fixed.
This process in no way involves any infringement of the laws of exchange. To be sure, capitalists will seek to purchase whatever labor-power they can at less than
