Das Kapital

THE LABOUR-PROCESS AND THE PROCESS OF PRODUCING SURPLUS-VALUE

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Seven
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value
Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value
Contents
Section 1 - The Labour-Process or the Production
of Use-Values
Section 2 - The Production of Surplus-Value
SECTION 1.
THE LABOUR-PROCESS OR THE PRODUCTION OF USE-VALUES
The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it;
and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power
consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter
becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in
action, a labourer. In order that his labour may re-appear in a commodity,
he must, before all things, expend it on something useful, on something
capable of satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the capitalist sets
the labourer to produce, is a particular use-value, a specified article.
The fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under
the control of a capitalist and on his behalf, does not alter the general
character of that production. We shall, therefore, in the first place,
have to consider the labour-process independently of the particular form
it assumes under given social conditions.
Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and
Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates,
and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes
himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and
legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate
Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting
on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his
own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in
obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive
forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval
of time separates the state of things in which a man brings
his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in
which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose
labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts
operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many
an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the
worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises
his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end
of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination
of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form
in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his
own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate
his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the
exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole
operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.
This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the
work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore,
he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers,
the more close his attention is forced to be.
The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal
activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work,
and 3, its instruments.
The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in
the virgin state in which it supplies man with necessaries
or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him,
and is the universal subject of human labour. All those things which labour
merely separates from immediate connexion with their environment, are subjects
of labour spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch
and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin
forest, and ores which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand,
the subject of labour has, so to say, been filtered through previous labour,
we call it raw material; such is ore already extracted and ready for washing.
All raw material is the subject of labour, but not every subject of labour
is raw material: it can only become so, after it has undergone some alteration
by means of labour.
An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which
the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour,
and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes use of the mechanical,
physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to make other
substances subservient to his aims. Leaving out of
consideration such ready-made means of subsistence as fruits, in gathering
which a man’s own limbs serve as the instruments of his labour, the first
thing of which the labourer possesses himself is not the subject of labour
but its instrument. Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity,
one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself
in spite of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is
his original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for
throwing, grinding, pressing, cutting, &c. The earth itself is an instrument
of labour, but when used as such in agriculture implies a whole series
of other instruments and a comparatively high development of labour.
No sooner does labour undergo the least development, than it requires specially
prepared instruments. Thus in the oldest caves we find stone implements
and weapons. In the earliest period of human history domesticated animals,
i.e., animals which have been bred for the purpose, and have undergone
modifications by means of labour, play the chief part as instruments of
labour along with specially prepared stones, wood, bones, and shells.
The use and fabrication of instruments of labour, although existing in
the germ among certain species of animals, is specifically characteristic
of the human labour-process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a tool-making
animal. Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance
for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil
bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not the
articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables
us to distinguish different economic epochs. Instruments
of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development
to which human labour has attained, but they are also indicators of the
social conditions under which that labour is carried on. Among the instruments
of labour, those of a mechanical nature, which, taken as a whole, we may
call the bone and muscles of production, offer much more decided characteristics
of a given epoch of production, than those which, like pipes, tubs, baskets,
jars, &c., serve only to hold the materials for labour, which latter
class, we may in a general way, call the vascular system of production.
The latter first begins to play an important part in the chemical industries.
In a wider sense we may include among the instruments of labour,
in addition to those things that are used for directly transferring labour
to its subject, and which therefore, in one way or another, serve as conductors
of activity, all such objects as are necessary for carrying on the labour-process.
These do not enter directly into the process, but without them it is either
impossible for it to take place at all, or possible only to a partial extent.
Once more we find the earth to be a universal instrument of this sort,
for it furnishes a locus standi to the labourer and a field of employment
for his activity. Among instruments that are the result of previous labour
and also belong to this class, we find workshops, canals, roads, and so
forth.
In the labour-process, therefore, man’s activity, with the help
of the instruments of labour, effects an alteration, designed from the
commencement, in the material worked upon. The process disappears in the
product, the latter is a use-value, Nature’s material adapted by a change
of form to the wants of man. Labour has incorporated itself with its subject:
the former is materialised, the latter transformed. That which in the labourer
appeared as movement, now appears in the product as a fixed quality without
motion. The blacksmith forges and the product is a forging.
If we examine the whole process from the point of view of its
result, the product, it is plain that both the instruments and the subject
of labour, are means of production, and that the
labour itself is productive labour.
Though a use-value, in the form of a product, issues from the
labour-process, yet other use-values, products of previous labour, enter
into it as means of production. The same use-value is both the product
of a previous process, and a means of production in a later process. Products
are therefore not only results, but also essential conditions of labour.
With the exception of the extractive industries, in which the
material for labour is provided immediately by Nature, such as mining,
hunting, fishing, and agriculture (so far as the latter is confined to
breaking up virgin soil), all branches of industry manipulate raw material,
objects already filtered through labour, already products of labour. Such
is seed in agriculture. Animals and plants, which we are accustomed to
consider as products of Nature, are in their present form, not only products
of, say last year’s labour, but the result of a gradual transformation,
continued through many generations, under man’s superintendence, and by
means of his labour. But in the great majority of cases, instruments of
labour show even to the most superficial observer, traces of the labour
of past ages.
Raw material may either form the principal substance of a product,
or it may enter into its formation only as an accessory. An accessory may
be consumed by the instruments of labour, as coal under a boiler, oil by
a wheel, hay by draft-horses, or it may be mixed with the raw material
in order to produce some modification thereof, as chlorine into unbleached
linen, coal with iron, dye-stuff with wool, or again, it may help to carry
on the work itself, as in the case of the materials used for heating and
lighting workshops. The distinction between principal substance and accessory
vanishes in the true chemical industries, because there none of the raw
material re-appears, in its original composition, in the substance of the
product.
Every object possesses various properties, and is thus capable
of being applied to different uses. One and the same product may therefore
serve as raw material in very different processes. Corn, for example, is
a raw material for millers, starch-manufacturers, distillers, and cattlebreeders.
It also enters as raw material into its own production in the shape of
seed; coal, too, is at the same time the product of, and a means of production
in, coal-mining.
Again, a particular product may be used in one and the same process,
both as an instrument of labour and as raw material. Take, for instance,
the fattening of cattle, where the animal is the raw material, and at the
same time an instrument for the production of manure.
A product, though ready for immediate consumption, may yet serve
as raw material for a further product, as grapes when they become the raw
material for wine. On the other hand, labour may give us its product in
such a form, that we can use it only as raw material, as is the case with cotton,
thread, and yarn. Such a raw material, though itself a product, may have
to go through a whole series of different processes: in each of these in
turn, it serves, with constantly varying form, as raw material, until the
last process of the series leaves it a perfect product, ready for individual
consumption, or for use as an instrument of labour.
Hence we see, that whether a use-value is to be regarded as raw
material, as instrument of labour, or as product, this is determined entirely
by its function in the labour-process, by the position it there occupies:
as this varies, so does its character.
Whenever therefore a product enters as a means of production into
a new labour-process, it thereby loses its character of product, and becomes
a mere factor in the process. A spinner treats spindles only as implements
for spinning, and flax only as the material that he spins. Of course it
is impossible to spin without material and spindles; and therefore the
existence of these things as products, at the commencement of the spinning
operation, must be presumed: but in the process itself, the fact that they
are products of previous labour, is a matter of utter indifference; just
as in the digestive process, it is of no importance whatever, that bread
is the produce of the previous labour of the farmer, the miller, and the
baker. On the contrary, it is generally by their imperfections as products,
that the means of production in any process assert themselves in their
character of products. A blunt knife or weak thread forcibly remind us
of Mr. A., the cutler, or Mr. B., the spinner. In the finished product
the labour by means of which it has acquired its useful qualities is not
palpable, has apparently vanished.
A machine which does not serve the purposes of labour, is useless.
In addition, it falls a prey to the destructive influence of natural forces.
Iron rusts and wood rots. Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit, is
cotton wasted. Living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them
from their death-sleep, change them from mere possible use-values into
real and effective ones. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as
part and parcel of labour’s organism, and, as it were, made alive for the
performance of their functions in the process, they are in truth consumed,
but consumed with a purpose, as elementary constituents of new use-values,
of new products, ever ready as means of subsistence for individual consumption,
or as means of production for some new labour-process.
If then, on the one hand, finished products are not only results,
but also necessary conditions, of the labour-process, on the other hand,
their assumption into that process, their contact with living labour, is
the sole means by which they can be made to retain their character of use-values,
and be utilised.
Labour uses up its material factors, its subject and its
instruments, consumes them, and is therefore a process of consumption.
Such productive consumption is distinguished from individual consumption
by this, that the latter uses up products, as means of subsistence for
the living individual; the former, as means whereby alone, labour, the
labour-power of the living individual, is enabled to act. The product,
therefore, of individual consumption, is the consumer himself; the result
of productive consumption, is a product distinct from the consumer.
In so far then, as its instruments and subjects are themselves
products, labour consumes products in order to create products, or in other
words, consumes one set of products by turning them into means of production
for another set. But, just as in the beginning, the only participators
in the labour-process were man and the earth, which latter exists independently
of man, so even now we still employ in the process many means of production,
provided directly by Nature, that do not represent any combination of natural
substances with human labour.
The labour-process, resolved as above into its simple elementary
factors, is human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation
of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition
for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting
Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent
of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every
such phase. It was, therefore, not necessary to represent our labourer
in connexion with other labourers; man and his labour on one side, Nature
and its materials on the other, sufficed. As the taste of the porridge
does not tell you who grew the oats, no more does this simple process tell
you of itself what are the social conditions under which it is taking place,
whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or the anxious eye of the
capitalist, whether Cincinnatus carries it on in tilling his modest farm
or a savage in killing wild animals with stones.
Let us now return to our would-be capitalist. We left him just
after he had purchased, in the open market, all the necessary factors of
the labour process; its objective factors, the means of production, as
well as its subjective factor, labour-power. With the keen eye of an expert,
he has selected the means of production and the kind of labour-power best
adapted to his particular trade, be it spinning, bootmaking, or any
other kind. He then proceeds to consume the commodity, the labour-power
that he has just bought, by causing the labourer, the impersonation of
that labour-power, to consume the means of production by his labour. The
general character of the labour-process is evidently not changed by the
fact, that the labourer works for the capitalist instead of for himself;
moreover, the particular methods and operations employed in bootmaking
or spinning are not immediately changed by the intervention of the capitalist.
He must begin by taking the labour-power as he finds it in the market,
and consequently be satisfied with labour of such a kind as would be found
in the period immediately preceding the rise of capitalists. Changes in
the methods of production by the subordination of labour to capital, can
take place only at a later period, and therefore will have to be treated
of in a later chapter.
The labour-process, turned into the process by which the capitalist
consumes labour-power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the
labourer works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs;
the capitalist taking good care that the work is done in a proper manner,
and that the means of production are used with intelligence, so that there
is no unnecessary waste of raw material, and no wear and tear of the implements
beyond what is necessarily caused by the work.
Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not
that of the labourer, its immediate producer. Suppose that a capitalist
pays for a day’s labour-power at its value; then the right to use that
power for a day belongs to him, just as much as the right to use any other
commodity, such as a horse that he has hired for the day. To the purchaser
of a commodity belongs its use, and the seller of labour-power, by giving
his labour, does no more, in reality, than part with the use-value that
he has sold. From the instant he steps into the workshop, the use-value
of his labour-power, and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs
to the capitalist. By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates
labour, as a living ferment, with the lifeless constituents of the product.
From his point of view, the labour-process is nothing more than the consumption
of the commodity purchased, i. e., of labour-power; but this consumption
cannot be effected except by supplying the labour-power with the means
of production. The labour-process is a process between things that the
capitalist has purchased, things that have become his property. The product
of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as does the wine
which is the product of a process of fermentation completed in his cellar.

SECTION 2.
THE PRODUCTION OF SURPLUS-VALUE
The product appropriated by the capitalist is a use-value, as yarn, for
example, or boots. But, although boots are, in one sense, the basis of
all social progress, and our capitalist is a decided “progressist,” yet
he does not manufacture boots for their own sake. Use-value is, by no means,
the thing “qu’on aime pour lui-même” in the production of commodities.
Use-values are only produced by capitalists, because, and in so far as,
they are the material substratum, the depositories of exchange-value. Our
capitalist has two objects in view: in the first place, he wants to produce
a use-value that has a value in exchange, that is to say, an article destined
to be sold, a commodity; and secondly, he desires to produce a commodity
whose value shall be greater than the sum of the values of the commodities
used in its production, that is, of the means of production and the labour-power,
that he purchased with his good money in the open market. His aim is to
produce not only a use-value, but a commodity also; not only use-value,
but value; not only value, but at the same time surplus-value.
It must be borne in mind, that we are now dealing with the production
of commodities, and that, up to this point, we have only considered one
aspect of the process. Just as commodities are, at the same time, use-values
and values, so the process of producing them must be a labour-process,
and at the same time, a process of creating value.
Let us now examine production as a creation of value.
We know that the value of each commodity is determined by the
quantity of labour expended on and materialised in it, by the working-time
necessary, under given social conditions, for its production. This rule
also holds good in the case of the product that accrued to our capitalist,
as the result of the labour-process carried on for him. Assuming this product
to be 10 lbs. of yarn, our first step is to calculate the quantity of labour
realised in it.
For spinning the yarn, raw material is required; suppose in this
case 10 lbs. of cotton. We have no need at present to investigate the value
of this cotton, for our capitalist has, we will assume, bought it at its
full value, say of ten shillings. In this price the labour required for
the production of the cotton is already expressed in terms of the average
labour of society. We will further assume that the wear and tear of the
spindle, which, for our present purpose, may represent all other instruments
of labour employed, amounts to the value of 2s. If, then, twenty-four hours’
labour, or two working-days, are required to produce the quantity of gold
represented by twelve shillings, we have here, to begin with, two days’
labour already incorporated in the yarn.
We must not let ourselves be misled by the circumstance that the
cotton has taken a new shape while the substance of the spindle has to
a certain extent been used up. By the general law of value, if the value
of 40 lbs. of yarn = the value of 40 lbs. of cotton + the value of a whole
spindle, i. e., if the same working-time is required to produce
the commodities on either side of this equation, then 10 lbs. of yarn are
an equivalent for 10 lbs. of cotton, together with one-fourth of a spindle.
In the case we are considering the same working-time is materialised in
the 10 lbs. of yarn on the one hand, and in the 10 lbs. of cotton and the
fraction of a spindle on the other. Therefore, whether value appears in
cotton, in a spindle, or in yarn, makes no difference in the amount of
that value. The spindle and cotton, instead of resting quietly side by
side, join together in the process, their forms are altered, and they are
turned into yarn; but their value is no more affected by this fact than
it would be if they had been simply exchanged for their equivalent in yarn.
The labour required for the production of the cotton, the raw
material of the yarn, is part of the labour necessary to produce the yarn,
and is therefore contained in the yarn. The same applies to the labour
embodied in the spindle, without whose wear and tear the cotton could not
be spun.
Hence, in determining the value of the yarn, or the labour-time
required for its production, all the special processes carried on at various
times and in different places, which were necessary, first to produce the
cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle, and then with the cotton
and spindle to spin the yarn, may together be looked on as different and
successive phases of one and the same process. The whole of the labour
in the yarn is past labour; and it is a matter of no importance that the
operations necessary for the production of its constituent elements were
carried on at times which, referred to the present, are more remote than
the final operation of spinning. If a definite quantity of labour,
say thirty days, is requisite to build a house, the total amount of labour
incorporated in it is not altered by the fact that the work of the last
day is done twenty-nine days later than that of the first. Therefore the
labour contained in the raw material and the instruments of labour can
be treated just as if it were labour expended in an earlier stage of the
spinning process, before the labour of actual spinning commenced.
The values of the means of production, i. e., the cotton
and the spindle, which values are expressed in the price of twelve shillings,
are therefore constituent parts of the value of the yarn, or, in other
words, of the value of the product.
Two conditions must nevertheless be fulfilled. First, the cotton
and spindle must concur in the production of a use-value; they must in
the present case become yarn. Value is independent of the particular use-value
by which it is borne, but it must be embodied in a use-value of some kind.
Secondly, the time occupied in the labour of production must not exceed
the time really necessary under the given social conditions of the case.
Therefore, if no more than 1 lb. of cotton be requisite to spin 1 lb.
of yarn, care must be taken that no more than this weight of cotton is
consumed in the production of 1 lb. of yarn; and similarly with regard
to the spindle. Though the capitalist have a hobby, and use a gold instead
of a steel spindle, yet the only labour that counts for anything in the
value of the yarn is that which would be required to produce a steel spindle,
because no more is necessary under the given social conditions.
We now know what portion of the value of the yarn is owing to
the cotton and the spindle. It amounts to twelve shillings or the value
of two days’ work. The next point for our consideration is, what portion
of the value of the yarn is added to the cotton by the labour of the spinner.
We have now to consider this labour under a very different aspect
from that which it had during the labour-process; there, we viewed it solely
as that particular kind of human activity which changes cotton into yarn;
there, the more the labour was suited to the work, the better the yarn,
other circumstances remaining the same. The labour of the spinner was then
viewed as specifically different from other kinds of productive labour,
different on the one hand in its special aim, viz., spinning, different,
on the other hand, in the special character of its operations, in the special
nature of its means of production and in the special use-value of its product.
For the operation of spinning, cotton and spindles are a necessity, but
for making rifled cannon they would be of no use whatever. Here, on the
contrary, where we consider the labour of the spinner only so far as it
is value-creating, i.e., a source of value, his labour differs
in no respect from the labour of the man who bores cannon, or (what
here more nearly concerns us), from the labour of the cotton-planter and
spindle-maker incorporated in the means of production. It is solely by
reason of this identity, that cotton planting, spindle making and spinning,
are capable of forming the component parts differing only quantitatively
from each other, of one whole, namely, the value of the yarn. Here, we
have nothing more to do with the quality, the nature and the specific character
of the labour, but merely with its quantity. And this simply requires to
be calculated. We proceed upon the assumption that spinning is simple,
unskilled labour, the average labour of a given state of society. Hereafter
we shall see that the contrary assumption would make no difference.
While the labourer is at work, his labour constantly undergoes
a transformation: from being motion, it becomes an object without motion;
from being the labourer working, it becomes the thing produced. At the
end of one hour’s spinning, that act is represented by a definite quantity
of yarn; in other words, a definite quantity of labour, namely that of
one hour, has become embodied 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 so far as it is
the expenditure of labour-power in general, and not in so far as it is
the specific work of the spinner.
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. If under normal,
i.e., average social conditions of production, a pounds of
cotton ought to be made into b pounds of yarn by one hour’s labour,
then a day’s labour does not count as 12 hours’ labour unless 12 a
pounds of cotton have been made into 12 b pounds of yarn; for in
the creation of value, the time that is socially necessary alone counts.
Not only the labour, but also the raw material and the product
now appear in quite a new light, very different from that in which we viewed
them in the labour-process pure and simple. The raw material serves now
merely as an absorbent of a definite quantity of labour. By this absorption
it is in fact changed into yarn, because it is spun, because labour-power
in the form of spinning is added to it; but the product, the yarn, is now
nothing more than a measure of the labour absorbed by the cotton. If in
one hour 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton can be spun into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn, then
10 lbs. of yarn indicate the absorption of 6 hours’ labour. Definite quantities
of product, these quantities being determined by experience, now represent
nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of crystallised
labour-time. They are nothing more than the materialisation
of so many hours or so many days of social labour.
We are here no more concerned about the facts, that the labour
is the specific work of spinning, that its subject is cotton and its product
yarn, than we are about the fact that the subject itself is already a product
and therefore raw material. If the spinner, instead of spinning, were working
in a coal mine, the subject of his labour, the coal, would be supplied
by Nature; nevertheless, a definite quantity of extracted coal, a hundredweight
for example, would represent a definite quantity of absorbed labour.
We assumed, on the occasion of its sale, that the value of a day’s
labour-power is three shillings, and that six hours’ labour is incorporated
in that sum; and consequently that this amount of labour is requisite to
produce the necessaries of life daily required on an average by the labourer.
If now our spinner by working for one hour, can convert 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton
into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn, it follows that in six
hours he will convert 10 lbs. of cotton into 10 lbs. of yarn. Hence, during
the spinning process, the cotton absorbs six hours’ labour. The same quantity
of labour is also embodied in a piece of gold of the value of three shillings.
Consequently by the mere labour of spinning, a value of three shillings
is added to the cotton.
Let us now consider the total value of the product, the 10 lbs.
of yarn. Two and a half days’ labour has been embodied in it, of which
two days were contained in the cotton and in the substance of the spindle
worn away, and half a day was absorbed during the process of spinning.
This two and a half days’ labour is also represented by a piece of gold
of the value of fifteen shillings. Hence, fifteen shillings is an adequate
price for the 10 lbs. of yarn, or the price of one pound is eighteenpence.
Our capitalist stares in astonishment. The value of the product
is exactly equal to the value of the capital advanced. The value so advanced
has not expanded, no surplus-value has been created, and consequently money
has not been converted into capital. The price of the yarn is fifteen shillings,
and fifteen shillings were spent in the open market upon the constituent
elements of the product, or, what amounts to the same thing, upon the factors
of the labour-process; ten shillings were paid for the cotton, two shillings
for the substance of the spindle worn away, and three shillings for the
labour-power. The swollen value of the yarn is of no avail, for it is merely
the sum of the values formerly existing in the cotton, the spindle, and
the labour-power: out of such a simple addition of existing
values, no surplus-value can possibly arise. These separate values are now all concentrated in one thing; but so they were
also in the sum of fifteen shillings, before it was split up into three
parts, by the purchase of the commodities.
There is in reality nothing very strange in this result. The value
of one pound of yarn being eighteenpence, if our capitalist buys 10 lbs.
of yarn in the market, he must pay fifteen shillings for them. It is clear
that, whether a man buys his house ready built, or gets it built for him,
in neither case will the mode of acquisition increase the amount of money
laid out on the house.
Our capitalist, who is at home in his vulgar economy, exclaims:
“Oh! but I advanced my money for the express purpose of making more
money.” The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he might
just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all.
He threatens all sorts of things. He won’t be caught napping again. In
future he will buy the commodities in the market, instead of manufacturing
them himself. But if all his brother capitalists were to do the same, where
would he find his commodities in the market? And his money he cannot eat.
He tries persuasion. “Consider my abstinence; I might have played ducks
and drakes with the 15 shillings; but instead of that I consumed it productively,
and made yarn with it.” Very well, and by way of reward he is now in
possession of good yarn instead of a bad conscience; and as for playing
the part of a miser, it would never do for him to relapse into such bad
ways as that; we have seen before to what results such asceticism leads.
Besides, where nothing is, the king has lost his rights; whatever may be
the merit of his abstinence, there is nothing wherewith specially to remunerate
it, because the value of the product is merely the sum of the values of
the commodities that were thrown into the process of production. Let him
therefore console himself with the reflection that virtue is its own reward.
But no, he becomes importunate. He says: “The yarn is of no use to me:
I produced it for sale.”
In that case let him sell it, or, still better,
let him for the future produce only things for satisfying his
personal wants, a remedy that his physician MacCulloch has already prescribed
as infallible against an epidemic of over-production. He now gets obstinate.
“Can the labourer,” he asks, “merely with his arms and legs, produce
commodities out of nothing? Did I not supply him with the materials, by
means of which, and in which alone, his labour could be embodied? And as
the greater part of society consists of such ne’er-do-wells, have I not
rendered society incalculable service by my instruments of production,
my cotton and my spindle, and not only society, but the labourer also,
whom in addition I have provided with the necessaries of life? And am I
to be allowed nothing in return for all this service?” Well, but has
not the labourer rendered him the equivalent service of changing his cotton
and spindle into yarn? Moreover, there is here no question of service.
A service is nothing more than the useful effect
of a use-value, be it of a commodity, or be it of labour.
But here we are dealing with exchange-value. The capitalist paid to the
labourer a value of 3 shillings, and the labourer gave him back an exact
equivalent in the value of 3 shillings, added by him to the cotton: he
gave him value for value. Our friend, up to this time so purse-proud, suddenly
assumes the modest demeanour of his own workman, and exclaims: “Have
I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labour of superintendence
and of overlooking the spinner? And does not this labour, too, create value?”
His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles. Meanwhile, after
a hearty laugh, he re-assumes his usual mien. Though he chanted to us the
whole creed of the economists, in reality, he says, he would not give a
brass farthing for it. He leaves this and all such like subterfuges and
juggling tricks to the professors of Political Economy, who are paid for
it. He himself is a practical man; and though he does not always consider
what he says outside his business, yet in his business he knows what he
is about.
Let us examine the matter more closely. The value of a day’s labour-power
amounts to 3 shillings, because on our assumption half a day’s labour is
embodied in that quantity of labour-power, i.e., because the means
of subsistence that are daily required for the production of labour-power,
cost half a day’s labour. But the past labour that is embodied in the labour-power,
and the living labour that it can call into action; the daily cost of maintaining
it, and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things.
The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter
is its use-value. The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep
the labourer alive during 24 hours, does not in any way prevent him from
working a whole day. Therefore, the value of labour-power, and the value
which that labour-power creates in the labour-process, are two entirely
different magnitudes; and this difference of the two values was what the
capitalist had in view, when he was purchasing the labour-power. The useful
qualities that labour-power possesses, and by virtue of which it makes
yarn or boots, were to him nothing more than a conditio sine qua non; for
in order to create value, labour must be expended in a useful manner. What
really influenced him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses
of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.
This is the special service that the capitalist expects from labour-power,
and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the “eternal laws” of
the exchange of commodities. The seller of labour-power, like the seller
of any other commodity, realises its exchange-value, and parts with its
use-value. He cannot take the one without giving the other. The use-value
of labour-power, or in other words, labour, belongs just as little to its
seller, as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer
who has sold it. The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power;
his, therefore, is the use of it for a day; a day’s labour belongs to him.
The circumstance, that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power
costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power
can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use
during one day creates, is double what he pays for that use, this circumstance
is, without doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means
an injury to the seller.
Our capitalist foresaw this state of things, and that was the
cause of his laughter. The labourer therefore finds, in the workshop, the
means of production necessary for working, not only during six, but during
twelve hours. Just as during the six hours’ process our 10 lbs. of cotton
absorbed six hours’ labour, and became 10 lbs. of yarn, so now, 20 lbs.
of cotton will absorb 12 hours’ labour and be changed into 20 lbs. of yarn.
Let us now examine the product of this prolonged process. There is now
materialised in this 20 lbs. of yarn the labour of five days, of which
four days are due to the cotton and the lost steel of the spindle, the
remaining day having been absorbed by the cotton during the spinning process.
Expressed in gold, the labour of five days is thirty shillings. This is
therefore the price of the 20 lbs. of yarn, giving, as before, eighteenpence
as the price of a pound. But the sum of the values of the commodities that
entered into the process amounts to 27 shillings. The value of the yarn
is 30 shillings. Therefore the value of the product is 1/9 greater than
the value advanced for its production; 27 shillings have been transformed
into 30 shillings; a surplus-value of 3 shillings has been created. The
trick has at last succeeded; money has been converted into capital.
Every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws that
regulate the exchange of commodities, have been in no way violated. Equivalent
has been exchanged for equivalent. For the capitalist as buyer paid for
each commodity, for the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power, its full
value. He then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities; he consumed
their use-value. The consumption of the labour-power, which was also the
process of producing commodities, resulted in 20 lbs. of yarn, having a
value of 30 shillings. The capitalist, formerly a buyer, now returns to
market as a seller, of commodities. He sells his yarn at eighteenpence
a pound, which is its exact value. Yet for all that he withdraws 3 shillings
more from circulation than he originally threw into it. This metamorphosis,
this conversion of money into capital, takes place both within the sphere
of circulation and also outside it; within the circulation, because conditioned
by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; outside the circulation,
because what is done within it is only a stepping-stone to the production
of surplus-value, a process which is entirely confined to the sphere of
production. Thus “tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles.” [“Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” – Voltaire, Candide]
By turning his money into commodities that serve as the material
elements of a new product, and as factors in the labour-process, by incorporating
living labour with their dead substance, the capitalist at the same time
converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital,
into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies.
If we now compare the two processes of producing value and of
creating surplus-value, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation
of the former beyond a definite point. If on the one hand the process be
not carried beyond the point, where the value paid by the capitalist for
the labour-power is replaced by an exact equivalent, it is simply a process
of producing value; if, on the other hand, it be continued beyond
that point, it becomes a process of creating surplus-value.
If we proceed further, and compare the process of producing value
with the labour-process, pure and simple, we find that the latter consists
of the useful labour, the work, that produces use-values. Here we contemplate
the labour as producing a particular article; we view it under its qualitative
aspect alone, with regard to its end and aim. But viewed as a value-creating
process, the same labour-process presents itself under its quantitative
aspect alone. Here it is a question merely of the time occupied by the
labourer in doing the work; of the period during which the labour-power
is usefully expended. Here, the commodities that take part in the process,
do not count any longer as necessary adjuncts of labour-power in the production
of a definite, useful object. They count merely as depositories of so much
absorbed or materialised labour; that labour, whether previously embodied
in the means of production, or incorporated in them for the first time
during the process by the action of labour-power, counts in either case
only according to its duration; it amounts to so many hours or days as
the case may be.
Moreover, only so much of the time spent in the production of
any article is counted, as, under the given social conditions, is necessary.
The consequences of this are various. In the first place, it becomes necessary
that the labour should be carried on under normal conditions. If a self-acting
mule is the implement in general use for spinning, it would be absurd to
supply the spinner with a distaff and spinning wheel. The cotton too must
not be such rubbish as to cause extra waste in being worked, but must be
of suitable quality.
Otherwise the spinner would be found to spend more
time in producing a pound of yarn than is socially necessary, in which
case the excess of time would create neither value nor money. But whether
the material factors of the process are of normal quality or not, depends
not upon the labourer, but entirely upon the capitalist. Then again, the
labour-power itself must be of average efficacy. In the trade in which
it is being employed, it must possess the average skill, handiness and
quickness prevalent in that trade, and our capitalist took good care to
buy labour-power of such normal goodness. This power must be applied with
the average amount of exertion and with the usual degree of intensity;
and the capitalist is as careful to see that this is done, as that his
workmen are not idle for a single moment. He has bought the use of the
labour-power for a definite period, and he insists upon his rights. He
has no intention of being robbed. Lastly, and for this purpose our friend
has a penal code of his own, all wasteful consumption of raw material or
instruments of labour is strictly forbidden, because what is so wasted,
represents labour superfluously expended, labour that does not
count in the product or enter into its value.
We now see, that the difference between labour, considered on
the one hand as producing utilities, and on the other hand, as creating
value, a difference which we discovered by our analysis of a commodity,
resolves itself into a distinction between two aspects of the process of
production.
The process of production, considered on the one hand as the unity
of the labour-process and the process of creating value, is production
of commodities; considered on the other hand as the unity of the labour-process
and the process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist process
of production, or capitalist production of commodities.
We stated, on a previous page, that in the creation of surplus-value
it does not in the least matter, whether the labour appropriated by the
capitalist be simple unskilled labour of average quality or more complicated
skilled labour. All labour of a higher or more complicated character than
average labour is expenditure of labour-power of a more costly kind, labour-power
whose production has cost more time and labour, and which therefore has
a higher value, than unskilled or simple labour-power. This
power being higher-value, its consumption is labour of a higher class,
labour that creates in equal times proportionally higher values than unskilled
labour does. Whatever difference in skill there may be between the labour
of a spinner and that of a jeweller, the portion of his labour by which
the jeweller merely replaces the value of his own labour-power, does not
in any way differ in quality from the additional portion by which he creates
surplus-value. In the making of jewellery, just as in spinning, the surplus-value
results only from a quantitative excess of labour, from a lengthening-out
of one and the same labour-process, in the one case, of the process of
making jewels, in the other of the process of making yarn.
But on the other hand, in every process of creating value, the
reduction of skilled labour to average social labour, e.g., one
day of skilled to six days of unskilled labour, is unavoidable.
We therefore save ourselves a superfluous operation, and simplify our analysis,
by the assumption, that the labour of the workman employed by the capitalist
is unskilled average labour.
Footnotes
1. “The earth’s spontaneous productions being in small quantity, and quite independent of man, appear, as it were, to
be furnished by Nature, in the same way as a small sum is given to a young
man, in order to put him in a way of industry, and of making his fortune.”
(James Steuart: “Principles of Polit. Econ.” edit. Dublin, 1770, v. I,
p.116.)
2. “Reason is just as cunning as she
is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity,
which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance
with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in
the process, carries out reason’s intentions.” (Hegel: “Enzyklopädie,
Erster Theil, Die Logik,” Berlin, 1840, p. 382.)
3. In his otherwise miserable work (“Théorie de l’Econ. Polit.” Paris, 1815), Ganilh enumerates in a striking manner
in opposition to the “Physiocrats” the long series of previous processes
necessary before agriculture properly so called can commence.
4. Turgot in his “Réflexions sur
la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses” (1766) brings well into
prominence the importance of domesticated animals to early civilisation.
5. The least important commodities of
all for the technological comparison of different epochs of production
are articles of luxury, in the strict meaning of the term. However little
our written histories up to this time notice the development of material
production, which is the basis of all social life, and therefore of all
real history, yet prehistoric times have been classified in accordance
with the results, not of so-called historical, but of materialistic investigations.
These periods have been divided, to correspond with the materials from
which their implements and weapons were made, viz., into the stone, the
bronze, and the iron ages.
6. It appears paradoxical to assert,
that uncaught fish, for instance, are a means of production in the fishing
industry. But hitherto no one has discovered the art of catching fish in
waters that contain none.
7. This method of determining, from the
standpoint of the labour-process alone, what is productive labour, is by
no means directly applicable to the case of the capitalist process of production.
8. Storch calls true raw materials “matières,” and accessory material “matériaux.” Cherbuliez describes accessories
as “matières instrumentales.”
9. By a wonderful feat of logical acumen,
Colonel Torrens has discovered, in this stone of the savage the origin
of capital. “In the first stone which he [the savage] flings at the wild
animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the
fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article
for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another, and thus discover
the origin of capital.” (R. Torrens: “An Essay on the Production of Wealth,”
&c., pp. 70-71.)
10. “Products are appropriated before they are converted into capital; this conversion does not secure them from
such appropriation.” (Cheibuliez: “Richesse ou Pauvreté,” edit.
Paris, 1841, p. 54.) “The Proletarian, by selling his labour for a definite
quantity of the necessaries of life, renounces all claim to a share in
the product. The mode of appropriation of the products remains the same
as before; it is in no way altered by the bargain we have mentioned. The
product belongs exclusively to the capitalist, who supplied the raw material
and the necessaries of life; and this is a rigorous consequence of the
law of appropriation, a law whose fundamental principle was the very opposite,
namely, that every labourer has an exclusive right to the ownership of
what he produces.” (l.c., p. 58.) “When the labourers receive wages for
their labour ... the capitalist is then the owner not of the capital only”
(he means the means of production) “but of the labour also. If what is
paid as wages is included, as it commonly is, in the term capital, it is
absurd to talk of labour separately from capital. The word capital as thus
employed includes labour and capital both.” (James Mill: “Elements of Pol.
Econ.,” &c., Ed. 1821, pp. 70, 71.)
11. As has been stated in a previous
note, the English language has two different expressions for these two
different aspects of labour: in the Simple Labour-process, the process
of producing Use-Values, it is Work; in the process of creation
of Value, it is Labour, taking the term in its strictly economic
sense. — F. E.
12. These figures are quite arbitrary.
13. This is the fundamental proposition
on which is based the doctrine of the Physiocrats as to the unproductiveness
of all labour that is not agriculture: it is irrefutable for the orthodox
economist. “Cette façon d’imputer à une seule chose la valeur
de plusieurs autres” (par exemple au lin la consommation du tisserand),
“d’appliquer, pour ainsi dire, couche sur couche, plusieurs valeurs sur
une seule, fait que celle-ci grossit d’autant.... Le terme d’addition peint
trés bien la maniere dont se forme le prix des ouvrages de main d’oeuvre;
ce prix n’est qu’un total de plusieurs valeurs consommées et additionnées
ensemble; or, additionner n’est pas multiplier.” [“This method of adding to one particular object the value of a number of others,” (for example, adding the living costs of the weaver to the flax), “of as it were heaping up various values in layers on top of one single value, has the result that this value grows to the same extent ... The expression ‘addition’ gives a very clear picture of the way in which the price of a manufactured product is formed; this price is only the sum of a number of values which have been consumed, and it is arrived at by adding them together; however, addition is not the same as multiplication.”] (“Mercier de la Rivière,” l.c., p. 599.)
14. Thus from 1844-47 he withdrew part
of his capital from productive employment, in order to throw it away in
railway speculations; and so also, during the American Civil War, he closed
his factory, and turned his work-people into the streets, in order to gamble
on the Liverpool cotton exchange.
15. “Extol thyself, put on finery and
adorn thyself ... but whoever takes more or better than he gives, that
is usury, and is not service, but wrong done to his neighbour, as when
one steals and robs. All is not service and benefit to a neighbour that
is called service and benefit. For an adulteress and adulterer do one another
great service and pleasure. A horseman does an incendiary a great service,
by helping him to rob on the highway, and pillage land and houses. The
papists do ours a great service, in that they don’t drown, burn, murder
all of them, or let them all rot in prison; but let some live, and only
drive them out, or take from them what they have. The devil himself does
his servants inestimable service.... To sum up, the world is full of great,
excellent, and daily service and benefit.” (Martin Luther: “An die Pfarrherrn
wider den Wucher zu predigen,” Wittenberg, 1540.)
16. In “Zur Kritik der Pol. Oek.,” p. 14, I make the following remark on this point — “It is not difficult to
understand what ‘service’ the category ‘service’ must render to a class
of economists like J. B. Say and F. Bastiat.”
17. This is one of the circumstances
that makes production by slave labour such a costly process. The labourer
here is, to use a striking expression of the ancients, distinguishable
only as instrumentum vocale, from an animal as instrumentum semi-vocale,
and from an implement as instrumentum mutum. But he himself takes care
to let both beast and implement feel that he is none of them, but is a
man. He convinces himself with immense satisfaction, that he is a different
being, by treating the one unmercifully and damaging the other con amore.
Hence the principle, universally applied in this method of production,
only to employ the rudest and heaviest implements and such as are difficult
to damage owing to their sheer clumsiness. In the slave-states bordering
on the Gulf of Mexico, down to the date of the civil war, ploughs constructed
on old Chinese models, which turned up the soil like a hog or a mole, instead
of making furrows, were alone to be found. Conf. J. E. Cairnes. “The Slave
Power,” London, 1862, p. 46 sqq. In his “Sea Board Slave States,” Olmsted
tells us: “I am here shown tools that no man in his senses, with us, would
allow a labourcr, for whom he was paying wages, to be encumbered with;
and the excessive weight and clumsiness of which, I would judge, would
make work at least ten per cent greater than with those ordinarily used
with us. And I am assured that, in the careless and clumsy way they must
be used by the slaves, anything lighter or less rude could not be furnished
them with good economy, and that such tools as we constantly give our labourers
and find our profit in giving them, would not last out a day in a Virginia
cornfield – much lighter and more free from stones though it be than ours.
So, too, when I ask why mules are so universally substituted for horses
on the farm, the first reason given, and confessedly the most conclusive
one, is that horses cannot bear the treatment that they always must get
from negroes; horses are always soon foundered or crippled by them, while
mules will bear cudgelling, or lose a meal or two now and then, and not
be materially injured, and they do not take cold or get sick, if neglected
or overworked. But I do not need to go further than to the window of the
room in which I am writing, to see at almost any time, treatment of cattle
that would ensure the immediate discharge of the driver by almost any farmer
owning them in the North.”
18. The distinction between skilled
and unskilled labour rests in part on pure illusion, or, to say the least,
on distinctions that have long since ceased to be real, and that survive
only by virtue of a traditional convention; in part on the helpless condition
of some groups of the working-class, a condition that prevents them from
exacting equally with the rest the value of their labour-power. Accidental
circumstances here play so great a part, that these two forms of labour
sometimes change places. Where, for instance, the physique of the working-class
has deteriorated, and is, relatively speaking, exhausted, which is the
case in all countries with a well developed capitalist production, the
lower forms of labour, which demand great expenditure of muscle, are in
general considered as skilled, compared with much more delicate forms of
labour; the latter sink down to the level of unskilled labour. Take as
an example the labour of a bricklayer, which in England occupies a much
higher level than that of a damask-weaver. Again, although the labour of
a fustian cutter demands great bodily exertion, and is at the same time
unhealthy, yet it counts only as unskilled labour. And then, we must not
forget, that the so-called skilled labour does not occupy a large space
in the field of national labour. Laing estimates that in England (and Wales)
the livelihood of 11,300,000 people depends on unskilled labour. If from
the total population of 18,000,000 living at the time when he wrote, we
deduct 1,000,000 for the “genteel population,” and 1,500,000 for paupers,
vagrants, criminals, prostitutes, &c., and 4,650,000 who compose the
middle-class, there remain the above mentioned 11,000,000. But in his middle-class
he includes people that live on the interest of small investments, officials,
men of letters, artists, schoolmasters and the like, and in order to swell
the number he also includes in these 4,650,000 the better paid portion
of the factory operatives! The bricklayers, too, figure amongst them. (S.
Laing: “National Distress,” &c., London, 1844). “The great class who
have nothing to give for food but ordinary labour, are the great bulk of
the people.” (James Mill, in art.: “Colony,” Supplement to the Encyclop.
Brit., 1831.)
19. “Where reference is made to labour
as a measure of value, it necessarily implies labour of one particular
kind ... the proportion which the other kinds bear to it being easily ascertained.”
(“Outlines of Pol. Econ.,” Lond., 1832, pp. 22 and 23.)
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