Chapters 12-13: Relative Surplus Value and Co-operation

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Feb 7, 2018
6 min read

Congrats, all! We've made it to Part Four! Wow!

It's probably worth a very mini recap of our journey so far at this stage. So, very briefly indeed:

Part One: Commodities and Money - We experience the world as a world of commodities and these have use-values and exchange-values. Though, of course, people in the past exchanged for exchange-value, the capitalist mode of production is the historically first society in which production for exchange-value is generalised and increasingly universalised, i.e. even if their products are useful, companies don't exist to produce use-values; they exist to produce use-values to maximise exchange-value.

Marx then talks a lot about the process of exchange and how one commodity emerges to take the form of a 'universal equivalent' through which exchange can be generalised, i.e. money. Later he talks about the money and commodity fetish in which it appears as if we humans relate with each other through commodities and these inanimate objects enter into a world of social relations with each other.

Part Two: The Transformation of Money into Capital - As the processes of money-mediated commodity exchange described in Part One develop and institutionalise, capital emerges. Capital first confronts us in money form, but actually it is a metamorphic entity, constantly transforming from money to commodities and back again. Marx introduces the two mirror-image circuits of capital's metamorphosis and accumulation that comprise the capital-labour relation: C-M-C (the worker's circuit, the circuit of use-values) in which the worker sells her only commodity, labour-power, to buy the use-values (in commodities) she and her family need for their reproduction and the reproduction of her renewed labour-power to sell again; M-C-M' (the capitalist's circuit; the exchange-value circuit) in which the capitalist puts her capital to work in a process of producing commodities for sale to make more money, to accumulate capital.

The rest of Part Two is focused on showing where this extra money, this surplus comes from. There must be a commodity out there that the capitalist purchases that produces more value than its own value. This commodity is labour-power. Consequently, in order to discover the 'secret of profit-making' we have to leave the noisy marketplace and venture into the 'hidden abode' of the factory.

Part Three: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value - Marx begins with an overview of the labour process in general, historical terms and then moves onto the 'valorisation process' in which the 'dead labour' in machinery and tools (constant capital) is combined with and revived by the 'living labour' of the workers (variable capital) to produce new value in the form of new commodities. This is done in the realm of production, but in order for capital to complete the process of self-valorisation this new value must be realised in the realm of circulation - in market exchange - in the form, once more, of money.

Marx then offers us equations to measure various elements including the rate of surplus value being generated in any production process (or economy as a whole). This is s/v where s = surplus value and v = variable capital. He moves on to introduce the concepts of necessary vs surplus labour time and necessary vs surplus product, i.e. which parts of the day and products are required for social reproduction and which parts are given for free by workers to capital for its own accumulation.

Finally, in Part Three, Marx devotes a long chapter to an historical overview of the history of the struggle over the length of the working day in England.

Right, so on with Part Four in which Marx introduces us to the concept of relative surplus value.

Chapter 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value

So far, Marx has only showed us how capitalists pursue more profit by stealing time: lengthening the working day, pilfering minutes supposed to be for lunch breaks, etc. This is the pursuit of absolute surplus-value. But, as is intuitive, there are natural limits to this and if bosses seek more absolute sv beyond these limits, they'll get poorer quality labour-power, i.e. deformed, diseased, disturbed, destroyed human beings! So, capitalists pursue surplus-value in relative ways too.

Absolute sv is clearly about time, but relative sv is also about time. It's about increasing the time dedicated in a working day to producing surplus-value (surplus labour time) and decreasing the time needed for the workers' reproduction (necessary labour time). The focus here is on technology - on the ways in which capitalists constantly try to revolutionise the means of production and the organisation of work to increase productivity.

What is very important here is when these innovations affect the commodities that workers need to reproduce themselves. The capitalist class as a whole has a particular interest (that they share with workers) in cheapening the value of life's essentials. This is the starting-point for many Feminist and Ecologist Marxist theories that show how capitalism's continuation has required the continuous access to multiple cheap inputs, access that may finally be over. See Jason Moore's work here in particular.

In Chapter 12, Marx shows how individual capitalists are incentivised by the promise of increased market share and profits to innovate. However, the extra profits they get when their innovations are successful and they are able to undercut their rivals are only temporary when their innovation is imitated by their rivals and generalised across the sector. At the same time, no real new value is being generated because actually these innovations require less variable capital (labour-power) and more constant capital (machinery), so the ratio between c and v is gradually increasing in favour of c. For example, if a firm invents a machine that enables one hundred worker to make 2,000 hammers instead of previously 1,000 then the actual value in each hammer is half the previous amount.

Marx concludes Chapter 12 by solving a riddle of bourgeois political economy. Those guys couldn't work out how capitalists always want to maximise the exchange-values of the commodities they sell, but constantly competed to lower exchange-values. The answer is presented by understanding relative surplus-value. The goal isn't really this; it's to increase the length of the surplus labour time in a working day relative to necessary labour-time and this is achieved by cheapening the commodities the worker needs to reproduce herself and her family. So, 'the value of commodities stands in precisely the opposite relation to the growth of productivity'.

Chapter 13: Co-operation

This is a great little chapter. Here, Marx points out that the emergence of the capitalist mode of production is synonymous with the growth of co-operation, i.e. capitalist production differed from the production of the guilds initially only in its larger size. Marx points out there there is what we'd now call 'economies of scale', i.e. a fall in the value of constant capital, achieved and saved by capitalists in larger-scale capitalist production. This 'economy in the application of the means of production arises entirely out of their joint consumption in the labour process by many workers'.

This joint productive consumption is co-operation and it constitutes a 'new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one'. This 'special productive power' is defined by Marx as 'the social productive power of labour' or 'the productive power of social labour'. Since the capitalist contracts with each of her workers individually, this productive power of social labour is effectively a free gift to the capitalist.

The larger the scale of production, the greater the benefits of this free gift of co-operation. Hence, this is one force pushing capital towards ever greater concentration. It also, therefore, requires that the capitalist 'should command in the field of production' just as 'a general should command on the field of battle', especially since 'as the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and, necessarily the pressure put on capital to overcome this resistance'.

'It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist.'

Similarly, as the mass of the means of production (machinery) grows, so does the need for 'superintendence' because the workers have no incentive to take care of the machines they experience as disciplining them and who experience the workplan they must obey as 'the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose'. Hence, just like an army's officers (managers) and NCOs (foremen, overseers), the capitalist mode of production comes to establish a rank of supervisors. The military analogies are germane. We're talking effectively about a situation of internal civil war.

So, capitalism is a system of increasingly large-scale and complex social co-operation in which the wealth generated by co-operating workers is privatised and their own co-operation is experienced by the workers as alienation, discipline, and violence. And because it is experience as such it is felt and believed that the co-operation originates outside of the workers in the system itself. This is one powerful way that Marx shows us a way beyond capitalism - through the liberation of our own co-operation by taking collective control of the means of production, making decisions about production collectively, and producing to meet our social needs (use-value) rather than private wealth (exchange-value). In one footnote, Marx points to the emergence of the success co-operative movement in Rochdale and Manchester since the 1840s, quoting The Spectator, a 'philistine publication' in which the magazine's author seems at once impressed but appalled by the evidence that workers can organise themselves more efficiently with no room for a capitalist boss! One hugely powerful and effective way that working people have developed to resist capital has been the establishment of co-operatives.