Part Five (Chs 16-18): The production of absolute and relative surplus-value

Hello again! Well, our little group is excited now because the end is coming into view after many months, so stick with us!

We've just been through Chapters 14 and 15 in which Marx has taken us through the historical process of transformation in production from guild-based handicraft on to manufacture workshops on to the factory, revealing its effects from global colonialism to the incorporation of women and children into the labour markets and workers' physical and psychological submission to the Machine!

Part Five is made up of three brief chapters. I will cover them briefly also.

Chapter 16: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value

In a way, the chapter's heading is misleading because its most interesting observations, from my understanding, are examples of Marx's grand perspectives on human nature and world development. Indeed, in our discussion group, we spent about fifteen minutes discussing just one remark on the first page! It was this:

'The solitary man cannot operate upon nature without calling his own muscles into play under the control of his own brain. Just as head and hand belong together in the system of nature, so in the labour process mental and physical labour are united. Later on they become separate; and this separation develops into a hostile antagonism.'

Here Marx seems to be referring to the hostile antagonism that develops when a solitary human being is compelled to labour in labour processes that are purely mental or physical. What comes to mind, above all, of course, based on the last chapter, is the mind and soul-numbing monotony of factory work. As Antonio Gramsci famously pointed out, all labour has an intellectual component, even the supposedly most physical labour. Who makes a better rubbish collector or toilet cleaner, someone doing it for the first time or for the thousandth? The experienced 'manual' worker has used her intellect in a trial-and-error process to become more efficient. Sadly, on an assembly line, the scope for this intellectuality is reduced to near zero, however.

At the same time, what is not fully elaborated here - only perhaps eluded to - is that this separation of hand and heart takes on a social form. Again, as Gramsci famously put it, 'All men are intellectuals, but not all men have the function of intellectuals in society'. We have separate strata of people who do the necessary work of producing the ideas, the ideology to justify and legitimate and naturalise this social order. Gramsci called them 'organic intellectuals'. These are the university profs, the media talking heads and op-ed writers, the think-tankers, the self-proclaimed 'experts' who fill our airwaves and bandwidth. The separation of social 'head' (organic intellectuals) and social 'hand' (the 'workers') is very evident today and manifests itself as a broad anti-intellectualism that has characterised the Brexit farce in this country, for example.

So, post-capitalist work is the reuniting of hand and head, but what about the heart? What about the satisfaction of our emotional and spiritual needs in the fulfillment of our ethical obligations to each other, to our society, in the giving and receiving of compassion, empathy, recognition, affection, love? This is our challenge.

Anyway, moving on! Marx then defines what is 'productive labour' and the 'productive worker' under capitalism. As the co-operative character of the labour process develops under capitalism, the definition of a productive worker changes. Now the individual worker is only to be considered as 'an organ of the collective labourer'. And it is only productive labour, of course, if it is productive of surplus-value - the whole point of the system. Marx concludes that 'to be a productive worker is not a piece of luck, but a misfortune'!

Marx then reflects on the environmental conditions conducive to/inconducive to development, that is, the increasing complexity of the division of labour and production process. He argues that the more benign the climate, the less labour time required to reproduce the society, the more potential surplus labour-time exists. He points to the grand achievements of Ancient Egypt and the wondrous fecundity of the soil near the Nile flood plains.

He argues, though, that necessity is the mother of invention in the sense that 'where nature is too prodigal with her gifts, she keeps [humans] in hand, like a child in leading-strings'. Human development is not in this case a 'nature-imposed necessity'. This is why, Marx speculates, the mother country of capital is found not in the tropics but in the temperate zone where degrees of differentiation of soil fertility and natural products forms the 'natural basis for the social division of labour' and 'spurs man on to the multiplication of his needs, his capacities, and the instruments and modes of his labour'.

This may be the case but I would like to read a decolonial critique of this. Perhaps Marx is ignoring or ignorant of the violent force of colonisation and imperialism that destroyed developmental processes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Chapter 17

In Chapter 17, Marx presents a technical analysis to show how changes in three 'magnitudes' determine the value of labour-power and, therefore, subsequently surplus-value. These three are: (1) the length of the working day - the 'extensive magnitude of labour'; (2) the normal intensity of the working day - the 'intensive magnitude of labour'; and (3) the productivity of labour. He proceeds to show what happens when one of these changes and the other two magnitudes remain constant. He gives us a tool to analyse any given situation at any given time.

A comment at the end of the chapter is of note:

'The capitalist mode of production, while it enforces economy in each individual business, also begets, by its anarchic system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of functions at present indispenable, but in themselves superfluous.'

The accusation Marx levels at capitalism is that it is outrageously wasteful of both resources and human beings and that it creates huge numbers of jobs that, outside of capitalism, would be immediately redundant and obsolete. Let's very briefly see if these charges stack up 150 years later...

(1) Wasteful resources?

According to the UK's Food Standard Agency, one-third of world food production is wasted! This is a waste not just of the food, but of the land, labour, energy, and water needed to produce it. It takes 100litres of water, for example, to produce a loaf of bread. Need I say any more?

(2) Wasting human lives?

Official unemployment rates mislead because they only record those actively seeking work. In reality, when we look globally, we see actually the majority of the working-age population unemployed and eeking out intolerable livings in the shadow economy. Capital's need for new resources and accumulation continues to kick millions off of their land and into slums, favelas, shanty towns in cities. In the post-industrialised world, capital's no longer needed human beings suffer ever more acutely. Skid Row in Los Angeles is just one prominent example where, each night, thousands of vulnerable and often physically and mentally ill men and women sleep. And then there's the millions of people incarcerated and brutalised just effectively for being surplus to capital's requirements. What a tragedy! What a waste!

(3) Unproductive productive labour?

Is there a large amount of jobs that make sense only under capitalism but seem not really or at all socially useful? This is what David Graeber famously called 'bullshit jobs' and there are tonnes of them. Graeber points out that between 1910 and 2000 'professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.”

Graeber points out that:

'But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.'

I, like Graeber, don't presume to judge you and say if you're job is meaningful or not (although the title 'bullshit job' is only slightly judgmental!). However, we can assess whether your job would make sense and continue to exist after capitalism and these all listed by Graeber simply would not. So, again, Marx is proved absolutely correct and prescient indeed. Capitalism is indeed a system defined by the tragedy of natural and human waste and enslavement for the continued accumulation of capital.

Chapter 18

This is a brief chapter where Marx sets out formulae for measuring the rate of surplus-value. I just want to point out a powerful paragraph at the end of the chapter that follows on nicely from Graeber's point about bullshit jobs:

'Capital...is not only the command over labour, as Adam Smith thought. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus-value...is in substance the materialization of unpaid labour-time. The secret of the self-valorization of capital resolves itself into the fact that it has at its disposal a definite quantity of the unpaid labour of other people.'

And this is what this whole book is about in a nutshell. It's about revealing the inner workings of a social system that functions through the theft of our freedom through the theft of our labour and our time.

Thanks for reading

Joel