Very proud of us all who have kept it going. We've gotten into a nice groove now. We looked at the labour theory of value, and how all commodities are commensurable by measuring the labour time. We saw that money is a commodity (gold) used to measure value. We learned that surplus value isn't generated by trade, because that would cancel out over the economy. We saw that surplus value comes from the variation between the value of the food etc. required to MAKE a day's labour, and the value of the work done in that day. We have learned the general formula of capital, and how capital differs from money. Not only am I proud of you, Stalin would be proud of you.
Let's use this shared activity as an excuse to also build camaraderie by thinking out loud in the comments.
The overall plan is to read Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week.
I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.
Just joining us? It'll take you about 8½ or 9 hours to catch up to where the group is.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4
Week 5, Jan 29-Feb 4, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 9, and from Chapter 10 we are reading section 1 'The Limits of the Working Day', PLUS section 2 'The Greed for Surplus-Labour', PLUS section 3 'Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation'
In other words, aim to get to the heading '4. Day Work and Night Work. The Shift System' by Sunday
Discuss the week's reading in the comments.
Use any translation/edition you like. Marxists.org has the Moore and Aveling translation in various file formats including epub and PDF: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
Ben Fowkes translation, PDF: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D
AernaLingus says: I noticed that the linked copy of the Fowkes translation doesn't have bookmarks, so I took the liberty of adding them myself. You can either download my version with the bookmarks added, or if you're a bit paranoid (can't blame ya) and don't mind some light command line work you can use the same simple script that I did with my formatted plaintext bookmarks to take the PDF from libgen and add the bookmarks yourself.
Resources
(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)
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Harvey's guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
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A University of Warwick guide to reading it: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/worldlitworldsystems/hotr.marxs_capital.untilp72.pdf
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Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/
Ok, WHY, if profit comes from exploiting labour-power, would capitalists improve technology?
If less work produces the goods, then there is less profit, surely? And profit is highest when variable capital is highest?
That's my question.
The explanation I can think of so far: if a more efficient book-printing machine is created somewhere, by someone, then the socially-necessary labour-time to make a book falls across the world. A boss can continue to run his print-shop in a labour-intensive way without the machine, but the value of his books at market has fallen, because although his ones still use a lot of labour, the socially-necessary labour has fallen.
While labour-intensive production might be more profitable for the bourgeois class as a whole, individual capitalists don't really have a choice in the matter: they have to use the most efficient process available to compete. Is that the Marxist explanation?
Yep pretty much.
Also the first capitalist to find a lower-cost way to produce, like with automation, gets a disproportionate share of profits at first and can even use it as an opportunity to gain overall marketshare, thus increasing their bulk of profit even if per-unit profit has decreased. For example, if they sell a table for 25% less due to cutting labor costs by 30% but sell 50% more of them, their total mass of profit has increased (albeit temporarily unless they have a monopoly).
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Your question is 100% valid and it strikes at the heart of the matter. Capitalists seek surplus value in whatever way they can find it. In certain economic conditions such as tense competition or strong labor, the capitalist might find they can only extract surplus value by producing commodities with less than socially average labor time by advancing technology. This is relative surplus value since the surplus value is relative to the rest of the book producers. But capitalists don't necessarily do this if absolute surplus value can be extracted. (Analysis of imperialism can be expanded here.)
Yes, and this is part of a general contradiction that capitalism constantly reduces socially necessary labor to an absolute minimum, which at the same time disintegrates the basis of capitalism. (By basis I mean the extraction of surplus labor, the labor cannot be extracted if there is not a necessary labor to speak of.) Pre-empting some later parts of the book and also Volume 3.
This is one of the contradictions that becomes an issue later. Profit is highest when variable capital is highest, but you are not producing nearly as much. The speed at which you produce also affects profit. You then enter an overproduction crisis, when you have less people paid well enough to consume, but capitalists have an overabundance of products, they can no longer sell.
CC is a multiplier for capitalist, if your shit machine makes 10 coats per worker and new shiny machine makes 12 coats per worker, your eyes lit up and you want new machine. You pay your workers the same and get more coats.
But uh huh new shine machine slowly propagates through the economy, and the amount of coats needed remains largely the same ( you ahve not changed worker compensation for them to buy more coats). Now you've done fucked up, and you fire some workers until new equilibrium is found.
Yes. The bourgeoisie may be a class with a common interest as capitalists but that does not mean there is not struggle within the bourgeoisie. An individual firm that wants to survive, let alone surpass the social average, must keep up with the state of the art, or perish.
In those industries which have absolute monopoly due to legal mandate, you do see a plateau in technological development; everyone knows this from experience.
Even without competition there is still the possibility to increase profits by improving technology, thereby reducing unit value, while enjoying a static market price due to legal mandate or artificially limiting supply.
Why would improving technology increase profit, based on the theories we're reading in Capital? Woulldn't increasing technology (decreasing labour) decrease profit/Mehrwert?
Only relatively. Human labor power is variable and so different from other forces of nature, yet there are also various forms of labor. By cutting down the production time of a commodity (through technology), you can expand the amount of labor expended in the time allotted, and so increase surplus value inasmuch as the workers movement can be suppressed and wages kept static/rise at a lower rate than the unpaid labor expended rises.
The proportion of labor which is unpaid increases.
No. This doesn't sound like what Marx is saying at all, no.
I don’t know what to tell you given you’ve shown nothing to contradict this. I’d recommend reading Ch. 15, Sec 3, Part C [link].
I'm not sure I understand you.
Surely you're not saying that machines perform labour that adds value in the Marxist theory?
Can you explain what you're saying? Coz it sounds like you're saying machines do labour.
Under the orthodox Marxist conception, machines are created by labor, which means that they themselves embody a certain about of "stored up" labor. Let's say the machine costs $1,000 and can be used to produce 1000 things. Under Marx's conception, the machine imbues $1 of value in each of the individual things it produces. Variable capital (labor) also adds value to the thing, so it costs more than $1, but $1 of its price comes from the machine. But you are right - the machine does not do labor. It stores labor, which is then released when the machine is used to make commodities. Marx repeats this a lot in Volume II and III, so it's kind of easy to miss it in Volume I.
Machines do fixed “labor” (where there is no struggle/surplus), while human labor power is variable/open to struggle (this is where value/surplus comes from). Machines always require an input at the very least, and so are simply tools of production, both to ease the labor process (to wear workers down more slowly) and allow workers to create commodities at a faster pace. Machines are used to streamline production, and increase surplus labor exploitation by allowing workers to create more commodities in a lower amount of time. Contradictions only arise with machines in capitalist society, where exchange value and not use value predominates, and so machines lead to a decrease in profit (negative effect) when they sideline human labor power, since this is the only place where profit can come about in the long term. This is part of the fall of the rate of profit, but from the immediate perspective capitalists only see an increase in efficiency/profit.
After typing the other reply I might not have answered the question directly.
An individual producer receives relative surplus value by reducing their personal labor costs relative to the market. This lasts as long as the industry has not caught up to the new technique. Eventually it does, and it's a race to the bottom as individual producers compete against each other.
I suppose the sticking point might be about the level of abstraction or how "zoomed in" the analysis is. There is no abstract capitalist roaming the earth acting in its own best interest, nor is there an abstract laborer. The law of value operates through "blindly operating averages" and the classes are individuals who share a common material interest, regardless of their personal consciousness of their class.
The law of value works as a social average, in the same way that temperature is a measure of average kinetic energy, although individual particles may have a higher or lower energy than the average.
Value is dependent on the degree of technological development in society. Price is grounded in value in the aggregate, but they do not correspond for individual commodities. But price does tend toward value, i.e. to the minimum of labor necessary, precisely because competition between individual producers opens the possibility of one producer undercutting the market for relative surplus value. There is an explicit quote by Marx about competition being the basis of the law of value, i.e. prices tending toward labor costs. I can't find it right now but I can look later if curious.
This is the subject of Part Four: The Production of Relative Surplus Value.
But to jump ahead, imagine a global village where 10 capitalists all produce yarn (buying labour power and means of production in market etc). We will hold the length of the working day steady (as this is the end result of chapter 10).
Each capitalist produces 10 yarn in a day, each bearing 1 unit of value, and hence each capitalist, after selling their yarn, has 10 units of value. The working day cannot be increased, so other methods of increasing the portion of the working day devoted to the production of surplus value must be found.
Suddenly one of the capitalists finds a way to increase the productivity of his spinner, whether by some new machine or by some new organizational method. This capitalist can now produce twice as much yarn in a day per unit of labour power. Hence, he produces 20 yarn a day with the same amount of variable capital. If this new method of production were adopted generally, socially necessary labour time to produce yarn would fall by half, each yarn bearing half as much value. Consequently, if this new method of production were adopted generally, this capitalist would find no new profit, as you say.
But the other 9 capitalists are still using the old production methods, because of patents, lack of funds, etc. Hence, the socially average labour time to produce the yarn hasn't fallen by half; it has fallen by 5% (unless my math is wrong; regardless the socially average labour time falls slower for society than for the capitalist using new production methods).
Each of the other 9 capitalists continue producing as they had before, but now their day's product of 10 yarn bears only 9.5 units of value, in spite of their workers continuing to work for as long as they had before. They begin to see a deficit. In contrast, the capitalist using new productive methods has produced 20 yarn bearing 19 units of value.
Improved Tech makes the labor produce more value. If they exploit the same amount of labor and the labor makes more value they make more profits. If a new tech costs more to implement than the increased value of the labor it will not be implemented.
The word "necessary" is really important here. It isn't "average" labor time.
If a factory with the tech doodad can make twice the books with the same labor and materials they will buy enough doodads to make all the books and lower the price of a book so the old style factories will be unable to make any profit and will thus close. Once the old style is gone they can slowly increase prices again until some new doodad is invented. All the book makers are trying to invent the next do dad so they can put competitors under and avoid going under themselves.
This doesn't fit what we've been reading. "Improved Tech makes the labor produce more value": Marx would say improved tech makes the labour pass along more value (the value of the fixed capital), but more fixed capital doesn't increase the amount of value added by labour. That would contradict everything we've read.
Sorry I said that sloppily.
The use-value of the product stays the same but the amount of necessary-labor goes down. The lag time between the lowering of the tech-lowered-labor-time and the lowering of the exchange value gives the capitalist a higher rate of return than competitors without tech temporarily. (longer if they can patent the tech) In that period where they have advantage they can act to put their competitors out of business and expand their market share.
The bigger share of the market is their motivation.
If capitalism without patent law existed it would lead to a stagnation. Any technology that took longer to invent than it did for others to steal and implement would never be invented because there would be no increase in profits to offset R&D.