Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 8
Absolute
and Relative
Chapters 16, 17 and 18 of Marx’s Capital Volume 1 (attached) have very interesting things to say about absolute and
relative Surplus-Value, and the old political economists’ mistakes about it.
Here are some of the points made by Karl Marx:
“Capitalist production is not merely the production of
commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer
produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore,
that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer
alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of
capital.”
“The production of absolute surplus-value turns
exclusively upon the length of the working-day; the production of relative
surplus-value, revolutionises out and out the technical processes of labour,
and the composition of society. It therefore pre-supposes a specific mode, the
capitalist mode of production, a mode which, along with its methods, means, and
conditions, arises and develops itself spontaneously on the foundation afforded
by the formal subjection of labour to capital. In the course of this
development, the formal subjection is replaced by the real subjection of labour
to capital.”
“Assuming that labour-power is paid for at its value,
we are confronted by this alternative: given the productiveness of labour and
its normal intensity, the rate of surplus-value can be raised only by the
actual prolongation of the working-day; on the other hand, given the length of
the working-day, that rise can be effected only by a change in the relative
magnitudes of the components of the working-day, viz., necessary labour and
surplus-labour; a change which, if the wages are not to fall below the value of
labour-power, presupposes a change either in the productiveness or in the
intensity of the labour.”
“Bourgeois economists instinctively saw, and rightly
so, that it is very dangerous to stir
too deeply the burning question of the origin of surplus-value.”
“Capital, therefore, is not only, as Adam Smith says,
the command over labor. It is essentially the command over unpaid labor. All
surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent), it may
subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid
labor. The secret of the self-expansion
of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity
of other people's unpaid labor.”
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Capital
V1, C16, 17, 18, Absolute and Relative Surplus Value.
