Marx’s Capital Volume 1,
Part 7
Co-operation
Chapters 11, 12 and 13 of Capital, Volume 1 (download linked below)
which follow the enormous Chapter 10, are short, and require little
introduction, because they are straightforward.
They are plain enough to provide plenty of material for study-circle
discussion, especially if there are people with work-experience present.
Note that the co-operation Marx writes about here is co-operation in
general, whereby people work together under a capitalist. It is not about
"co-ops" as such.
The following two excerpts demonstrate how well Karl Marx understood the
workplace.
Rate and Mass of Surplus Value
“Within the process of production, capital acquired
the command over labour, i.e., over functioning labour-power or the labourer
himself. Personified capital, the capitalist, takes care that the labourer does
his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity.
“Capital further developed into a coercive relation,
which compels the working-class to do more work than the narrow round of its
own life-wants prescribes. As a producer of the activity of others, as a
pumper-out of surplus labour and exploiter of labour-power, it surpasses in
energy, disregard of bounds, recklessness and efficiency, all earlier systems
of production based on directly compulsory labour.
“At first, capital subordinates labour on the basis of
the technical conditions in which it historically finds it. It does not,
therefore, change immediately the mode of production. The production of surplus
value — in the form hitherto considered by us — by means of simple extension of
the working day, proved, therefore, to be independent of any change in the mode
of production itself. It was not less active in the old-fashioned bakeries than
in the modern cotton factories.”
Co-operation
“When numerous labourers work together side by side,
whether in one and the same process, or in different but connected processes,
they are said to co-operate.”
“By the co-operation of numerous wage-labourers, the
sway of capital develops into a requisite for carrying on the labour-process
itself, into a real requisite of production. That a capitalist should command
on the field of production, is now as indispensable as that a general should
command on the field of battle.”
“The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist
production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, [14]
and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible extent. As
the number of the co-operating labourers increases, so too does their
resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital
to overcome this resistance by counterpressure. The control exercised by the
capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature of the social
labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but it is, at the same time, a
function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is consequently
rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and
labouring raw material he exploits.”
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Capital
V1, C11, 12, 13, SV - Absolute, Relative, Co-operation.
