Capital, Marx (*)

Last updated on 27 Sep 2022.

Review and notes on Das Kapital by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels.

Volume 1: The Process of Production of Capital

1. Commodities

Key Ideas.

The capitalist economy functions on the basis of the commodity. (S1)
The use value of a commodity is only realized by consumption, and only has value because the total labor power of society is in some part embedded within it. Use values are amalgams of matter and labor. (S1, S2)
The exchange value of a commodity reflects something deeper within the essence of the commodity. (S1)
The four forms of a commodity (S3):
- A. Elementary Form. The simplest form to represent a commodity is as in exchange or relation to another commodity: $\alpha A = \beta B$, for two commodities $A$ and $B$ and two corresponding scaling coefficients $\alpha, \beta$. After all, a commodity compared to itself has no value beyond the tautologically trivial. To say $\alpha A = \beta B$ is not the same as $\beta B = \alpha A$ in this Marxist algebra. The left term occupies the relative form; the right occupies the equivalent form. $A$’s value is being bodily represented in terms of $B$. In this sense $B$ is a single unit which is said to be exchangeable with $\frac{\alpha}{\beta}$ of the relative form of a commodity. A commodity can only be in relative or equivalent form (exclusive) at any one time.
- B. Expanded Relative Form. It is not necessarily just the case that we can express $A$ in terms of $B$. We can use $A$ as the relative to other equivalents, such as $C, D, E, ...$. That is, we can use many different commodities as the bodily value manifestation of $$A$.
- C. General Form. We can just as easily express $B, C, D, E, ...$ as the relative commodity with $A$ as the equivalent form. Via the asymmetry of $=$ in Marxist algebra, this collective flip has a significant change in meaning. Rather than just suggesting a single commodity can be bodily manifested in value by every other commodity, we now assert that every possible commodity can find bodily manifestation in a single commodity. This opens up a complete world of exchange, because now multiple commodities can be mapped to the same manifestion, whereas previously in Form C a single commodity could be mapped to any one of multiple commodities. Commodity $A$ serves as the universal equivalent substance.
- D. Money form. We replace the universal equivalent with the commodity of money.
A commodity seems simple, but it functions in the bourgeois economy by obscuring the social labor relation within an exchange of commodities through the universal equivalent form of money. (S4).

Section 1. The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value

The unit of the capitalist economy is the commodity.
A commodity is external to us.
Ever useful thing is comprised both of quality and quantity.
Use value of a thing is made by its utility.
Utility is limited by the physical properties of the commodity, and therefore is not completely abstract.
Use value is realized only by consumption.
Exchange values express something equal, but masks something inside it.
When we equate two commodities through exchange-value, both of the two things must be reducible to a third. It exists in common to something both.
If we do not consider the use values of commodities, the remaining common property is of labor.
When we abstract the commodity, we abstract not only its use value but also the products of labor within it.
When commodities are exchanged, the exchange value manifests independent of the use value; yet value remains.
The common dissolver is value; exchange value is the only way a commodity can be expressed.
A use value only has value because human labor is embodied in it. This labor is not of any individual laborer but the total labor power of society. Each unit of labor power is standardized.
Power looms in England reduced the amount of labor needed to convert $x$ yarn into cloth by one half. The value of hand-loom weaves falls by half because the product of their one hour is one-half of the product of the social labor (with power looms).
Magnitude of value is determined by socially necessary labor. Commodities which embody the same quantity of labor have the same value.
Value varies directly with quantity and inversely with productiveness of labor.
Things can have use-value but not value; things cannot have value but not use-values.

Section 2. The Two-fold Character of the Labor Embodied in Commodities

A commodiy is a complex of use-value and exchange-value. Labor has the same two-fold character.
Use values are only exchanged with other different use values.
Labor is the creator of use value.
Use values (‘bodies’ of commodities) are combinations of matter and labor.
- Echoing Lockean ideas?
All skilled labor can be reduced to a multiplication of unskilled labor.
All commodities are equal in the right proportions.
An increase in the quantity of use values is an increase in material wealth.
Increased material wealth may lead to decrease in value.
Human labor creates and forms the value of commodities and use values.

Section 3. The Form of Value or Exchange-Value

Commodities reside in ‘natural’ form as they exist. They have a physical and a value form.
Value only manifests in social relation of commodity to commodity.
Commodities have the money form.
The simplest way to express the value of a single commodity is the relation between values of two commodities.
Relative and equivalent form. We cannot express commodities in terms of themselves; it must be expressed relatively, and presupposes the value of an equivalent. A single commodity cannot assume both relative and equivalent form
The relative form assumes an independent expression; the equivlaent form is only realized as comparable with the relative form.
Human labor power is not itself value; it only becomes value when embodied in an object.
- Prostitution?
In the equivalent position, we see nothing but value in its bodily form.

\[\text{Relative form} = \alpha \text{Equivalent form}\]

By means of value relation, the bodily form of commodity $B$ becomes the value form of commodity $A$.Commodity $A$ converts $B$ into the substance which expresses $A$’s value. $A$ has taken the form of relative value.
The relative value of a commodity $A$ rises and falls directly with the value of $A$, supposing that the value of $B$ is constant; and vice versa.
The same change in relative value can arise from opposite causes (relative or equivalent value increases/decreases in opposite directions)
When a commodity is said to be in equivalent form, it serves the purpose of direct exchange. The value is not quantiative; it is only a definite quantity of a thing.
When a commodity acts as an equivlaent, no quantiative determination is expressed.
The equivalent expresses value as it is - an engimatic form which ‘escapes the notice of the bourgeois political economist, until this form, completely developed, confronts him in the shape of money.’
Concrete labor becomes the form under which abstract labor manifests itself through the equivalent form, and the labor of private individuals maniests itself as directly social labor.
Aristotle attempted to reconcile exchange in the absence of a value concept. There is, say, no common unit which directly allows for the equating of five beds and one house. Marx proposes this common substance is human labor.
Elementary form of value of a commodity is contained in the expression relating the value relation to a different commodity
The value of a commodity obtains independence via manifestation by manifesting as exchange-value.
Marx now goes and revises: a commodity is not both a use value and an exchange value. A commodity is a use value and a value, which together assumes the form of exchange value.
- The commodity whose value a commodity is expressed is use-value; the commodity in which the value is expressed is exchange-value.
A product becomes a commodity when labor is expressed as one of the qualities of the product - i.e. its value.
Every elementary relative value form of a commodity correpsonds to the single equivalent form of another commodity.
It is not the exchange proportions of commodites which regulates the magnitude of value, but vice versa.
Expanded relative form will be infinite and interminable.
All commodites express their value in an elementary form and with unity. The general form of value: the entire world of commodities is represented with the equivalent of a single commodity.
The elementary and expanded value forms express the value of each commodity in terms of a single commodity of a different kind. The general form brings commodites into relation with each other as values, manifesting as exchange values. A single commodity plays the role of the equivalent, and becomes exchangeable with all other commodities.
Existence of commodities as values is purely social. In the world of commodities, the character possessed by all labor constitutes a particular social character.
The development of the equivalent form is the result of the development of the relative form.
‘Antagonism’ between relative form of value and equivalent form of value.
Only one single commodity at a time can completely expand its relative value
In the general form of value, the universal equivalent form can be assumed by any commodity. A socially identified commodity becomes the money commodity. There is no difference functionally between the general form and the money form, except the money is explicitly identified as the universal equivalent form in the money-form.

Section 4. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

A commodity appears easily understood, but in fact it is lived very in a very queer way.
A commodity is easily understood from the perspective of demand: it satisfies human wants.
A commodity is something transcendent, beyond its mere physical form.
The mystery of the commodity is such: the social relations between producers is epresents as a relation between products. The social relation exists not beteen producers but products of labor.
Fetishism of products of labor: the social qualities of the commodity become obscured, unpercievable.
Only by being exchanged is there one uniform social condition which emerges. When we exchange products, we equate different ofrms of labor as a homogenous unit of human labor, even though we are not aware of it.
The establisment of money leads to characters as values; money form conceals the social character of private labor, and social relations between producers.
It is clearly absurd to compare coats with linen. But we can conceal the absurdity of this labor relation with a universal equivalent.
The key mystery of the commodity comes fom its obscuring of the social character of the commodity and the labor within it.
Religion is replaced by a system of capital when relations of life already offer reasonable explanations for relations between other people and Nature.
The formula of production which dominates over man instead of vice versa is natural to the brougeoisie.
Exchange value is of interest to human consumers but is not part of the commodity. Rather, it is exchange value which is inside the comodity.

2. Exchange

Commodities cannot cause resistance against man’s exchange of it.
Exchange - objects which change in private possession. People exist as representatives of owners of commodities.
A commodity looks at every other commodity as the bodily expression of its own value.
The owner of the commodity does not have any immediate use-value for the commodity.
*All commodities are not use values for their owners and use values for their non-owners.**
To the owner of a commodity, every other commodity is in equivalent form. The owned commodity is the universal equivalent.
- This applied to every commodity owner, so no comodity acts as a single universal equivlaent.
- Exchange before the advent of money amounts to “transacting before thinking”
Money is the social recognition of a single universal equivalent.
Objects become exchangeable through the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them.
Reciprocal alienation and interdependence is not found in common-property systmes, such as the patrirchal family
“Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver”
When an owner exchanges a commodity for money, they now possess the value-form, not the value of the commodity.
Gold and silver are direct abstract incarnations of human labor.

3. Money, or the Circulation of Commodities

Section 1. The Measure of Values

It will be assumed that gold is the money commodity.
Money must be the universal measure of value.
Money as a measure of value is given by the common substance in all commodities - labor-time.
Does money have a price? Money is its own equivalent (?)
Money is a measure of value (incarnation of human labor) and the standard of price (a fixed weight of metal).
A money unit must be stable and not subject to variation, such that it remains a standard of price. But it must be a product of labor.
Change in the value of gold does not affect it as a standard o fprice.
A fall in prices results only from a fall in the value of commodities, or from a rise in the value of money.
Price is the money-name of the labor realized in a commodity.
Price obscures all richness in a value relation.
When a commodity’s value is represented in price, it is exchanged with the money-commodity which may or may not express the real value magnitude.
Price ceases to express value. Objects which are not commodities by themselves (conscience, honor) are capable of acquiring, through being sold, the form of commodities. Therefore, an object can have price but not value.
The price of uncultivated land is, according to Marx, wit no value.
The exchange of commodities: $C - M - C$, Commodity - Money - Commodity. The entire result, $C \to C$, concerns the circulation of materialized social labor.
- $C \to M$. This is sale. The labor expended upon the commodity must be socially useful. The purchaser spends the amount of labor time that is on average needed to produce the product. Te price is the money-name of the social labor realized in the commodity. Because of competition among producers in the market, each commodity which is the same is sold at the same price, represented a socially fixed quantity of homogenous human labor
- Every sale is a purchase; the conversion of a commodity into money is also the conversion of money into a commodity. Thus, $(C \to M) \iff (M \to C)$.
- $M \to C$. This is purchase. Money depicts itslef in the bodies of all other commodities. The last metamorphasis of a commodity is the collection of first-order metamorphoses of other commodities.
Each commodity metamorphasis circuit is linked not end-to-end but middle-to-end and end-to-middle with other commodity metamorphasis circuits; this forms the circulation of commodities.
The exchange of commodities escapes bounds of indirect barter and gives rise to the circulation of the materializations of social labor.
The circulation of commodities does not necessarily imply an equilibrium between slaes and purchases: every seller brings his buyer to market with him. A single person enacts both sale and purchase, polar opposites; yet they are separate and independent.
If the time between $C \to M$ and $M \to C$ is too great - i.e. money-form accumulation, hoarding - the oneness of selling and buying asserts itself in the form of crisis.
Value is given by the possibility of exchange.
The circulation of material products of labor must be begun and ended with value in the form of a commodity.
Return of money is caused by renewal of circulation; the currency of money is constituted by its constant motion away from its origin.
Commodities are constantly being passed in the direction opposite to that of money, from non-use-values to use-values.
Money is a means of circulation only because of the reality of the values inside commodities.
Reciprocal displacement between commodity and money form the $C \to M \to C$ circulatory exchange.
Alienated form of the commodity - the money form in the seller’s hand. Absolute alienated form of the commodity - the money form which leaves the seller’s form.
Commodites infect each other with their value relations such that prices converge to representing ‘true’ value (i.e. comparative value)
The quantity of the medium of circulation is deterined by the sum of the prices that have to be realiaed.
The quantity of money functioning as the circulating medium is the sum of the prices of commodities divided by the number of moves.
The slowing of currency reflects the isolation of the processes of use-aspects to value-aspects and value-aspects to use-aspects.
Given the sum of the values of commodities and the average velocity of metamorphoses, the quantity of money-currncy depends on the value of the precious metal.
- Erroneous assertion - money is without a value and prices are determined by the quantity of the circulating medium. Conventional inflation reasoning.
The coin is prouced and regulated State, and acquires its symbolic value through State enforcement..
Coins of the same denomination can become different in value because they are different in weight.
The function of a coin becomes, however, independent of all value.
Money is a symbol of value; its functional existence absorbs its material existence.

Section 3. Money

Money is the commodity which functions as a measure of value.
There is a desire to hold onto money; commodities are sold not to purchase other commodities, but to obtain the money-form.
We have sales witout purchases: this allows for accumulation of the money-form of value in the owners of commodities.
Money, as every commodity, does away with distinctions; and it can become the private property of individuals; money is also social power, and therefore social power can become within the possession of individuals.
The value of a commodity measures its attraction to other elements of material wealth, and indicates the social wealth of its owner.
To a ‘barbarian’ commodity owner, value is equivalent to the value-form.
The desire for hoarding is intrisically unsatiable. Money has no bounds on efficacy from a qualitative standpoint becuase it is the universal equivalent convertible with every other commodity, but is also limited from a quantiative standpoint; this antagonism spurs the hoarder.
Hard work, saving, and avarice are the cardinal virtues of hoarding: to seel much and buy little, to support consumption.
With the development of circulation, the alienation of commodities (purchase?) becomes separated from the realization of their prices (sale).
The relationship between the creditor and the debtor has been the principal class antagonism throughout history.
The equivalence of commodities and money is no longer simultaneous.
The seller converts the commodity into money to satisfy a want, the hoarder does so to accumulate money-fomrs, the debtor does so in order to pay; the value-form becomes the end and aim of the sale rather than the intermediary.
The debtor-buyer converts money back into commodities before he has turned commodities into money.
Practically, money does not serve as the circulating medium but the indiivudal incarnation of social labor, an independent form of existence of exchange-value, and as the universal commodity.
Monetary crises - contradictions between money as a means and as an end.A lenghtening chain of payments develops; the use-value of commodities becomes valueless; money becomes the only wealth. The antithesis between commodities and the value-form comes to a head.
Money represents commodities long withdrawn from circulation but still appears to be current; commodities circulate with value-forms drifting elsewhere.
Credit-money is derived from money as a means of payment.
Money becomes the commodity which is the universal subject of all contracts; it serves as the means of payments beyond the circulation of commodities - rents, taxes, and so on.
Money as a medium of payment forces the necessity of accumulation.
- When money leaves its oriign sphere of circulation, it becomes the standard and is universally recognized.

4. The General Formula for Capital

Circulation of commodities is the beginning place of capital.
Capital first takes form in money. All new capital is birthed in the form of money.
We have the transfiguration $C \to M \to C$, but we also have $M \to C \to M$. Money that circulates in the later formula is capital.
- Personal note - This is really profound to me
The $M \to C \to M$ circuit consists of a purchase and a sale.
Similarities between the two circuits
- Both are resolvable into two antithetical phases - the sale and th epurchase.
- Both involve a commodity and a money.
- Both involve a buyer and a seller.
Differences
- In one case both the initial point and the goal are commodities; in the other, it is money.
- The movement in one case is the intervention of money; yet in th eother it is the commodity.
- The buyer lays out money such that, as a seller, he may recover it. Money is not spent; it is advanced.
- The objective of C-M-C is cosumption. The objective of M-C-M is exchange-value.
Thus emerges the difference between money and capital. Capital is money used to make more money.
Money is not qualitative; the only difference is quantiative; and thus the exact form of the circuit is

\[M \to C \to M'; M' = M + \Delta M\]

Here, $\Delta M$ is surplus-value.
Because M-C-M’ ends with money, it is now interminable; for capital must be reinvested. Money ends the movmene tto begin it again.
Selling in order to buy is a satisfaction of wants. Buying in order to sell is different - the unbounded circulation of limits.
The capitalist becomes capital personified, endowed with consciousness. Use values are not the aims of the capital; nor profit in the singular sense. It is rather the eternal process of discovering surplus value.
Things which have value acquire the quality to add value itself.
Value begins and ends under the form of money.
Money and commodities are not antagonistic to each other; the capitalist knows all comodities are money.
Capital becomes endowed with a motion of its own.

M-M’, money which begets money, such is the description of Capital from the mouths of its first interpreters, the Mercentilists.

5. Contradictions in the General Formula for Capital

The inversion of the order of succession permits the expansion of value in the form of surplus value.
It is valid to asert that exchange is a transaction by which both sides gain.
In the medium of circulation, value is a condition of circulation, not its result.
In an exchange, there is nothing but a metamorphosis - change in the form of the commodity. The same exchange value remains int he hands of the owner of the commodity
Where equality exists there can be no gain.
Behind attempts to circulate commodities with use-value, we see a mix-up of use-value and exchange-value. The argument that surplus-values are productive - one sells what they do not need for something they do need. But what they are trading here is exchange-value (?)
The creation of surplus-money cannot be explained by the idea that commodities are sold above or below their value, since the prices of comodities may change but the relations reain the smae.
We cannot explai surplus-value with the existence of a class which only purchases but does not sell (e.g. a nation which requires a tribute from a producing nation and uses the tribute to purchase commodities from said producing nation).
Circulation - either between equivalents or non-equivalents - still does not produce surplus-value; it may change the distribution of value, but not the summ total of value itslef.
Surplus-value cannot be created by circulation. but surplus-value can also not be created outside of circulation.
The development of the capitalist occurs both in and out of the process of circulation.

6. The Buying and Selling of Labor-Power

Surplus value does not take case in money itself; money only realizes the price of the commodity; nor in the circulation of commodities. Thus it takes place in the first act M-C, in the purchase of a commodity.
Essential conditions to find labor-pwoer in the market as a commodity:
- Individuals must not sell their labor power whole-sale (i.e. slavery) but rather incrementally, over a specified finite period of time.
- The laborer must rather sell as a commodity his labor and not the products of his labor. A laborer can sell the latter if he has his own means of subsistence and raw materials.

“ever since his first appearance on the world’s stage, man always has been, and must still be a consumer, both before and while he is producing.”

To convert money into capital, the owner of money must meet with a free laborer; this laborer can dispose his labor power as a commodity and has nothing else to sell.
Definite historical conditions are required for a product to become a commodity, and money into capital. The emergence of capital marks a new epoch in the history of social production.
The value of labor power is determined by the labor time needed for its production and reproduction.
The production of labor power presupposes its existence. The labor time prerequisite for the production of labor-power is the time needed to produce means of subsistence.
The owner of labor power must perpetuate himself by procreation - i.e. the laborer’s children.
The value of labor power becomes the value of a definite means of subsistence.
There is a time delay between purchase and realization of use-value in the labor-time commodity. The capitalist can utilize the use-value before it is paid (e.g. every week, month, year, etc.)
All look to themself only - freedom, equality, property, Bentham.
Surplus value comes from labor-power.

7. The Labor-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value

Section 1. The Labor Process or the Production of Use-Values.

Labor is a process which both man and Nature participate in.
What differentiates the labor-power of man and that of Nature is its preconception in imagination before its realization.
Items which can be obtained simply by severing a connection to nature (fish, fruit, etc.) are gifts of Nature. The results of this severance are raw materials.
An instrument of labor is a mechanism which the laborer serves as a conductor of his activity with respect to the subject of labor
The labor process disappears into the product: the blacksmith’s hammer swings, the farmer’s picking.
Products are not just results, but also essential conditions of labor; they are use-values, means in other labor processes.
A machine which does not serve the purposes of labor is useless.
The labor process under capitalist production possesses two properties:
- The character ensures the efficiency of the work, minimizing waste and deterioration.
- The product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the immediate producer. The capitalist owns the labor power and congeals it into the product; upon sale of the product he only parts ways with the use-value. He has already the value.

Section 2. The Production of Surplus-Value.

The product used by the capitalist is a use-value, but they are produced only in that they are repositories of exchange-values.
The aim is to produce a value which has surplus value.
The value of the means of production are constituencies of the value of the product.
Two conditions:
- Value is independent of use-value, but it most be embodied in a use-value.
- Time occupied in the labor of production must not exceed the socially necessary time.
The value which labor power creates and the value o flabor power are different in magnitude; and the capitalist aims at the difference between the two. The laborer realizes its exchange value and parts with its use value, just as with any commodity. The buyer of the labor-power owns its use value now.
Equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, but surplus labor originates from teh excess in labor.
It does not matter whether labor appropriated by the capitalist is skilled or unskilled. Moreover, the reduction of skilled labor to average labor is unavoidable.

8. Constant Capital and Variable Capital

Labor adds fresh value by expending additional labor.
Labor raises the means of production from the dead by making them living factors of the labor process.
Labor both produces and preserves value.
The total value of the means of production are gradually transferred to the products, given that their use-value deteriorates.
The property that the laborer retains value while adding value to it is a gift of Nature and costs the laborer nothing but is of tremendous help to the capitalist.
The action of labor power not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over this base.
The part of capital which constitutes the means of production is constant capital. The part represented by labor-power is variable: this undergoes the alteration of value. It produces the equivalent of its own value and an excess surplus value, which can vary.

9. The Rate of Surplus Value

Section 1. The Degree of Exploitation of Labor-Power

Let $C$ represent capital; it consists of the money $c$ laid into the means of production and the sum of money $v$ expended upon labor power. Thus $C = c + v$. Let the surplus value be $s$. Thus the resulting sum is $C = c + v + s$.
$v$ relates to $s$; the dead labor is animated into living labor, variable labor.
One can calculate the absolute production of surplus value by setting $c = 0$.
The relative production of surplus value is given by $\frac{s}{v}$ - this is the rate of surplus value.
Necessary labor-time: the labor-time required for the reproduction of wages in expended labor. Necessary labor: the labor expended in necessary labor-time.
When a laborer’s labor is no longer necessary, it becomes surplus labor and has the effect of ‘creating out of nothing’.
The rate of surplus value expresses the ratio between surplus labor and necessary labor. This is the degree of exploitation of labor-power.

Section 2. The Representation of the Components of the Value of the Product by Corresponding Proportional Parts of the Product Itself

Various component parts of the value of the product can be represented as proportional parts of the product itself. The product is a result of a chain of labor applied to the natural gifts of labor, and thus we can identify how constitutencies of value manifest in physicalities of the product.

One may perceive the worker as laboring to account for the reproduction of all the machinery and also to produce surplus value.

Section 3. Senior’s Last Hour

Nassau Senior - the whole profit is derived from the last hour. Thus decreasing the length of the workday threatens not just surplus profit but gross profit.
Marx - but we are not reproducing all of the value in the single hour. The value was already congealed within the object, and one hour of time was added to it. There is nothing mystical about it.

Section 4. Surplus-Produce

SUrplus-produce - the part of the product that represents the surplus-value.
A nation’s wealth should be measured by the relative magnitude of surplus-produce.
Sum of necessary labor and surplus labor constitutes the time which is worked, i.e. the working day.

10. The Working Day

Section 1. The Limits of the Working Day

The working day is not constant; it is variable.
There are, however, limitations on the working day - the ratio between surplus labor and necessary labor must be near zero at minimum and labor in total cannot exceed 24 hours a day.
What is now the outermost limit?
Capital is dead labor, vampire like - capital has ‘one single life impulse’ - to create surplus value
The bounds of the normal working day are exceedingly elastic.

Section 2. The Greed for Surplus-Labor - Manufacturer and Boyard

Capital is not the inventor or sustainer of surplus labor; any sector of society which holds monopoly over the means of production must use surplus labor.
However, it is in capital in which the bounds on the quantity of surplus labor are raised to physical limits.
In many cases, with the corvee system, the working day is longer than the material day.
Progressive ‘small thefts’ of capital
The worker becomes understood as labor-time

Section 4. Day and Night - the Relay System

Constant capital only absorbs labor; variable capital translates it into surplus labor
Because it is impossible to fully use labor throughout day and night, a relay system emerges
Thus the machine can spin 24 hours a day and extract more surplus labor than physically in a day.

Section 5-7. The Struggle for a Normal Working Day

David Harvey - the first occurrence of class conflict in Capital
The laborer is always nothing else than their labor power
Capital does not care for the length of life of labor power - it is a ‘greedy algorithm’
Capitalist production therefore produces the deterioration of human-labor power and the premature exhaustion of labor-power.
In slavery, there is some care for the slave’s health
The population of laborers degenerates and becomes stunted; yet capital invents its own responses (profit and the good it brings)
Free competition brings out the laws of capitalist production – coercive laws – and therefore the will or morality of the capitalist is irrelevant.
The working day is a result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and laborer.
Capital keeps on pushing the working day longer and longer - “capital celebrated its orgies”
Capitalism redefined day and night, age, childhood, temporality.
Legislation may impose limits but capital always skirts around
Capital has an unrestricted passion for lenghtening the working day.
A labor as a ‘free’ agent of their labor succumbs to capitalist production.
“Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Yet out of the Civil War emerges the agitation for 8 hours.
For protection against exploitation, the worker must emerge as a class.

11. The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value

We have henceforth considered the value of labor power as in given, constant magnitudes.
The magnitude of variable capital varies with the number of workers
The mass of surplus value created is a combination of the number of workers and the degree of exploitation of each worker.
Let $S=$ mass of surplus-value, $s=$ the surplus-value given by an individual laborer on an average day, $v=$ the variable capital spent daily, $V=$ the sum total of variable capital, $P=$ the value of an average labor-power, $\frac{a'}{a}$ the degree of exploitation. We can calculate the mass of surplus value as follows:

\[S = \frac{s}{v} \cdot V + P \times \frac{a'}{a} \times n\]

The absolute limit on the average working day sets a limit on how small a workforce can be.
Thus capital tends to increase as many laborers as possible.
The mass of the surplus-value produced is determined by the rate of surplus-value and the amount of variable capital advanced.
The capitalist divides capital into constant parts (means of production) and variable parts (labor-power).
We find that surplus value is maximized by variable capital. This is contradictory because variable capital should compensate constant capital (e.g. the spinner and the baker).
Interesting - “0/0 may represent an actual magnitude”
Social working day - total number of hours worked.
The capitalist must have an initial principal capital amount, larger than the value of labor power. A laborer which does not have this amount must turn to work. Sometimes, the surplus value extracted is not enough and the capitalist must work himself, thus he is a hybrid capitalist laborer. But at a certain evolution in society, the capitalist must dedicate all his time to surplus-value creation.
The capitalist is personified capital: ensures the labor process proceeds efficiently.
Capital coerces the working class to perform more work than is ‘needed’ for self-sustenance.
The production of surplus value through extension of the working day is independent of change in the mode of production.
When we consider the process of production from the perspective of optimizing surplus value, it becomes the means of production which work the laborer, not the laborer which works the means of production. This is a deconstructive step, an inversion - the likes of Derrida and Baudrillard. It is the means of production which consumes the laborer, the laborer becomes embedded into the product.

12. Concept of Relative Surplus-Value

The laborer continues to work past the value of what he is paid for.
How can the production of surplus be increased without increasing the working day? By somehow lenghthening the period of surplus labor and simultaneously neccessarily contracting the period of necessary labor.
The capitalist can pay the laborer less, and thus the reproduction of necessary labor becomes shorter in labor-time. Yet then the laborer’s labor-power is diminished because the laborer fails to sustain their own life.
Therefore we cannot decrease the labor-time spent reproducing by reducing the wage for the value of the laborer’s labor-power, but by reducing the value itself.
Surplus value produced by prolonging the working day - absolute surplus value.
Surplus value produced by changing the ratios of surplus to necessary labor-time in the working day - relative surplus-value.
Increasing the productivity of labor in industries which supply the necessities of life decreases the value of labor-power.
A scientific analysis of competition is not possible.
The real value is not measured by labor-time but socially necessary labor time. Therefore extra-surplus value is realized by increasing labor-efficiency such that the individual value is below the social value, and the differential between individual value and social value is pocketed as exrta surplus-value. Thus it is the incentive of the capitalist to cheapen commodities by increasing the productiveness of labor.
As soon as an efficient method of production becomes general, the difference between the individual and social values of a product ceases to exist and surplus-value falls.
A commodity’s value is inversely related to the productiveness of labor, but relaitve-surplus value is directly related to it.
The capitalist has no interest in the commodity’s value. What is important is the surplus-value.
Why does the capitalist continually decrease the social value of commodities?

13. Cooperation

Capitalist production begins when capital begins to operate across a large number of laborers and yields large quantities of products. That is, it emerges in scale. Economies of scale mark, logically and historically, capitalist production.
There are substantive differences that emerge between a pre-capitalist and a capitalist system.
Capitalism changes the conditions of production to be held and consumed, ironically, in common.
At scale, the value of constant capital decreases.
All parts of work progress simultaneously in capitalist production.
Labor in common plays a large role in cooperation.
The productive labor of power is social: the power is due to cooperation. The laborer ‘strips off’ his individuality.
Laborers cannot cooperate without being brought together. Therefore capitalsm encourages cooperation.
Resistance to conditions of exploitation rise with the number of cooperating labroers. Thus capital must counteract this resistance.
Thus the capitalist hands down the task of supervision to others - a special form of wage-laborer. Hierarchy emerges from necessary production.
An immanent power in capital betowed by Nature
Cooperation is a necessary attribute of production at scale.

14. Division of Labor and Manufacture

Section 1. Two-Fold Origin of Manufacture

Manufacture arises in two ways:
1. In one workshop with a diverse set of specialties.
2. In one workshop which employs the same form of work.
The commodity becomes the social union of the workers.
Manufacture arises out of independent handicrafts and from the cooperation of workers on a single handicraft.
The decomposition of a process of production coincides with the breakdown of a commodity into its manual operations.

Section 2. The Detail Laborer and his Implements

A laborer who dedicates his entire life performing a single operation becomes an automatic specialist. Specialized detail labors can decrease labor-time required producing a single commodity and therefore increase productivity.
Manufacturing continues to reproduce the division of specialty.

Section 3. The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture - Heterogeneous Manufacture, Serial Manufacture

The watch becomes a commodity which comes together as the social product of many laborers.
Manufacture brings together many different social products of different durations and specialties. Therefore manufacture produces a differential of labor.
Manufacture creates a class of unskilled laborers and a calss of skilled laborers.
Fall in the value of labor power increases surplus value.

Section 4. Division of labor in Manufacture and Divison of Labor in Society.

Division of labor in society begins, like divison of labor in manufacture, from the opposites.
In a family, division of labor is assigned based on a “puirely physiological foundation”.
What is the difference between an economy of producers spread out across farms and producers, and an economy within a manufacture? In the former, society is bourght together by commodities; in the manufacture, it is rather labor which is the common commodity.
The capitalist mode of production in particualr produces division of labor in the workshop - a diverse form of division.

Section 5. The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture

An increase in the variable component necessitates an increase in the constant component.
Manufacture does not only subject the laborer to the command of capital but also creates a hierarchy among the laborers.
Man is made a mere fragment of his own body, an automatic motor of a fractional operation.
Marx is really sarcastic lol, p. 232 - on Adam Smith
Education of the masses violates the division of labor.
Crippling of the body and the mind is inseparable from division of labor.
Cooperation based on division of labor becomes an immediate formation.
Brave New World - we do not need to inject the different castes with deteriorating biological material, because this already happens in the mateirality of the system.

15. Machinery and Modern Industry

Section 1. The Development of Machinery

John Stuart Mill claims that not all mechanical inventions have improved the day’s work.
Machinery is but a means fo producing surplus-value.
Question: how are the instruments of labor converted from tools into machines?
The difference between tool and machine: the initiating labor force in the tool is the tool, but something else for then machine.
All fully developed machinery contains three different parts.
- Motor mechanism - what puts the whole in engine, the energy source
- Transmitting mechanism - the conversion of energy into motion.
- Tool, working machine - the ‘front-end’ which was previously used by the machine
The machine performs the smae operations as a workman did before; the tool is taken from the man and fit into a machine.
It was the invention of machines that made revolution.
The machine supercedes the workman. It becomes free from the restraint of human labor.
The individual merely becomes a factor in mechanical production.
Cooperation forms from machines working together just as it does with human laborers. (?!)
Machine as ‘mechanical monster’ with factory-filling bodies, ‘demon power’, and ‘giant limbs’
The usage of machines allows them to produce in a way different from the original manual labor method.
When production is mechanized, now we need machines to make machines. The machines which make machines need to be done with manual labor.
Machinery operates by labor in common

Section 2. The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product

Productive forces derived from natural cooperation and division of labor are not paid for by capital; they are ‘natural’ to social labor.
The laborer is set to work not with the manual tool but the machine which handles the tools.
Machinery only incrementally enters the process of surplus-value production. It never adds more value than it loses on average.
There is a difference between the machine’s value and the value transferred from the machine to the product. This is generally very large; very little value is transferred from the machine to each product. Therefore a more efficient machine adds less value to each product.
The productiveness of a machine is measured by the amount of human labor-power it replaces.
Less labor-power must be expended into producing the machinery than is displaced by the machine. The capitalist
Capitalist profit comes from unpaid surplus labor.
The machine validates the labor which went into creating the machine: the amount of value transferred depends on the productivity of the machine.
Marx insists on the social nature of technological development, against great/genius man theory.
Reducing wages decreases the want for machines.

Section 3. The Proximate Effects of Machinery on the Workman.

Modern indsutry begins by revolutionizing the mechanisms of labor as machines.
Machines redistribute the load of labor. Therefore capitalists who used machinery first sought out women and children.
Therefore the mechanistic period of capitalist production pushes the entire family intoi the capitalist workforce.
Machinery does not reduce the human load so much as it does increase the mode of exploitation.
The workman becomes a ‘slave-dealer’ by selling his family into labor.
“Capital is by nature a leveller”
Capitalist production decreases the life-times of children.
“Converting immature humans into machines for the fabrication of surplus-value” - so the distinction between the machine and the laborer does diminish.
Conflict of sex in the background of capital: the male laborer struggling against the capitalist infrastructure fails in the introduction of their wives and children into the factories.
Machinery allows for the extensive lengthening of the working day.
Capital is motivated to “reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by that repellent yet elastic natural barrier, man.” Capital as ‘automata’
“pliant and docile character of the women and children” - directly related with the redistribution of labor by machine work.
Machines deteriorate in two ways - from use and non-use (inherent deterioration). But it also undergoes ‘moral depreciation’ - its exchange value decreases due to increased production of other machines. Therefore the machine must be used to its full productive extent before it is rendered subpar by a more advanced species of machinery.
When machinery becomes more widespread in industry, the social value of a product decreases below its individual value.
Machinery allows for the conversion of variable capital into constant capital.
Machinery only increases surplus value by decreasing the number of laborers employed for some amount of capital and therefore increases efficiency.
Aristotle - if every tool could do work as it fit it, then there would be no need for the structure of work at all.
“Machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working day”
“slavery of the masses”- A normal working day becomes fixed by law; therefore labor intensifies.
Labor becomes distributed nonuniformly across the workday.
How is labor intensified?
- Shortening of the work-day allows for condensation of labor.
- Machinery becomes the objective means of increasing more labor done in a smaller amount of time.
- The workman expends more labor-power.

Section 4. The Factory

A factory is machinery organized into a system: machinery changes the number of people involved in the process and changes the distribution of time and labor.
Machinery equalizes work and reduces specialization.
Relays system
Crucial distinction between productiveness due to social awareness/training and capitalist exploitation.
“it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labor, but the instruments of labor that employ the workman.”

Section 5. The Strife Between Workman and Machine

Only when machiner is introduced does the working man fight against the machine itself.
In the 17th century, many laborers revolted against the ribbon loom.
It took time before labor directed their anger from the instruments of production to the mode.
Machinery is the most direct laborer’s competitor. It decreases the use-value and exchange-value of the workman’s labor-power.
Machinery is the most powerful tool against strikes and revolts.

Section 6. The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery

Bourgeois political economists argue that when machinery displaces workmen, the capital freed is used to employ more workers for a different task.
Fewer people will be employed with every advance in machinery.
Machinery does not set the laborer “free”
The growing wealth of the bourgoiesie gives rise to new desires.
Increase in means of production causes an increased demand for labor in new branches of production.

Section 7. Repulsion and Attraction of WOrkpeople by the Factory System

When machinery is applied to a space, the result is almost predetermined: the factory system damages the ‘old’ producers. Initially, capital attracts profits and social capital. Soon, machinery is produced by machinery.
The factory-system produces in large quantities with large expansive steps.
The factory system expands rapidly in jumps.
Laborers are constantly moved from location to location, simultaneously attracted and repulsed from employment to employment.

Section 8. Revolution Effected in Manufacture, Handicrafts, and Domestic Industry by Modern Industry

Machinery does away with cooperation based on handicrafts.
A new division of labor disrupts the old one, with particular employment of cheap labor to provide inputs to simplified machines.
Capital mobilizes another ‘army’ of workers in domestic industries.
Modern manufacturing expands beyond the factory proper: it is in general the exploitation of cheap and immature labor. Labor becomes heavier in its lightness.
“Reckless squandering of labor-power”, “robbery of conditions normally requisite for labor”.
Newspaper and book printers become imprinted with the label of “slaughterhouses” - due to labor required for book-binding.
Domestic industry - places of industry which have not yet been taken over by machinery.
Wages in domestic industries are very small and even further cramped.
Exploitation eventually reaches a natural limit. When this is the case, machinery becomes an effective introduction.
The unemployed by the introduction of machinery sets forth a fluid population of workers to handle demand surges.
The conversion of a manufacturing system to a factory system decreases the middle class and increases the concentration of capital.
Irregularity in the workman’s psychology arises from the “anarchy in production” - anarchy which exists in presupposition of laissez-faire exploitation.
The capitalist risks nothing but “the skin of the worker himself”.
Modern industry eliminates the system of manufacturing, in which each man is bound to a specialty. Instead, everyone does the same thing via reduction of work to raw labor.
- Does Marx presuppose a magical conception of technicality and the ability of technical workarounds?
The technical basis of industry now becomes revolutionary rather than conservative.
The dissolution of the family is “disgusting” - does Marx have a romantic, even traditionalist, nostalgia? No - immediately followed by a statement on the relativism of familial developments.
Capitalist development destroys the ‘redundant population’ and grows the antagonisms immanent to the processes of production into the explosion of a new society.
Capitalist production develops technology by ‘sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the laborer’.
- What does Marx mean when he says “robs” the soil of its elements, and so on? In Marxist ontology objects have the capacity for possession?

16. Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value

Both the machinery and the laborer are means of production.
The current exposition of the labor process has been strongly individuated: an individual appropriates “gifts of nature”. Eventually products become the products of collective labor.
Capitalist production is characterized by the production of surplus-value.
To be a productive laborer is a misfortune.
The prolongation of the day increases absolute surplus-value. The production of relative surplus value emerges from alternative sources which conern the distribution of labor across a constant working day.
One may think that the separation between relative and absolute surplus-value seems negligible. Relative surplus-value is absolute; absolute surplus-value is relative.
Favorable natural conditions give rise to the conditions, but not actualization, of surplus labor.
The laborer pays for the right to work with his surplus labor.
John Stuart Mill - profit arises from labor producing more than necessary labor. Capital yields a profit because the consumption of tools outweighs their production time. The capitalist contributes his labor at less-than market-price, and lends the difference at interest.
Mark engages in a critique here which demonstrates the insufficiency on ending the analysis at mere labor, and the need to consider surplus-value which in fact naturally arises from their work.

17. Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labor-Power and in Surplus-Value

The value of labor-power is equivalent to the labor needed to sustain a laborer’s life, on average.
The relative sizes of surplus-value and the value of labor-power are determined by:
1. How long the working day is (absolute surplus-value)
2. The standard intensity of labor (how much labor expended in constant time)
3. The productiveness of labor (how much product expended in constant labor)

Section 1. Length of the Working Day and Intensity of Labor Constant; Productiveness of Labor Variable

There are three governing principles on these magnitudes:
1. A working day with a fixed length always creates the same amount of value, irregardless of the productiveness. This is because the amount of human labor remains the same.
2. Surplus value and the value of labor power are inversely correlated. The sum of surplus value and the value of labor power equals the value produced in a working day.
3. Changes in surplus value is dependent on but never the cause of changes in the value of labor power. The value of labor-power is determined by the value of certain necessary commodities (for life).
Ricardo formulated these laws but conflated surplus-value and profit, rent, etc. (forms of surplus-value). In computer science terminology, Ricardo conflated the instantiation with the class.

Section 2. Working Day and Productiveness of Labor Constant; Intensity of Labor Variable

Increased intensity means that more labor is expended in a constant period of time.
The value of the product remains the same, even though more of it is expended.
If an increased intensity is to be taken into account across an industry, then the value of labor-power decreases as it is taken into account. Therefore intensity is held relative to the mean.

Section 3. Productiveness and Intensity of Labor Constant; Length of the Working Day Variable

Three laws:
1. The working day creates a varying amount of value in proportion to its length
2. Every change in the degree of exploitation arises from a change in the absolute magnitude of surplus labor (and also therefore of surplus-value, from section 1). Therefore the degree of exploitation can be expressed as a single variable.
3. The absolute value of labor-power changes only in relationship to the lengthening of surplus-labor.
When the working day is shortened, the value of labor power is unaltered, even though surplus-labor and surplus-value is decreased
When the working day is lengthened, there is no absolute change in the value of labor-power but decreases relatively; surplus-value increases absolutely and relatively.

Section 4. Simultaneous Variation in the Duration, Productiveness, and Intensity of Labor

Labor becomes less productive when the working day is increased
Intensity and productiveness of labor increase with a shortening of the working day
Time becomes shorter with technological developments: each individual has a greater chance to enhance their own well-being, but a particular class is more deprived of the power to shift their burden of labor.

“In capitalist society sparse time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labor time.”

18. Various Formulas for the Rate of Surplus-Value

The rate of surplus-value can be represented as surplus-value / variable capital. This is the degree of exploitation: the ratio between surplus-labor and necessary-labor.
Classical political economy: surplus-value / working-day, equivalent to surplus-value / product-value and surplus product / total product. However, this falsely expresses the degree of exploitation. It suggests that surplus-value can never reach 100%.
- If necessary labor $\to 0$ as is needed for the degree of exploitation $\to 1$, then surplus labor also $\to 0$ because surplus labor is a function of necessary labor. Therefore the degree of exploitation never reaches 1.
Classical PE tends to represent surplus value in comparison to the total value created hides that capital exchanges variable capital for labor-power.
unpaid labor / paid labor is a popular expression of surplus-labor / necessary-labor
The capitalist pays the value of labor-power and receives living labor-power - which produces surplus-value.
Contrary to Adam Smith - capital is the command over unpaid labor.
Capital self-expands via an uncompensated accumulation of labor.

19. The Transformation of the Value of Labor-Power into Wages

In bourgeois economies, it appears that the laborer’s wage is the price of labor - it is the natural price, the necessary price.
The value of the commodity is the quantity of labor contained within it.
What is the independent existence of labor if the value of labor is in terms of labor? The laborer, at origin, must sell a commodity.
Technically speaking, the value of a commodity is not the amount of labor realized in it, but the amount of living labor needed to produce it. Therefore the value of the commodity is not intrinsic to itself but rather to the current social totality of labor.
The concept of ‘value of labor’ is an imaginary idea.
When demand and supply are at an equillibrium, they cease to explain why the price of labor is what it is.
Classical political economy accepts a circular definition of a ‘natural price’ of labor expressed in terms of money.
The value of labor is always less than the value it produces, the value of labor-power.
The wage form masks the dichotomy between paid and unpaid labor. All labor appears as if it were paid. In slave labor, all of the slave’s labor appears as unpaid; in waged labor, all of the worker’s labor appears as for himself.
The phenomenal form of the value of labor power into wages masks the ‘in itself’; the real, actual relation.
Labor-power is the value-creating element.
Labor-power is “…beyond the cognizance of the ordinary mind”. Marx committing the Great Man move?
The capitalist, too, accounts for his profit in the buying of cheap materials and the selling of over the value.
The dynamics of wages demonstrates that wages pay for the function of labor rather than the value of labor-power.
- Changes in wages with changes in the length of the workday.
- The difference between laborers who perform the same work. - rise of racialization and genderedness, some proto-awareness?
Classical PE cannot help but to approximate the true relation, but does not consciously formulate it in explicit terms.

20. Time-Wages

Wages can take many forms. Much of classical economy conflates these forms.
There is a substantive difference between the sum of wages a laborer receives and the price of labor. The money-value of labor is given by the average daily value of labor-power divided by the length of the working day.
The longer the working days, the smaller the wages.

21. Piece-Wages

Piece-wages are a different form of time-wages, and time-wages are a form of the value/price of labor-power.
Piece-wages appear to be a measurement of embodied labor rather than labor-power.
Piece-wages measure embodied time, and time-wages measure direct time.
Piece-wages are fruitful ways to reduce wages on the basis of quality. (Parasite - pizza box folding)
Piece-wages are the basis for modern ‘domestic labor’, ‘domestic industry’.

Piece wages facilitate the interposition of parasites between the capitalist and the wage-laborer.”

Sweating system - a laborer organizes contracts with the manufacturer and exploits other laborers. The ‘subletting of labor’.
Using piece-wages allows the capitalist to more easily raise the normal degree of labor.
Piece-wages endow the laborer with a sense of individuality and freedom, liberty, independence. Piece-work raises individual wages and lowers the average.
Piece-wages are most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production.
Under legislation fixing the length of the working day, the capitalist can only incease surplus-value by intensifying labor.

22. National Differences of Wages

We have to take into account differences in nations in the translation of labor-power into wages.
Within a nation, Marx assumes the economy acts as a homogenous unit. However, on the international ‘universal’ market, such a constant nature of intensity of labor cannot be maintained.
Each nation’s development of capitalist proportion is correlated with its intensity and productivity of labor.
Nominal wages are higher in developed countries than an undeveloped ones because of the higher intensity. However, the relative price of labor is lower.

23. Simple Reproduction

Twofold circular movement:
1. Conversion of money into means of production and labor-power.
2. Process of production: production of surplus-labor from labor.
Condition of accumulation: the capitalist must be determined to sell commodities and to reap a surplus-value.
Production must be a continual process.
Every process of production is a process of reproduction. “incessant renewal”
Society must reconvert part of the products into the means of production, to continue.
If there is no surplus-value in revenue; that is, revenue serves to provide the capitalist the necessaries of consumption, then reproduction will occur in simple form: mere repetition of the process of production.
The purchase of labor-power is the prerequisite for production; the surplus-value produced by the laborer is not only used to fund the capitalist’s consumption but also as variable capital to purchase additional labor.

“What flows back to the laboer in the shape of wages is a portion of the product that is continuously reproduced by him.”

Variable capital is a particular historical form of providing for the necessaries of life and self-maintenance, for reproduction of production.
The conversion from forced labor to wage labor begins the cycle of reproduction.
When the capitalist has completely consumed the original stock of capital and reproduced it, the updated load of capital is all surplus-value appropriated without payment.
Merely by continuing the process of production (simple reproduction), all capital becomes accumulated capital (appropriated surplus-value).
The starting point of capitalist production: the alienation of labor from the product; the alienation of the subjective (labor-power) from the objective (conditions)
The laborer constantly creates new objective labor, the alienated value which exploits him.
The laborer engages in productive consumption (producing surplus-value through labor-power) and subsistence consumption. Yet these two forms of consumption are intricately tied together; subsistence consumption is reproduction of productive consumption.
The working class is as much an appendage of capital as the instruments of labor.
Capital often uses the state to enforce proprietary rights over the ‘free’ laborer.
Inanimate vs living machinery: one falls into decay, the other is self-reproductive.

24. Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital

Section 1. Capitalist Production on a Progressively Increasing Scale

Previously, we have explored how capital gives rise to surplus-value. Now, how does surplus give rise to capital?
“We can neither see nor smell in this sum of money a trace of surplus-value.” Derrida, trace
Capital value is expressed in money-form. Surplus-value begins as a portion of the gross product, the fruits of production which were not compensated for. When this product is converted into money upon liquidation, it now reaches the orgina form of capital.
What does surplus-value consist of? If it were all consumed by the capitalist class, nothing but simple reproduction would occur. Accumulation requires the conversion of some quantity of surplus value (in the ofmr of products) into capital.
Surplus-value is convertible into capital because the surplus value is already in a material form which contributes to new capital.
The circle moves from simple reproduction into a spiral.
How is original capital obtained? Political economists suggest it is by individual labor and the labor of ascendants. This is indeed true.
Creating capital out of capital
Surplus-value presupposed the purchase of labor power with original capital. This purchase is like any other purchase of a commodity.
The worker is compensated for the exchange-value and therefore alienated from the use-value.
The law of exchange requires equivalence between the exchange-values of commodities.
Workers pay for their own wages in the sense of surplus-value.
Standard microeconomic theory stipulates contracts between individuals. But the reptition of the process of accumulation forms classes from which braoder contractural relationships can be understood.
This result - the process of accumulation - is overdetermined (‘inevitable’) from the moment the laborer offers labor-power as a commodity.

Section 2. Erroneous Conception by Political Economy of Reproduction on a Progressively Increasing Scale

Classical economists may suggest that gains from profit are expended for the purpose of consumption and self-enrichments.
Yet bourgeois economy must put forth that accumulation is the first duty of every citizen; thus it is preached to save and invest.
Economists often confuse capitalist production with hoarding. Excluding money from circulation removes its accumulation. Capital is concerned with differentials; the differential of a constant sum of money is zero.
One suggestion is that all of surplus value is consumed by productive laborers (Smith, Ricardo): yet surplus-value divides itself into constant capital (the means of production) and labor-power (variable capital). Labor power is the form that variable capital is expressed as during production. The capitalist consumed labor-power (variable capital), while the labor-power of laborers consumes the means of production (constant capital)>

Section 3. Separation of Surplus Value into Capital and Revenue - the Abstinence Theory* *One of the most important sections of Capital, in my opinion. A short but important excerpt melding critical theory, sociology, economics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and even a certain type of calculus - if you look for it.

One portion of surplus value is consumed by the capital as revenue, and the other is accumulated as capital.
The ratio of revenue to capital determines the magnitude of accumulation.
The capitalist has no historical value and no right to historical existence, except as personified capital; as a subordinated player in the circulation of capital, production, consumption.
Soon, the capitalist ceases to follow direct subordination of capital: the classical capitalist looks upon individual consumption as abstinence from accumulation, a modern capitalist sees accumulation as abstinence from pleasure. Pleasure dominates, and luxury follows. And there is now a conflict between the passion for accumulation and the passion for enjoyment.
Production and reproduction on progressively increasing scales continue without intervention from the capitalist ‘abstainer’, the “queer saint”.

Section 4. Circumstances that Determine the Amount of Accumulation.

Ceteris paribus the ratio between capital and revenue, the magnitude of capital accumulated is dependent on the absolute magnitude of surplus-value.
The rate of surplus value is dependent on the rate of exploitation.
Wages are often forcibly reduced below the value of the labor.
Additional labor produced by a higher degree of exploitation can increase surplus-value without a cost in constant capital.
In extractive industries, raw materials come as gifts of nature.
Capital burrows into land and labor-power to acquire the power of expansion and self-augmentation.
Another important factor: the degree of productivity of social labor.
The capitalist consumption can increase without taking from the fund of accumulation.
Constant capital is easily reproduced: science and technology play a large rule in developing more efficient machines. The excrements of production and consumption can be churned through the reproductive process into new matter for capital.
Capital, with the power of S&HN, are given an incredible expansive power independent of the original magnitude of principal capital.
Living labor possesses a natural property - to transmit old value while it creates new value.
Bourgeois political theorists cannot disentangle the means of production and their “antagonsitic social mask”.
Through successive accumulation, the capitalist can live a more extravagant life while showing ‘abstinence’; capital increases by successive accumulation.

Section 5. The So-Called Labor Fund

Capital is not fixed, but constantly fluctuating as it divides into revenue and additional capital.
All elements of capital are furnished by labor.
Classical economy conceives of social capital as static. This fails to account for the behavior of capital.
Presuming that capital or labor is static and merely continually redistributed among workers is not only “silly”, it is an apologetic reproach to workers organizing for higher wages and similar action.

25: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

Section 1: The Increased Demand for Labor Power that Accompanies Accumulation

The most important factor in the influence of how capital grows is the composition of capital.
Composition is determined by the ratio between constant/value capital and functions as a process of production (means of production / living labor power). This is the value composition and the technical composition, respectively.
Value composition of capital - the organic composition of capital.
We can average/aggregate across different levels of abstraction to derive different compositions.
Growth of capital is dependent on the variable capital component. Capital must be re-transformed, recursive
At a certain point, the costs of capital accumulation expand to the point where there is not enough labor and wages must rise.
Simple reproduction reproduces the capital relation itself; the accumulative reproduction reproduces on a progressive scale, enacting re-incorporation continuously.

“Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat.”

Classical polticial economists incorrectly attributed accumulation to consumption by productive laborers. It was suggested that accumulated results must be distributed to the workers (trickle-down).
What these political economists do not see is that accumulation increases the masses of wage laborers who make eternel their dependent relation on their own product.
What distinguishes the bourgeois from the proletariat is not (specifically) command of land or money, but rather control of labor-power.
Accumulation proceeds in a way such that dependence on capital becomes “easy and liberal”. A larger part of their own surplus product comes back in the shape of wages - “a circle of enjoyment”.
Labor power is not sold for an exchange; it is concerned with the augmentation of capital.
Wages always necessarily imply a minimal quantity of unpaid labor resulting from the accumulation of capital.
Either the price of labor keeps risin, or accumulation diminishes. The capitalist production blocks the advances it temporarily makes (pharmakon): labor falls again - it is an excess of capital which makes exploitable labor power insufficient. Interesting discussion of excess here. A poverty of capital produces a sufficiency of labor power.
The rate of wages are dependent on the rate of accumulation; during crisis, a general fall in the price of commodities comes in turn with a rise in the value of money
Capitalist production - the relation between the accumulation of capital and the rate of wages is the relation between unpaid labor ( $\to$ capital) and necessary labor.

Section 2: Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration that Accompanies it

Economists assert that constant growth of accumulation leads to a rise in wages.
Smith - increase in labor wages increases productive powers and increases product-labor efficiency.
The growth of the means of production is an expression of the growth of labor.
The increasing differential between constant and variable capital is less than the differential between the mass of means of production and the mass of labor power.
Primitive accumulation - accumulation of capital in the hands of commodity producers is needed to kick off capitalist productions; this occurs during the transition from ahndicraft to capitalism.
Retransformation of surplus value into capital takes the form of increased cmagnitude of capital.
Thus, over time, the technical composition changes - the varaible constituent becomes smaller relative to the constant.

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Andre Ye