From Marxists Internet Archive
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Eleven: Rate and Mass of Surplus Value
In this chapter, as hitherto, the value of labour-power, and therefore the
part of the workingday necessary for the reproduction or maintenance of that
labour-power, are supposed to be given, constant magnitudes.
This premised, with the rate, the mass is at the same time given of the
surplusvalue that the individual labourer furnishes to the capitalist in a
definite period of time. If, e.g., the necessary labour amounts to 6
hours daily, expressed in a quantum of gold = 3 shillings, then 3s. is the daily
value of one labour-power or the value of the capital advanced in the buying of
one labour-power. If, further, the rate of surplusvalue be = 100%, this variable
capital of 3s. produces a mass of surplusvalue of 3s., or the labourer supplies
daily a mass of surpluslabour equal to 6 hours.
But the variable capital of a capitalist is the expression in money of the
total value of all the labour-powers that he employs simultaneously. Its value
is, therefore, equal to the average value of one labour-power, multiplied by the
number of labour-powers employed. With a given value of labour-power, therefore,
the magnitude of the variable capital varies directly as the number of labourers
employed simultaneously. If the daily value of one labour-power = 3s., then a
capital of 300s. must be advanced in order to exploit daily 100 labour-powers,
of n times 3s., in order to exploit daily n labour-powers.
In the same way, if a variable capital of 3s., being the daily value of one
labour-power, produce a daily surplusvalue of 3s., a variable capital of 300s.
will produce a daily surplusvalue of 300s., and one of n times 3s. a daily
surplusvalue of n × 3s. The mass of the surplusvalue produced is therefore
equal to the surplusvalue which the workingday of one labourer supplies
multiplied by the number of labourers employed. But as further the mass of
surplusvalue which a single labourer produces, the value of labour-power being
given, is determined by the rate of the surplusvalue, this law follows: the mass
of the surplusvalue
produced is equal to the amount of the variable capital advanced, multiplied by
the rate of surplusvalue, in other words: it is determined by the compound ratio
between the number of labour-powers exploited simultaneously by the same
capitalist and the degree of exploitation of each individual labour-power.
Let the mass of the surplusvalue be S, the surplusvalue supplied by the
individual labourer in the average day s the variable capital daily advanced in
the purchase of one individual labour-power v, the sum total of the variable
capital V, the value of an average labour-power P, its degree of exploitation
(a'/a) (surplus-labour/necessary-labour) and the number of labourers employed n;
we have:
It is always supposed, not only that the value of an average labour-power is
constant, but that the labourers employed by a capitalist are reduced to average
labourers. There are exceptional cases in which the surplusvalue produced does
not increase in proportion to the number of labourers exploited, but then the
value of the labour-power does not remain constant.
In the production of a definite mass of surplusvalue, therefore the decrease
of one factor may be compensated by the increase of the other. If the variable
capital diminishes, and at the same time the rate of surplusvalue increases in
the same ratio, the mass of surplusvalue produced remains unaltered. If on our
earlier assumption the capitalist must advance 300s., in order to exploit 100
labourers a day, and if the rate of surplusvalue amounts to 50%, this variable
capital of 300s. yields a surplusvalue of 150s. or of 100 × 3 workinghours. If
the rate of surplusvalue doubles, or the workingday, instead of being extended
from 6 to 9, is extended from 6 to 12 hours and at the same time variable
capital is lessened by half, and reduced to 150s., it yields also a
surplus-value of 150s. or 50 × 6 workinghours. Diminution of the variable
capital may therefore be compensated by a proportionate rise in the degree of
exploitation of labour-power, or the decrease in the number of the labourers
employed by a proportionate extension of the workingday. Within certain limits
therefore the supply of labour exploitable by capital is independent of the
supply of labourers. [1] On the
contrary, a fall in the rate of surplusvalue leaves unaltered the mass of the
surplus-value produced, if the amount of the variable capital, or number of the
labourers employed, increases in the same proportion.
Nevertheless, the compensation of a decrease in the number of labourers
employed, or of the amount of variable capital advanced by a rise in the rate of
surplusvalue. or by the lengthening of the working-day, has impassable limits.
Whatever the value of labour-power may be, whether the workingtime necessary for
the maintenance of the labourer is 2 or 10 hours, the total value that a
labourer can produce, day in, day out, is always less than the value in which 24
hours of labour are embodied, less than 12s., if 12s. is the money expression
for 24 hours of realised labour. In our former assumption, according to which 6
workinghours are daily necessary in order to reproduce the labour-power itself
or to replace the value of the capital advanced in its purchase, a variable
capital of 1,500s., that employs 500 labourers at a rate of surplusvalue of 100%
with a 12 hours’ workingday, produces daily a surplusvalue of 1,500s. or of 6
× 500 workinghours. A capital of 300s. that employs 100 labourers a day with a
rate of surplusvalue of 200% or with a workingday of 18 hours, produces only a
mass of surplusvalue of 600s. or 12 × 100 workinghours; and its total
value-product, the equivalent of the variable capital advanced plus the
surplus-value, can, day in, day out, never reach the sum of 1,200s. or 24 × 100
workinghours. The absolute limit of the average workingday — this being by
nature always less than 24 hours — sets an absolute limit to the compensation
of a reduction of variable capital by a higher rate of surplusvalue, or of the
decrease of the number of labourers exploited by a higher degree of exploitation
of labour-power. This palpable law is of importance for the clearing up of many
phenomena, arising from a tendency (to be worked out later on) of capital to
reduce as much as possible the number of labourers employed by it, or its
variable constituent transformed into labour-power, in contradiction to its
other tendency to produce the greatest possible mass of surplusvalue. On the
other hand, if the mass of labour-power employed, or the amount of variable
capital, increases, but not in proportion to the fall in the rate of
surplusvalue, the mass of the surplusvalue produced, falls.
A third law results from the determination, of the mass of the surplus-value
produced, by the two factors: rate of surplusvalue and amount of variable
capital advanced. The rate of surplusvalue, or the degree of exploitation of
labour-power, and the value of labour-power, or the amount of necessary
workingtime being given, it is selfevident that the greater the variable
capital, the greater would be the mass of the value produced and of the
surplusvalue. If the limit of the working-day is given, and also the limit of
its necessary constituent, the mass of
value and surplusvalue that an individual capitalist produces, is clearly
exclusively dependent on the mass of labour that he sets in motion. But this,
under the conditions supposed above, depends on the mass of labour-power, or the
number of labourers whom he exploits, and this number in its turn is determined
by the amount of the variable capital advanced. With a given rate of
surplusvalue, and a given value of labour-power, therefore, the masses of
surplusvalue produced vary directly as the amounts of the variable capitals
advanced. Now we know that the capitalist divides his capital into two parts.
One part he lays out in means of production. This is the constant part of his
capital. The other part he lays out in living labour-power. This part forms his
variable capital. On the basis of the same mode of social production, the
division of capital into constant and variable differs in different branches of
production, and within the same branch of production, too, this relation changes
with changes in the technical conditions and in the social combinations of the
processes of production. But in whatever proportion a given capital breaks up
into a constant and a variable part, whether the latter is to the former as 1:2
or 1:10 or 1:x, the law just laid down is not affected by this. For, according
to our previous analysis, the value of the constant capital reappears in the
value of the product, but does not enter into the newly produced value, the
newly created value product. To employ 1,000 spinners, more raw material,
spindles, &c., are, of course, required, than to employ 100. The value of
these additional means of production however may rise, fall, remain unaltered,
be large or small; it has no influence on the process of creation of
surplusvalue by means of the labour-powers that put them in motion. The law
demonstrated above now, therefore, takes this form: the masses of value and of
surplusvalue produced by different capitals — the value of labour-power being
given and its degree of exploitation being equal — vary directly as the
amounts of the variable constituents of these capitals, i.e., as their
constituents transformed into living labour-power.
This law clearly contradicts all experience based on appearance. Everyone
knows that a cotton spinner, who, reckoning the percentage on the whole of his
applied capital, employs much constant and little variable capital, does not, on
account of this, pocket less profit or surplusvalue than a baker, who relatively
sets in motion much variable and little constant capital. For the solution of
this apparent contradiction, many intermediate terms are as yet wanted, as from
the standpoint of elementary algebra many intermediate terms are wanted to
understand that 0/0 may represent an actual magnitude. Classical economy,
although not formulating the law, holds instinctively to it, because it is a
necessary consequence of the general law of value. It tries to
rescue the law from collision with contradictory phenomena by a violent
abstraction. It will be seen later[2]
how the school of Ricardo has come to grief over this stumblingblock. Vulgar
economy which, indeed, “has really learnt nothing,” here as everywhere
sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains
them. In opposition to Spinoza, it believes that “ignorance is a sufficient
reason.”
The labour which is set in motion by the total capital of a society, day in,
day out, may be regarded as a single collective workingday. If, e.g.,
the number of labourers is a million, and the average working-day of a labourer
is 10 hours, the social workingday consists of ten million hours. With a given
length of this workingday, whether its limits are fixed physically or socially,
the mass of surplusvalue can only be increased by increasing the number of
labourers, i.e., of the labouring population. The growth of population
here forms the mathematical limit to the production of surplusvalue by the total
social capital. On the contrary, with a given amount of population, this limit
is formed by the possible lengthening of the workingday.[3]
It will, however, be seen in the following chapter that this law only holds for
the form of surplusvalue dealt with up to the present.
From the treatment of the production of surplusvalue, so far, it follows that
not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital.
To effect this transformation, in fact, a certain minimum of money or of
exchangevalue must be presupposed in the hands of the individual possessor of
money or commodities. The minimum of variable capital is the cost price of a
single labour-power, employed the whole year through, day in, day out, for the
production of surplusvalue. If this labourer were in possession of his own means
of production, and were satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond
the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours
a day. He would, besides, only require the means of production sufficient for 8
workinghours. The capitalist, on the other hand, who makes him do, besides these
8 hours, say 4 hours’ surplus-labour, requires an additional sum of money for
furnishing the additional means of production. On our supposition, however, he
would have to employ two labourers in order to live, on the surplusvalue
appropriated daily, as well as, and no better than a labourer, i.e., to be able
to satisfy his necessary wants. In this case the mere maintenance of life would
be the end of his production, not the increase of wealth; but this latter is
implied in capitalist production. That he may live only twice
as well as an ordinary labourer, and besides turn half of the surplus-value
produced into capital, he would have to raise, with the number of labourers, the
minimum of the capital advanced 8 times. Of course he can, like his labourer,
take to work himself, participate directly in the process of production, but he
is then only a hybrid between capitalist and labourer, a “small master.” A
certain stage of capitalist production necessitates that the capitalist be able
to devote the whole of the time during which he functions as a capitalist, i.e.,
as personified capital, to the appropriation and therefore control of the labour
of others, and to the selling of the products of this labour.[4]
The guilds of the middle ages therefore tried to prevent by force the
transformation of the master of a trade into a capitalist, by limiting the
number of labourers that could be employed by one master within a very small
maximum. The possessor of money or commodities actually turns into a capitalist
in such cases only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds
the maximum of the middle ages. Here, as in natural science, is shown the
correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely
quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.[5]
The minimum of the sum of value that the individual possessor of money or
commodities must command, in order to metamorphose himself into a capitalist,
changes with the different stages of development of capitalist production, and
is at given stages different in different spheres of production, according to
their special and technical conditions. Certain spheres of production demand,
even at the very outset of capitalist production, a minimum of capital that is
not as yet found in the hands of single individuals. This gives rise partly to
state subsidies to private persons, as in France in the time of Clobber, and as
in many German states up to our own epoch, partly to the formation of societies
with legal monopoly for the exploitation of certain branches of industry and
commerce, the forerunners of our modern joint stock companies.[6]
Within the process of production, as we have seen, 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
workingclass to do more work than the narrow round of its own lifewants
prescribes. As a producer of the activity of others, as a pumper-out of
surpluslabour 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 surplusvalue — in the
form hitherto considered by us — by means of simple extension of the
workingday, proved, therefore, to be independent of any change in the mode of
production itself. It was not less active in the oldfashioned bakeries than in
the modern cotton factories.
If we consider the process of production from the point of view of the simple
labour process, the labourer stands in relation to the means of production, not
in their quality as capital, but as the mere means and material of his own
intelligent productive activity. In tanning, e.g., he deals with the
skins as his simple object of labour. It is not the capitalist whose skin he
tans. But it is different as soon as we deal with the process of production from
the point of view of the process of creation of surplusvalue. The means of
production are at once changed into means for the absorption of the labour of
others. It is now no longer the labourer that employs the means of production,
but the means of
production that employ the labourer. Instead of being consumed by him as
material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment
necessary to their own lifeprocess, and the lifeprocess of capital consists only
in its movement as value constantly expanding, constantly multiplying itself.
Furnaces and workshops that stand idle by night, and absorb no living labour,
are “a mere loss” to the capitalist. Hence, furnaces and
workshops constitute lawful claims upon the nightlabour of the work-people. The
simple transformation of money into the material factors of the process of
production, into means of production, transforms the latter into a title and a
right to the labour and surpluslabour of others. An example
will show, in conclusion, how this sophistication, peculiar to and
characteristic of capitalist production, this complete inversion of the relation
between dead and living labour, between value and the force that creates value,
mirrors itself in the consciousness of capitalists. During the revolt of the
English factory lords between 1848 and 1850, “the head of one of the oldest
and most respectable houses in the West of Scotland, Messrs. Carlile Sons &
Co., of the linen and cotton thread factory at Paisley, a company which has now
existed for about a century, which was in operation in 1752, and four
generations of the same family have conducted it” ... this “very intelligent
gentleman” then wrote a letter[7]
in the Glasgow Daily Mail of April 25th, 1849, with the title, “The
relay system,” in which among other things the following grotesquely naïve
passage occurs: “Let us now ... see what evils will attend the limiting to 10
hours the working of the factory.... They amount to the most serious damage to
the millowner’s prospects and property. If he (i.e., his “hands”) worked
12 hours before,and is limited to 10, then every 12 machines or spindles in his
establishment shrink to 10, and should the works be disposed of, they will be
valued only as 10, so that a sixth part would thus be deducted from the value of
every factory in the country.”[8]
To this West of Scotland bourgeois brain, inheriting the accumulated
capitalistic qualities of “four generations.” the value of the means of
production, spindles, &c., is so inseparably mixed up with their property,
as capital, to expand their own value, and to swallow up daily
a definite quantity of the unpaid labour of others, that the head of the firm of
Carlile & Co. actually imagines that if he sells his factory, not only will
the value of the spindles be paid to him, but, in addition, their power of
annexing surplusvalue, not only the labour which is embodied in them, and is
necessary to the production of spindles of this kind, but also the surpluslabour
which they help to pump out daily from the brave Scots of Paisley, and for that
very reason he thinks that with the shortening of the workingday by 2 hours, the
selling-price of 12 spinning machines dwindles to that of 10!
Footnotes
1.
This elementary law appears to be unknown to the vulgar economists, who,
upside-down Archimedes, in the determination of the market-price of labour by
supply and demand, imagine they have found the fulcrum by means of which, not to
move the world, but to stop its motion.
2.
Further particulars will be given in Book IV.
3.
“The Labour, that is the economic time, of society, is a given portion, say
ten hours a day of a million of people, or ten million hours.... Capital has its
boundary of increase. This boundary may, at any given period, be attained in the
actual extent of economic time employed.” (“An Essay on the Political
Economy of Nations.” London, 1821, pp. 47, 49.)
4.
“The farmer cannot rely on his own labour, and if he does, I will maintain
that he is a loser by it. His employment should be a general attention to the
whole: his thresher must be watched, or he will soon lose his wages in corn not
threshed out, his mowers reapers, &c., must be looked after; he must
constantly go round his fences; he must see there is no neglect; which would be
the case if he was confined to any one spot.” (“An Inquiry into the
Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions and the Size of Farms, &c.
By a Farmer.” London, 1773, p. 12.) This book is very interesting. In it the
genesis of the “capitalist farmer” or “merchant farmer,” as he is
explicitly called, may be studied, and his selfglorification at the expense of
the small farmer who has only to do with bare subsistence, be noted. “The
class of capitalists are from the first partially, and they become ultimately
completely, discharged from the necessity of the manual labour.” (“Textbook
of Lectures on the Political Economy of Nations. By the Rev. Richard Jones.”
Hertford 1852. Lecture III., p. 39.)
5.
The molecular theory of modern chemistry first scientifically worked out by
Laurent and Gerhardt rests on no other law. (Addition to 3rd Edition.) For the
explanation of this statement, which is not very clear to nonchemists, we remark
that the author speaks here of the homologous series of carbon compounds, first
so named by C. Gerhardt in 1843, each series of which has its own general
algebraic formula. Thus the series of paraffins: CnH2n+2,
that of the normal alcohols: CnH2n+2O;
of the normal fatty acids: CnH2nO2
and many others. In the above examples, by the simply quantitative addition of
CH2 to the molecular formula, a qualitatively different
body is each time formed. On the share (overestimated by Marx) of Laurent and
Gerhardt in the determination of this important fact see Kopp, “Entwicklung
der Chemie.” Munchen, 1873, pp. 709, 716, and Schorkmmer, “The Rise and
Development of Organic Chemistry.” London, 1879, p. 54. — F. E..
See Letter
from Marx to Engels, 22 June 1867
For Hegel’s formulation of the idea in the Logic,
see Remark:
Examples of Such Nodal Lines; the Maxim, ‘Nature Does Not Make Leaps’.
6.
Martin Luther calls these kinds of institutions: “The Company Monopolia.”
7.
Reports of Insp. of Fact., April 30th, 1849, p. 59.
8.
l.c., p. 60. Factory Inspector Stuart, himself a Scotchman, and in contrast to
the English Factory Inspectors, quite taken captive by the capitalistic method
of thinking, remarks expressly on this letter which he incorporates in his
report that it is “the most useful of the communications which any of the
factoryowners working with relays have given to those engaged in the same trade,
and which is the most calculated to remove the prejudices of such of them as
have scruples respecting any change of the arrangement of the hours of work.”
Transcribed by Zodiac
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