Chapter III — The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value
1. The Labour Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value
The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting its seller to work. This labour to produce commodities at first turns out use-values, and in this property it is independent of the specific relation between capitalist and labourer... Description of the labour process as such. (Pp. 141-49.)
The-.labour process, on a capitalist basis, has two peculiarities. L The labourer works under the capitalist's control. 2. The product is the capitalist's property, since the labour process is now only a process between two things purchased by the capitalist: labour-power and means of production. (P. 150.)
But the capitalist does not want the use-value produced for its own sake, but only as the depository of exchange-value and especially of surplus-value. Labour under this condition — where the commodity was a unity of use-value and exchange-value — becomes the unity of the production process and of the process of creating value. (P. 151.)
Thus the quantity of labour objectified in the product is to be investigated.
Yarn, for example. Let 10 lbs. of cotton be necessary for making it, say 10 shillings, and instruments of labour, whose wear and tear are inevitable in the spinning — here denoted in brief as spindle share — say 2 shillings. Thus, there are 12 shillings' worth of means of production in the product, i.e., inasmuch as 1) the product has become an actual use-value, in this case yarn; and 2) only the socially necessary labour-time was represented in these instruments of labour. How much is added to it by the labour of spinning?
Thus, the labour process is here viewed from an altogether different angle. In the value of the product the labours of the cotton-planter, of the spindle-maker, etc., and of the spinner, are commensurable, qualitatively equal parts of general, human, necessary value-creating labour, and therefore distinguishable only quantitatively, and for that very reason quantitatively comparable by the length of time, presupposing that it is socially necessary labour-time, for only the latter is value-creating.
Assumed the value of a day's labour-power is 3 shillings, and that it represents 6 hours of labour, that 1[2]/[3] lbs. of yarn are made per hour, hence in 6 hours: 10 lbs. of yarn from 10 lbs. of cotton (as above); then 3 shillings of value have been added in 6 hours, and the value of the product is 15 shillings (10 + 2 + 3 shillings) or a shilling and a half per pound of yarn.
But in this case there is no surplus-value. This is of no use to the capitalist. (Vulgar-economic humbug,[183] p. 157.)
We assumed that the value of a day's labour-power was 3 shillings, because V2 working-day, or 6 hours, is incorporated in it. But the fact that only '/[2] working-day is required to maintain the worker for 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. The value of labour-power and the value it creates are two different quantities. Its useful property was only a conditio sine qua non; but what was decisive was the specific use-value of labour-power in being the source of more exchange-value than it has itself. (P. 159.)
Hence, the labourer works 12 hours, spins 20 lbs. of cotton worth 20 shillings and 4 shillings' worth of spindles, and his labour costs 3 shillings: total — 27 shillings. But in the product there are embodied: four days' labour in the shape of spindles and cotton, and one day's labour of the spinner, in all five days at 6 shillings totalling 30 shillings' value of product. We have a surplus-value of 3 shillings: money has been converted into capital. (P. 160.) All the conditions of the problem are fulfilled. (Details p. 160.)
As a value-creating process, the labour process becomes a process of producing surplus-value the moment it is prolonged beyond the point where it delivers a simple equivalent for the paid-for value of labour-power.
The value-creating process differs from the simple labour process in that the latter is considered qualitatively, the former quantitatively, and only to the extent that it comprises socially necessary labour-time. (P. 161, details p. 162.)
As the unity of labour process and value-creating process, the production process is the production of commodities; as the unity of labour process and the process of producing surplus-value it is the process of capitalist production of commodities. (P. 163.)
Reduction of complex labour to simple labour. (Pp. 163-65.)
2. Constant and Variable Capital
The labour process adds new value to the object of labour, but at the same time it transfers the value of the object of labour to the product, thus preserving it by merely adding new value. This double result is attained in this manner: the specifically useful qualitative character of labour converts one use-value into another use-value and thus preserves value; the value-creating, abstractly general, quantitative character of labour, however, adds value. (P. 166.)
E.g., let the productivity of spinning labour multiply sixfold. As useful (qualitative) labour it preserves in the same period of time six times as many instruments of labour. But it adds only the same new value as before, i.e., in each pound of yarn there is only [1]/[6] of the new value previously added. As value-creating labour it accomplishes no more than before. (P. 167.) Conversely, if the productivity of spinning labour remains the same, but the value of the instruments of labour rises. (P. 168.)
The instruments of labour transfer to the product only that > value which they lose themselves. (P. 169.) This is the case in differing degree. Coal, LUBRICANTS, etc., are consumed completely, raw materials take on a new form. Instruments, machinery, etc., transmit value only slowly and by parts, and the wear and tear are calculated by experience. (Pp. 169-70.) But the instrument remains continually as a whole in the labour process. Therefore, the same instrument counts as a whole in the labour process but only partly in the process of producing surplus-value, so that the difference between the two processes is reflected here in material factors. (P. 171.) Conversely, the raw material, which forms waste, enters wholly into the process of producing surplus-value, and only [partly] into the labour process, since it appears in the product minus the waste. (P. 171.)
But in no case can an instrument of labour transfer more exchange-value than it possessed itself — in the labour process it acts only as a use-value and hence can give only the exchange-value that it possessed previously. (P. 172.)
This preserving of value is very advantageous to the capitalist but costs him nothing. (Pp. 173, 174.)
Yet the preserved value only reappears, it was already present, and only the labour process adds new value. That is, in capitalist production, surplus-value, the excess of the product's value over the value of the consumed elements of the product (means of production and labour-power). (Pp. 175, 176.)
Herewith have been described the forms of existence which the original capital value takes on in dropping its money-form, in being converted into factors of the labour process: (1) in the purchase of instruments of labour; (2) in the purchase of labour-power.
The capital invested in instruments of labour does not therefore alter the magnitude of its value in the production process. We call it constant capital.
The portion invested in labour-power does change its value; it produces: 1) its own value, and 2) surplus-value—it is variable capital. (P. 176.)
(Capital is constant only in relation to the production process specifically given, in which it does not change; it can consist sometimes of more, sometimes of fewer instruments of labour, and the purchased instruments of labour may rise or fall in value, but that does not affect their relationship to the production process. P. 177. Likewise, the percentage in which a given capital is subdivided into constant and variable capital may change, but in any given case the c remains constant and the v variable. P. 178.)'
3. The Rate of Surplus-Value
C V C=£500=410 + 90. At the end of the labour process in which v
C V S is turned into labour-power we get 410 + 90 + 90 = 590. Let us assume c consists of 312 raw material, 44 auxiliary material, and 54 wear and tear of machinery, in all 410. Let the value of all the machinery be 1,054. If this were entered as a whole, we would get 1,410 for c on both sides of our calculation; the surplus-value would remain 90 as before. (P. 179.)
Since the value of c merely re-appears in the product, the value of the product we get differs from the value created in the process; the latter, therefore, equals not c + v + s, but v + s. Hence the magnitude of c is immaterial to the process of producing surplus-value, i.e., c=o. (P. 180.) This also takes place in practice in commercial accounting, e.g., in calculating a country's profit from its industry, imported raw material is deducted. (P. 181.) Cf. Vol. Ill [1 8 4] for the ratio of surplus-value to total capital.
Hence: the rate of surplus-value is s:v, in the above case 90:90=100%.
The labour-time during which the labourer reproduces the value of his labour-power — under capitalist or other conditions — is the necessary labour;what goes beyond that,producing surplus-value for the capitalist, surplus-labour. (Pp. 183, 184.) Surplus-value is congealed surplus-labour, and only the form of extorting it differentiates the various social formations.
Examples of the incorrectness of including c, pp. 185-96. (Senior.)"(1)
The sum of the necessary labour and the surplus-labour equals the working day.
4. The Working Day
The necessary labour-time is given. The surplus-labour is variable, but within certain limits. It can never be reduced to nil, since then capitalist production ceases. It can never go as high as 24 hours for physical reasons, and, moreover, the maximum limit is always affected by moral grounds as well. But these limits are very elastic. The economic demand is that the working-day should be no longer than for normal wear and tear of the worker. But what is normal? An antinomy results and only force can decide. Hence the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class for the normal working day. (Pp. 198-202.)
Surplus-labour in earlier social epochs. As long as the exchange-value is not more important than the use-value, surplus-labour is milder, e.g., among the ancients; only where direct exchange-value — gold and silver — was produced, surplus-labour was terri-ble. (P. 203.) Likewise in the slave states of America until the mass production of cotton for export. Likewise corvée labour, e.g., in Romania.
Corvée labour is the best means of comparison with capitalist exploitation, because the former fixes and shows the surplus-labour as a specific labour-time to be performed — Règlement organique[185] of Wallachia. (Pp. 204-06.)
The English FACTORY ACTS are negative expression of the greed for surplus-labour, just as the foregoing was its positive expression.
The FACTORY ACTS. That of 1850—(p. 207). 10 v
[2] hours and 7 7[2] on Saturdays=60 hours per week. Millowners' profit through evasion. (Pp. 208-11.)
Exploitation in unrestricted or only later restricted branches: lace industry (p. 212), POTTERIES (p. 213), lucifer matches (p. 215), wall-paper (pp. 215-17), baking (pp. 217-22), railway employees (p. 223), seamstresses (pp. 223-25), blacksmiths (p. 226), day and night workers IN SHIFTS: (a) metallurgy and the metal industry (pp. 227-36).
These facts prove that capital regards the labourer as nothing else than labour-power, all of whose time is labour-time as far as this is at all possible at a given moment, and that the length of life of labour-power is immaterial to the capitalist. (Pp. 236-38.) But is this not against the interests of the capitalist? What about the replacement of what is rapidly worn out? The organised slave trade in the interior of the United States has raised the rapid wearing out of slaves to an economic principle, exactly like the supply of labourers from the rural districts in Europe, etc. (P. 239.) POORHOUSE SUPPLY. (P. 240.) The capitalist sees only the continuously available surplus-population and wears it out. Whether the race perishes—après moi le déluge.a Capital is reckless of the health and length of life of the labourer, unless it is forced by society to show consideration ... and free competition makes the inherent laws of capitalist production hold good as external coercive laws for every individual capitalist. (P. 243.) Establishment of a normal working day—the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and worker.
At the beginning laws were made to raise working-time; now to lower it. (P. 244.) The first STATUTE OF LABOURERS, 23rd Edward III, 1349, was passed under the pretext that the plague had so decimated the population that everyone had to do more work. Hence maximum wages and limit of the working day were fixed by law. In 1496, under Henry VII, the working day of agricultural labourers and all ARTIFICERS continued from 5 a.m. to between 7 and 8 p.m. in summer — March to September, with 1 hour, 1 [1]/[2] hours and ll[2] hour, in all 3 hours' break. In winter it was from 5 a.m. to dark. This statute was never strictly enforced. In the 18th century the whole week's labour was not yet available to capital (with the exception of agricultural labour). Cf. controversies of that time. (Pp. 248-51.) Only with modern large-scale industry was this, and more, achieved; it broke down all bounds and exploited the workers most shamelessly. T h e proletariat resisted as soon as it recovered consciousness. T h e five acts of 1802-33 were only nominal, since there were no inspectors. Only the Act of 1833 created a normal working day in the four textile industries: from 5.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., during which time YOUNG PERSONS from 13 to 18 years of age could be employed only 12 hours with 1 7 [2] hours' pause, children from 9 to 13 years of age only 8 hours, while night work of children and YOUNG PERSONS was prohibited. (Pp. 253-55.) T h e relay system and its abuse for purposes of evasion. (P. 256.) Finally, the Act of 1844 which put women of all ages on the same basis as YOUNG PERSONS. Children limited to 6[1]/[2] hours; the relay system curbed. O n the other hand, children permitted from 8 years on. At last in 1847 the ten-hour bill forced through for women and YOUNG PERSONS. (P. 259.) The capitalists' efforts against it. (Pp. 260-68.) A FLAW in the Act of 1847 led to the compromise Act of 1850 (p. 269), which fixed the working day for YOUNG PERSONS and WOMEN — 5 days of 10 l/[2], 1 day of 7 V2 — 60 hours per week, and that between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Otherwise the Act of 1847 in force for children. T h e exception for the silk industry. (P. 270.) In 1853 the working-time for children also limited to between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. (P. 272.)
PRINTWORKS ACT in 1845 limits almost nothing — children and women can work 16 hours!
Bleaching and dyeing works 1860. Lace factories 1861; potteries and many other branches 1863 (under the Factory Act, special acts passed the same year for bleaching in the open air and baking). (P. 274.)
Large-scale industry thus at first creates the need for limiting working-time, but it is later found that the same overwork has gradually taken possession of all other branches as well. (P. 277.)
History further shows that the individual "free" labourer is defenceless against the capitalist and succumbs, especially with the introduction of women's and children's labour, so that it is here that the class struggle develops between the workers and the capitalists. (P. 277.)
In France, the twelve-hour day law for all ages and branches of work was passed only in 1848. (Cf., however, p. 253, footnote on the French child labour law of 1841, which was really enforced only in 1853, and then only in the Département du Nord.) Complete "freedom of labour" in Belgium. The eight-hour movement in America. (P. 279.)
Thus, the labourer comes out of the production process quite different than he entered. The labour contract was not the act of a free agent; the time for which he is free to sell his labour[-power] is the time for which he is forced to sell it, and only the mass opposition of the workers wins for them the passing of a law that shall prevent the workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their generation into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the inalienable rights of man comes the modest Magna Charta of the Factory Act. (Pp. 280, 281.)
5. Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value
With the rate, the mass is also given. If the daily value of one labour-power is 3 shillings, and the rate of surplus-value is 100 per cent, its daily mass=3 shillings for one labourer.
I. Since the variable capital is the money expression of the value of all the labour-powers simultaneously employed by one capitalist, the mass of the surplus-value produced by them is equal to the variable capital multiplied by the rate of surplus-value. Both factors can vary, different combinations thus arising. The mass of surplus-value can grow, even with decreasing variable capital, if the rate rises, that is, if the working day is lengthened. (P. 282.)
12* II. This increase in the rate of surplus-value has its absolute limit in that the working day can never be prolonged to the full 24 hours; hence the total value of one worker's daily production can never equal the value of 24 working hours. Thus, in order to obtain the same mass of surplus-value, variable capital can be replaced by increased exploitation of labour only within these limits. This is important for the explanation of various phenomena arising from the contradictory tendency of capital: (1) to reduce the variable capital and the number of workers employed; and (2) to produce the greatest possible mass of surplus-value nonetheless. (Pp. 283, 284.)
III. The masses of value and surplus-value produced by different capitals, with the given value and equally high degree of exploitation of labour-power, are related directly as the magnitudes of the variable components of these capitals. (P. 285.) This seems to contradict all facts.
For a given society and a given working day, surplus-value can be increased only by increasing the number of workers, i.e., the population; with a given number of workers, only by lengthening the working day. This is important, however, only for absolute surplus-value.
It now turns out that not every sum of money can be transformed into capital — that a minimum exists: the cost price of a single labour-power and of the necessary instruments of labour. In order to be able to live himself like a worker, the capitalist would have to have two workers, with a rate of surplus-value of 50 per cent, and yet save nothing. Even with eight he is still a small master. Hence, in the Middle Ages people were forcibly hampered in transformation from craftsmen into capitalists by limitation of the number of journeymen to be employed by one master. The minimum of wealth required to form a real capitalist varies in different periods and branches of business. (P. 288.)
Capital has evolved into command over labour, and sees to it that work is done regularly and intensively. Moreover, it compels the workers to do more work than is necessary for their sustenance; and in pumping out surplus-value it surpasses all earlier production systems based upon direct compulsory labour.
Capital took over labour with the given technical conditions, and at first does not change them. Hence, with the production process considered as a labour process, the worker stands in relation to the means of production not as to capital, but as to the means of his own appropriate activity. But, considered as a process of creating surplus-value, otherwise. The means of production become means of absorbing the labour of others. It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production that employ the worker. (P. 289.) Instead of being consumed by him ... they consume him as the leaven necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists only in its movement as value constantly multiplying itself.... The simple transformation of money into means of production transforms the latter into a right by law and a right by coercion to the labour and surplus-labour of others.
Endnotes
[3] Garottes—robbers who strangled their victims. In the early 1860s such attacks often occurred in London and were a subject of special debate in Parliament.
[183] Engels refers to the attempts of vulgar economists, in particular by John MacCulloch, to gloss over the source of capitalist profit and to depict the relations between capitalists and workers as an equal exchange of services. These attempts were criticised by Marx. 19 —137
[6] The phrase from Gladstone's speech on April 16, 1863, quoted here by Marx, appeared in almost all the London newspaper reports of this parliamentary session (The Times, The Morning Star, The Daily Telegraph, April 17, 1863) but was omitted in Hansard's semi-official publication of parliamentary debates in which the text was corrected by the speakers themselves. In the magazine Concordia, No. 10, March 7, 1872 the German bourgeois economist Brentano used this as a pretext for accusing Marx of unscrupulous misquotation. Marx replied to this libel in his letters to the editor of Der Volksstaat on May 23 and July 28, 1872 (see present edition, Vol. 23). After Marx's death, the same accusation was made in November 1883 by the British bourgeois economist Taylor. The lie to this assertion was given by Eleanor Marx in two letters to the magazine To-Day in February and March 1884, and then by Engels in the Preface to the fourth German edition of Capital in June 1890 and in the pamphlet Brentano Contra Marx in 1891. P. 7
[184] A reference to the future third volume of Capital which was written mainly in 1864-65. The volume was prepared for the press by Engels after Marx's death and published in 1894.
[185] On the Règlement organique see Note 176.
[2] This presumably refers to the articles "The Trade and Navigation Returns" and "Pauperism.—July 1850 and 1849", published in The Economist, August 10, 1850.
[1] On September 28, 1864 an international meeting was held at St. Martin's Hall,. Long Acre, London. It was organised by the London trade-union leaders and a group of Paris Proudhonist workers jointly with the representatives of German, Italian and other foreign workers then living in London and a number of prominent European democratic émigrés. The meeting resolved to found an International Working Men's Association (later known as the First International) and elected a Provisional Committee which shortly afterwards constituted itself as the leading body of the Association. This body, known as the General Council of the International, was mainly called the Central Council until the end of 1866. Karl Marx was elected to this Committee and later to the Sub-Committee appointed at its first meeting on October 5 to draw up the Association's programme documents. The Sub-Committee, or Standing Committee, subsequently functioned as an executive body and included the President of the Central (General) Council (until autumn 1867, when this post was abolished), the General Secretary and the corresponding secretaries for different countries. Marx did not attend its first meetings, when the Sub-Committee drew up a document consisting of an introductory declaration of principles, written by the Owenite John Weston and edited by the French petty-bourgeois democrat Victor Le Lubez, and the Rules of the Italian workers' societies, drawn up by Mazzini and translated into English by the Italian Luigi Wolff. This document, edited by Le Lubez, was discussed at the Sub-Committee meeting on October 15 about which Marx was informed too late for him to attend, and at the Provisional Committee meeting on October 18, when Marx first familiarised himself with this material. His critical assessment of it is to be found in his letter to Engels of November 4, 1864 (see present edition, Vol. 42). Circumstances did not allow Marx to prevent the Provisional Committee's approval of the declaration of principles and the Rules, but he convinced the Committee members that the document needed polishing and insisted on referring it back to the Sub-Committee for final editing. On October 20 the Sub-Committee met at Marx's house; at that meeting th^7 managed to edit only the first point of the Rules. By the next meeting of the Sub-Committee on October 27 Marx had completely revised the submitted document. He wrote a new document — the Inaugural Address of the 17* he altered the Preamble to the Rules, discarding the loosely-phrased declaration of principles, reduced the 40 points of the Rules to 10, and formulated them in a way which expressed the proletarian nature of the organisation then being founded, and eliminated all Mazzinian organisational principles (petty regulation typical of secret societies, etc.). The Sub-Committee approved the Address and the Rules as drawn up by Marx, stipulating, however, that two declarative phrases on "rights and duties" and "truth, justice, and morality" be inserted in the Preamble to the Rules. On November 1, 1864 both documents were unanimously approved by the Provisional Committee. On the proposal of a Committee member, Whitlock, Marx supplemented the Inaugural Address with a note on carbon and nitrogen as most important elements of food. The Inaugural Address was first published by The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 160, November 5, 1864 without the sanction of the Central Council and as an offprint to be sent to various newspapers. Marx strongly disapproved of this publication which contained a number of misprints (see this volume, p. 353). In November 1864 the Address and the Rules were published in London as a pamphlet Address and Provisional Rules of the Working Men's International Association, Established September 28, 1864, at a Public Meeting Held at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, London. On the decision of the Central Council of May 9, 1866 the English version of the Inaugural Address, the Provisional Rules and some other documents were again published as a pamphlet in London in August that year. The Address was also published in The Miner & Workman's Advocate, No. 93, December 10, 1864. The German authorised translation entitled "Manifest an die arbeitende Klasse Europa's" was published in Der Social-Demokrat, Nos. 2 and 3, December 21 and 30, 1864. During 1865, 1866 and later, various translations of the Inaugural Address appeared: into French in Paris, Geneva and Brussels; into Italian in Genoa and Naples; into German in Leipzig, Geneva, Berlin and Vienna in 1866 and 1868; into Hungarian in Pest in 1868; into Russian in Geneva in 1871; into Spanish and Portuguese in Madrid and Lisbon in 1873. Various German translations continued to be published in Germany and Switzerland (Zurich) in the early 1870s as well. The Inaugural Address has survived in two manuscript copies written by Mrs. Marx and Jenny Marx (Marx's daughter), and copies of pamphlets with Marx's corrections. In this volume the document is published according to the English pamphlet of 1864. The most important differences between the English version and the German authorised translation are given in footnotes. At the end of the pamphlet there was a list of the Central Council members: "Names and Nationalities of the Central Provisional Council. "English: Longmaid, Worley, Leno, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Shearman, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Odger, Howell, Osborne, Carter, Gray, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Cremer, Dick. "French: Dénouai, Le Lubez, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont. "Italian: L. Wolff, Fontana, Setacci, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri. "Swiss: Nusperli, Jung. "German: Eccarius, Wolff, Otto, Lessner, Pfänder, Lochner, Marx, Kaub, Bolleter. "Polish: Holtorp, Rybczinski. George Odger, President of the Central Council. George W. Wheeler, Honorary Treasurer. Karl Marx, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Germany. G. P. Fontana, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Italy. /. E. Holtorp, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Poland. Hermann F. Jung, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland. V. Le Lubez, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for France. William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.»