Chapter XVIII.- Various Formulae for the Rate of Surplus Value
sation of labour. In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour time.
C h a p t e r XVIII
VARIOUS FORMULA FOR THE RATE OF SURPLUS VALUE
We have seen that the rate of surplus value is represented by the following formulae.
Surplus value / s \ _ Surplus value _ Surplus labour
Variable Capital V v / Value of labour power Necessary labour
The two first of these formulas represent, as a ratio of values, that which, in the third, is represented as a ratio of the times during which those values are produced. These formulae, supplementary the one to the other, are rigorously definite and correct. We therefore find them substantially, but not consciously, worked out in classical political economy. There we meet with the following derivative formulae.
Surplus labour _ Surplus value _ Surplus product
Working day Value of the Product Total Product
One and the same ratio is here expressed as a ratio of labour times, of the values in which those labour times are embodied, and of the products in which those values exist. It is of course understood that, by "Value of the Product," is meant only the value newly created in a working day, the constant part of the value of the product being excluded.
In all of these formulae (II), the actual degree of exploitation of labour, or the rate of surplus value, is falsely expressed. Let the working day be 12 hours. Then, making the same assumptions as in former instances, the real degree of exploitation of labour will be represented in the following proportions.
6 hours surplus labour _ Surplus value of 3 sh. _ = | ; -= 1UU /o-6 hours necessary labour Variable Capital of 3 sh.
From formula; II we get very differently,
6 hours surplus labour _ Surplus value of 3 sh.
Working day of 12 hours Value created of 6 sh.
50%.
These derivative formulae express, in reality, only the proportion in which the working day, or the value produced by it, is divided between capitalist and labourer. If they are to be treated as direct expressions of the degree of self-expansion of capital, the following erroneous law would hold good: Surplus labour or surplus value can never reach 100%.1) Since the surplus labour is only an aliquot part of the working day, or since surplus value is only an aliquot part of the value created, the surplus labour must necessarily be always less than the working day, or the surplus value always less than the total value created. In order, however, to attain the ratio of 100:100 they must be equal. In order that the surplus labour may absorb the whole day (i. e., an average day of any week or year), the necessary labour must sink to zero. But if the necessary labour vanish, so too does the surplus labour, since it is only a function of the former. The ratio
Surplus labour Surplus value ,. c , i U ,. i— or J-can therefore never reach the limit Working day Value created of j^j, still less rise to ^Ö^S But not so the rate of surplus value, the real degree of exploitation of labour. Take, e. g., the estimate of L. de Lavergne, according to which the English agricultural labourer gets
" Thus, e. g., in "Dritter Brief an v. Kirchmann von Rodbertus. Widerlegung der Ricardo'schen Lehre von der Grundrente und Begründung einer neuen Rententheo-rie", Berlin, 1851. I shall return to this letter later on; in spite of its erroneous theory of rent, it sees through the nature of capitalist production.[2] jj Added in the 3rd German edition.— It may be seen from this how favourably Marx judged his predecessors, whenever he found in them real progress, or new and sound ideas. The subsequent publication of Rodbertus' letters to Rud. Meyer has shown that the above acknowledgement by Marx wants restricting to some extent. In those letters this passage occurs: "Capital must be rescued not only from labour, but from itself, and that will be best effected, by treating the acts of the industrial capitalist as economic and political functions, that have been delegated to him with his capital, and by treating his profit as a form of sa-lary, because we still know no other social organisation. But salaries may be regulated, and may also be reduced if they take too much from wages. The irruption of Marx into Society, as I may call his book, must be warded off.... Altogether, Marx's book is not so much an investigation into capital, as a polemic against the present form of capital, a form which he confounds with the concept itself of capital" {Briefe, &c, von Dr. Rodbertus-Jagetzow, herausgg. von Dr. Rud. Meyer, Berlin, 1881, I. Bd. p. Ill, 48. Brief von Rodbertus). To such ideological commonplaces did the bold attack by Rodbertus in his "social letters" finally dwindle down.— F.E.jj only -^ , the capitalist (farmer) on the other hand -f of the product '!
or of its value,[446] apart from the question of how the booty is subsequently divided between the capitalist, the landlord and others. According to this, the surplus labour of the English agricultural labourer is to his necessary labour as 3:1, which gives a rate of exploitation of 300%.
The favourite method of treating the working day as constant in magnitude became, through the use of the formulae II, a fixed usage, because in them surplus labour is always compared with a working day of given length. The same holds good when the repar-tition of the value produced is exclusively kept in sight. The working day that has already been realised in a given value, must necessarily be a day of given length.
The habit of representing surplus value and value of labour power as fractions of the value created — a habit that originates in the capitalist mode of production itself, and whose import will hereafter be disclosed — conceals the very transaction that characterises capital, namely the exchange of variable capital for living labour power, and the consequent exclusion of the labourer from the product. Instead of the real fact, we have the false semblance of an association, in which labourer and capitalist divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they respectively contribute towards its formation.[2]'
Moreover, the formula? II can at any time be reconverted into for-i T i r r u Surplus labour of 6 hours ., . mulae 1. It, tor instance, we have -, then the Working day of 12 hours necessary labour time being 12 hours less the surplus labour of 6 hours, we get the following result,
Surplus labour of 6 hours _ 100
Necessary labour of 6 hours 100
[1] That part of the product which merely replaces the constant capital advanced, is of course left out in this calculation. Mr. L. de Lavergne, a blind admirer of England, is inclined to estimate the share of the capitalist too low, rather than too high.
[21] All well-developed forms of capitalist production being forms of cooperation, nothing is, of course, easier, than to make abstraction from their antagonistic character, and to transform them by a word into some form of free association, as is done by A. de Laborde in De l'Esprit d'Association dans tous les intérêts de la communauté, Paris 1818 [pp. 130-31]. H. Carey, the Yankee, occasionally performs this conjuring trick with like success, even with the relations resulting from slavery.[4]*[7] There is a third formula which I have occasionally already anticipated; it is
Surplus value _ Surplus labour _ Unpaid labour
Value of labour power Necessary labour Paid labour
After the investigations we have given above, it is no longer possible to be misled, by the formula — ^ ^ — , into concluding, Paid labour that the capitalist pays for labour and not for labour power. This for-i • , , r Surplus labour T-,I mula is only a popular expression tor Ine capi-Necessary labour talist pays the value, so far as price coincides with value, of the labour power, and receives in exchange the disposal of the living labour power itself. His usufruct is spread over two periods. During one the labourer produces a value that is only equal to the value of his labour power: he produces its equivalent. Thus the capitalist receives in return for his advance of the price of the labour power, a product of the same price. It is the same as if he had bought the product ready made in the market. During the other period, the period of surplus labour, the usufruct of the labour power creates a value for the capitalist, that costs him no'equivalent.[11] This expenditure of labour power comes to him gratis. In this sense it is that surplus labour can be called unpaid labour.
Capital, therefore, is not only, as Adam Smith says,[448] the command over labour. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent), it may subsequently crystallise into, is in substance the materialisation of unpaid labour. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labour.
[11] Although the Physiocrats could not penetrate the mystery of surplus value, yet this much was clear to them, viz., that it is "a wealth which is independent and disposable, which he" (the possessor) "has not bought and which he sells" (Turgot, Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses, p . 11).
Endnotes
[446] L. Lavergne, The Rural Economy of England, Scotland and Ireland, London, 1855, p. 87.-533
[1] Capital—Marx's major work to which he devoted four decades (from the early 1840s till the end of his life). Marx started studying political economy at the end of 1843 in Paris. His aim was to write a treatise containing a critical analysis of political economy. As a result of his research in this field appeared such works as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, Wage Labour and Capital, Manifesto of the Communist Party and others. After an interval caused by the 1848-49 revolution, Marx continued his economic studies in London, where he lived as a refugee from August 1849. Here he studied the works of different economists, the history of economic development and the economics of his time in various countries, especially in England which was then a classic example of a capitalist country. He investigated theories of money, credit and the causes of economic crises, the history of landownership and the theory of ground rent, the socio-economic condition of the working class and questions of population, the history of technology and other problems. -By 1857 he had completed his enormous preparatory work and then proceeded to the final stage — the systématisation and generalisation of the collected material. From January 1857 to June 1858, Marx wrote a manuscript containing 50 signatures, which was, in fact, the first rough draft of Capital. In the present edition it was published in vols 28 and 29. At first Marx intended to publish his work in separate instalments, and the first instalment, as he wrote, "should form a relative whole" (see present edition, Vol. 40, p. 287), which embraces only the first section of Book I — the section consisting of 3 chapters: 1) The Commodity; 2) Money or Simple Circulation and 3) Capital. However, the final variant of the first instalment — A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy — does not contain the third chapter. Marx wrote the chapter on commodity especially. He wrote the chapter on money for "the first instalment" on the basis of the manuscript of 1857-58. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One was published in 1859 (present edition, Vol. 29). It was to be followed by "the second instalment", i. e. by the chapter on capital. However, soon afterwards, Marx had to postpone this work for a year and a half as he was occupied in writing the pamphlet Herr Vogt (present edition, Vol. 17) and in other urgent matters. Only in August 1861, did he begin work on "the second instalment". By the middle of 1863, he had written a new rough draft which was considerably longer than the manuscript of 1857-58 — 23 notebooks, having a total volume of about 200 signatures. The complete manuscript of 1861-63, which is considered to be the second rough draft of Capital, is reproduced in vols 30-34 of the present edition. Later on Marx decided to divide the theoretical part of the work on capital into 3 parts. The historico-critical section was to be the fourth and concluding part, and was to be based on the part of the 1861-63 manuscript entitled "Theories of Surplus Value". In his letter to Kugelmann dated October 13, 1866, Marx writes, "The whole work is thus divided into the following parts: Book I. The Process of Production of Capital. Book II. The Process of Circulation of Capital. Book III. Structure of the Process as a Whole. Book IV. On the History of the Theory" (see present edition, Vol. 42, p. 328). Marx also gave up his plan to publish the work in separate instalments and decided first to complete the whole work and then to publish it. Marx continued his work, concentrating mainly on those parts that were not sufficiently elaborated in the 1861-63 manuscript. He studied an enormous quantity of economic and technical literature, including books on agriculture, on credit and money and turnover. He also studied statistical material, various parliamentary documents, official reports on child labour in industry, on housing conditions of the British working class, etc. Marx then wrote a new manuscript (from August 1863 to the end of 1865), which constituted a more detailed variant of the three theoretical volumes of Capital. Only after the whole work was completed (January 1866), did Marx begin preparing it for the press, having decided, on Engels' advice, not to prepare the whole work but only Volume I of Capital. The final touches were made by Marx with great thoroughness and, in fact, became yet another recasting of Volume I of Capital as a whole. To ensure the integrity, completeness and clarity of the exposition, Marx thought it necessary to reproduce in a comparatively short form the major problems dealt with in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (published in 1859) at the beginning of Volume I of Capital—they now constitute the whole of the first part "Commodities and Money" (in the first edition which was not yet subdivided into parts the first chapter bore this title). After the publication of Volume I of Capital (September 1867), Marx continued work on it in preparation for publication in German and translation into foreign lan-guages. For the second edition (1872) he made more subdivisions and also a lot of changes in the text (see this volume, pp. 12-13), gave important instructions for the Russian edition, published in Petersburg in 1872 and the first foreign translation of Capital, once more changed the book's structure and thoroughly edited the French edition (1872-75). Marx intended to take into consideration most of the changes made in the French edition when preparing the third German edition of Volume I. At the same time, after the publication of Volume I of Capital Marx continued his work on the subsequent volumes, intending to finish the whole edition as soon as possible. However, he was unable to do so. A lot of time was taken up by his activities in the General Council of the First International, and his work was increasingly hampered by poor health. After Marx's death, Engels finished preparing the third (1883) German edition of Volume I of Capital for press, which was taken as the basis for the translation into English made by Samuel Moore and Eduard Aveling and edited by Engels (1887).— 1,311
[21] The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in 1838 by the Manchester factory owners Cobden and Bright. Defending the interests of manufacturers, the League secured the repeal of the Corn Laws which provided for the limitation and prohibition of grain imports, which served the interests of the landed aristocracy. The Corn Law adopted in 1815 prohibited the import of corn while the price of bread in England itself remained less than 80 sh. per quarter. In 1822 this law was slightly altered, and in 1828 a sliding scale was introduced, according to which there was a rise in import duties on corn when its price fell on the home market and vice versa. Trying to achieve the repeal of corn laws and to establish trade in corn, the League aimed at reducing domestic prices for corn and thus at reducing wages for wage-workers.The slogan of free trade was widely used by the League in its advocacy of the unity of interests of workers and manufacturers. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846.'— 15, 296, 458, 462, 667, 703
[4] Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur! (It is of you that the story is told) — Horace, Satires, Bk. I, Satire 1.— 8, 272
[7] The Civil War in America broke out in April 1861 and ended in April 1865. It was a war of the North against the Confederacy of the Southern States. The decisive role in the victory of the North in April 1865 was played by the workers and farmers. The international democratic public and the international working-class movement sympathised with and gave all possible support to the position of the Northern States.—9, 207, 262, 398, 540, 720, 760
[448] 446 A. Smith, Recherches sur la nature..., t. 1, Paris, 1802, pp. 59 ff.— 534
[2] Marx is referring to the sections "Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities" and "Theories of the Medium of Circulation and of Money" in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One (present edition, Vol. 29, pp. 292-302, 389-417), which he later abandoned as he intended to prepare a special historico-critical concluding volume of Capital (see Note 1).— 7, 532
[11] 1 ' The plan outlined here was not realised by Marx. The work referred to here as Book II, was published by Engels as Volume II of Capital (1885) after Marx's death, and Book III as Volume III of Capital (1894). Book IV was not published in Marx's or Engels' lifetime. See also Note 2.— 11, 565