7. Capital and Surplus-Value¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 7: Capital and Surplus-Value¶
Marx begins by observing that money is the first historical form in which capital appears, embodied in the wealth of merchants and usurers. The transformation of money into capital is not a simple matter of exchange. The simple commodity owner sells in order to buy, whereas the incipient capitalist buys in order to sell at a higher price, seeking not merely the original sum but an increment—surplus-value. This surplus cannot arise from buying below value or selling above it, for such gains and losses cancel out within the total circulation; nor can cheating increase the aggregate sum in circulation. The capitalist class as a whole cannot over-reach itself. The problem, then, is to explain how selling dearer than one bought is possible while assuming that equal values are exchanged.
Marx’s solution is epoch-making. The increase in value cannot come from the money itself, nor from the act of purchase or sale, but from the use-value of the commodity purchased. The capitalist finds labour-power, a commodity whose use-value is a source of value. Its value is determined by the labour-time necessary to produce the labourer’s means of subsistence. If six hours’ labour maintains the labourer for a day, but he works twelve, the capitalist pays the value of six hours’ labour yet receives twelve hours’ value. The difference is unpaid surplus-labour, embodied as surplus-value. Money is thus converted into capital. This relation requires the free labourer—free to dispose of his labour-power and free of other commodities to sell. This is not a natural condition but the result of past historical development, appearing on a mass scale at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century with the dissolution of feudalism and the rise of world trade.
Marx then turns to Dühring, who first attacks the concept of capital as a historical phase, calling it a “bastard of historical and logical fantasy”, yet proceeds to treat it as a historical phase himself. Dühring declares that all means of production which appropriate “shares in the fruits of the general labour-power”—including landed property in all class societies—are capital. Later, however, he separates landed property and rent from capital and profit, defining capital only as means of production yielding profit or interest. This is analogous to including horses, oxen, asses and dogs under the term “locomotive”, then excluding them and applying the term only to the steam-engine. Thus Dühring’s conception destroys all economic analysis, discernment, and honesty in the use of concepts. Nevertheless, Dühring claims to have discovered the axis of all history: “Force and labour are the two principal factors which come into play in forming social connections.” This yields two articles: Labour produces; Force distributes. This, “speaking in plain human language”, sums up Dühring’s entire economic wisdom.