commodity
-use value
-exchange value
= labour value. socially necessary labor time. which connect to use value.
labour value
– concrete
– abstract
= form value
form value
– equivalent
– relative
= money form of value
money form of value is a representation of value. fetishism
– material relation with person
– social relation given by prices between things.
= market
market
– buyers
– sellers
= money
Circuit 2
money has dual aspect
money
– measure of value
– means of circulation
= Universal form of money. world money. end of the day ther is only one money
world money
– debtors
– creditors
= a circulation process of capital.
circulation process
– equivalence
– non equivalence. profit or surplus value
= buying or selling of labour power
buying or selling of labour power. this introduces whole kind of class relation
– capital
– labour
this is Marx’s way of representation
this is not a causal change. this is an expansion of an argument. this is to explain us, the capital mode of production. this does not stop here. it goes on.
after class struggle – absolute and relative surplus value. this is about how to understand capitalism. argument grows organically. [like nature] [10:00]
It partly reflect the subject matter, but primarily its a technique of representation. its a way of communication about how to understand a capitalistic mode of production. no causality. you get it as a totality, a unity. he said, we have to understand that its an Organic system.
what happens inside of production in chapter on the labour process. ‘These are distinctively bourgeois categories’. labour value for example is a bourgeois category.
Aristotle couldn’t see it because in the world of slave labour the labour theory of value couldn’t possibly work.
So the labour theory of value is a conceptual apparatus which arises out of the practices of the bourgeois era.
the categories of political economy are the categories generated out of bourgeois practices. They’re not universal categories, and should not be treated
as universal categories common to all modes of production.
exception to that argument. chapter on the labour process
Bourgeois categories effectively separate: historically it was man and nature. Nature and society, nature and culture, natural and artificial. But that is a bourgeois conception.
‘Is the labour process natural or social?’ Marx’s answer is: ‘The labour process is the labour process.’ It’s both, simultaneously.
labour process is a naturally imposed necessity.
We alter things around us in order to live.
In so doing we develop all kinds of social ways and social aspects.
Man sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head, and hands in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it. And in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”
A very dialectical proposition which says: You cannot change yourself without changing the world around you. And you cannot change the world around you
without simultaneously changing yourself.
In other words: The unitariness of it. [20:00]
we actually produce nature.
Promethean
We decide to do this or not to do this, and how we decide has crucial meaning. We all decide to drive SUVs we know what happens to the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere… we know those things. But we still decide to drive SUVs.
There’s a sovereign moment
Feuerbach’s anthropology
all species are engaging in this process of production of nature
production, transformative activities in their environment.
‘Consciousness arises out of material activity.’But here he’s saying: The idea precedes the act, the purpose precedes the act.
if you’re prepared to think dialectically rather than causally.
An architect doesn’t start from nothing, an architect starts from a particular situation, from a particular history, from a particular learning process, from a particular material world. So the imagination of the architect is brought to bear on a particular situation given the wealth of experience that has arisen out of a lifetime of activity, and a lifetime of learning,
Fourier view of work as play, pure play. he is attacking the Fourier conception, that all work should be mere play. [30:00]
The process is extinguished in the product. The product of the process is a use-value, a piece of natural material adapted to human needs by means of a change in its form. Labour has become bound up in its object. value is objectified in the thing.
Since all labour is past, some of those past labours disappear in the process of production. mining the coal, power source to make the steel. The coal just disappears; it’s not in the steel; it has disappeared. But it is still past labour metamorphoses that occur Labour uses up its material elements, therefore a process of consumption. productive consumption… [40:00]
I sell my labour power to the capitalist. 1. ‘Your capacity to work now belongs to me, you’re going to follow my instructions 2. The product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker
Lockean view, – private property arises out of the way in which people labour, and embody their labour in the land, and therefore that belongs to them.
Here completely different rule. The capitalist consumes the labour power, and the means of production, and the product belongs to the capitalist.
consideration of all of the past labour incorporated in the means of production.
don’t I deserve some return for the investment? abstinence [50:00]
argument about the ‘Protestant Ethic’ and abstinence and that kind of stuff has an it was a return to abstinence!’
I actually provide employment. Don’t I deserve something for providing employment to people?’
I worked hard. You know, I mean …it wasn’t
what we forget here, is actually that capitalists usually pay themselves twice. To the degree that they work they pay themselves a managerial fee.
They pay themselves as managers. They then actually in addition take a rate of return on the capital they advanced.
Now, small entrepreneurs don’t do that.
labour in this C-M-C circuit. The labourer sells the labour power for the money in order to get the commodities to live. [1:00:00]
skills.
in France, in the nineteenth century, if women can do it was unskilled by definition;
So as soon as you introduce women and suddenly it became unskilled. Which is why so many of the anarchists like Proudhon were anti-having-women-in-the-workshop.
Deeply antagonistic to women’s employment; so the anarchist Proudhon thought women belong at home, not in the workshop.
First International split on that question of whether women are welcome in the employment place or whether they were not.
As he says: “The distinction between higher and simple labour…rests in part on pure illusion… …on distinctions that long since
ceased to be real …in part on the helpless condition of some sections of the working class…”
what do you do with the situation of highly productive, skilled labour,
As he says: “This power being of higher value, expresses itself in labour of a higher sort,
and therefore becomes objectified, during an equal amount of time,
in proportionally higher values.” That is, skilled labour is incorporating more value into a product than unskilled labour. It doesn’t affect the theory of surplus value. But it does affect the whole calculus, as to exactly how we understand the value of labour power, as it is both employed, and as it is productive in the labour process.
But Marx pushes by that whole argument by the end of this chapter, simply saying:
“We therefore save ourselves a superfluous operation, and simplify our analysis by the assumption that the labour of the worker employed by the capitalist is average simple labour.”
constant capital –
it is past labour, which is being incorporated in products prior to their incorporation in a particular labour process.
The value of that labour, the value of the commodities, the value of the means of production is fixed.
Marx argues: “It gets transferred through the production process to the final product.”
cotton that ends up in the shirt. But what happens when we’re dealing with the energy inputs? dealing with materials that disappear? machines, that last a long time, say for ten years,
Well, Marx is going to say: ‘There is a value transfer that goes on, even though there is no material transfer going on.’ The value part of the machine
gets passed on to the product, but at the end of the day the machine is still there – so how much of the value of the machine gets passed on into the product? this can only happen of course precisely because value is immaterial but objective.
Socially necessary labour time is a social relation. It has a social meaning,
and the means of its transfer is socially mandated.
So what the labourer is doing is transferring value through productive consumption.
Remember the term: ‘through productive consumption’.
if it goes on strike, Marx is doing here, is trying to work through an accounting system from the standpoint of the labourer, to say to the labourer: ‘Look at what you’re doing!
a counter argument to the way the capitalist says ‘Well, I’m giving you employment’ by turning to the capitalist and saying: ‘Yeah, but I am preserving your value.
Shouldn’t you be paying me a lot more to preserve your value? Without me you wouldn’t preserve your value. You would lose all your value!’.
So in effect what Marx is proposing here is a value-added theory of surplus value production.
And because it is adding value he defines that capacity of adding value as ‘Variable Capital’, and it is variable, because it is increasing the amount of value. The labourer is working incorporating more socially necessary labour time into those existing or preexisting raw materials, using the preexisting machinery, and is adding value.
And as the labourer adds value, they do reach this point, where the amount of value they have added to the product is equivalent to the value of their own labour power. So the value of the product at the end of the day is going to be the addition of these three elements:
-constant capital, the value of that;
-variable capital, which is equivalent to the value of labour power;
-and the surplus value.
Every single commodity is made up of a C-element, a V-element, and a S-element.
constant capital is not about the creation of value;cannot be in Marx’s accounting system.
machines cannot be a source of value. all machines do is to transfer value;
value of the raw materials can yo-yo up and down, depending upon conditions of labour in all those industries which are producing the raw materials or the machines.
C/V
It’s a ratio of the
value of the raw materials
which a given labourer,
Productivity
S/V
amount of surplus versus variable capital.
And this is the rate of exploitation.
Rate of profit
S/C+V
which is the surplus over
the total amount of capital advanced,
the rate of exploitation. Which is the amount of labour-time, socially necessary labour time, which you are giving to the capitalist without remuneration.
what does the bank look at? It looks at the rate of profit.
it becomes impossible for the worker to know at what point they have done enough adding of socially necessary labour time to be equivalent to their wage. And of course it doesn’t work that way anyway, because we’re looking at a continuous labour process.
1836, Nassau W. Senior
the manufactures were making the argument in Manchester, that their profit all came from hour eleven to twelve.
capitalist’s command of time and the workers time which is absolutely crucial. You can’t make a profit unless,
as a capitalist, you command the workers time. And that therefore there’s going to be class struggle over the workers time and how that time is used. of that command over time is to command the intensity of the labour process. And if you can up the intensity of the labour process you’re going to get a lot more value produced. value is socially necessary labour time. Profit comes from surplus value which is surplus labour-time, the surplus labour-time of the worker, over and above the necessary labour-time they use in order to reproduce their own value.’
So suddenly this becomes all about time and temporality. capitalist command the product, to command the time of the labourer. without the command of that time no surplus value, no profit. one of the big problems of capitalism is the way in which decisions are made short-term. shorttermism moments are the elements of profit,
these days we’re not supposed to talk about totalities anymore, apparently it’s reactionary, organic totality.
Learning capital 4, Learning capital 5, Learning capital 6.