28 July 2010

Labour Power

Course on Marx's Capital: Week 8


Labour Power

Chapter 6 of Capital, Volume 1 is the one where Karl Marx pops out the secret of the whole deal – the Buying and Selling of Labour Power. The “Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta” finishing the previous chapter was fair warning: This is it. This is the heart of the matter. Here are some highlights:

“In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labour, and, consequently, a creation of value..


“By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description.


“…The second essential condition to the owner of money finding labour-power in the market as a commodity is this — that the labourer instead of being in the position to sell commodities in which his labour is incorporated, must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power, which exists only in his living self. 


“…For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power."

The first three paragraphs on page 3 of the downloadable extract linked below are also crucial, and are very surprising at the first reading. And then:


“…Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business.’ Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. 


“He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.”


The illustration has little to do with Marx's text, but it does remind us that this thing, labour power, is kept in line by force.


Please download the document, comrades, and read it.

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20 July 2010

Capital


Course on Marx's Capital: Week 7


Capital

Chapter 4 of Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1, called “The General Formula for Capital”, is one of the short chapters in the book. It is immediately followed “The Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital” which is Chapter 5; so here they are given together (see link for download, below).

Chapter 4 introduces the distinction between selling an unwanted commodity to get money to buy another commodity for use (C-M-C); or otherwise purchasing a commodity for re-sale with the intention of getting back the money, plus a surplus (M-C-M’).

This distinction is made as a preparation for the definition of Surplus-Value that is coming. “Capital” is not a hasty book. It is well paced so as to be friendly to any kind of reader, including worker readers.

In spite of its name, Chapter 4 is not a general definition of capital. This “general formula” is only an outline of “capital as it appears prima facie within the sphere of circulation”. The chapter does not explain how a surplus is obtained, or where it comes from. That explanation is reserved for later.

Chapter 5 of Capital Volume 1 finds Karl Marx at his most relaxed. He knows very well that C-M-C and M-C-M are formally no more than portions of, or extracts from, a series with no end and no beginning, as …MCMCMCMCMCMCMCMCMCMCMC…. He flaunts the absurdity of the distinction, asking: “How can this purely formal distinction between these processes change their character as it were by magic?” 

He proceeds to state directly that: 
“The inversion… of the order of succession does not take us outside the sphere of the simple circulation of commodities, and we must rather look, whether there is in this simple circulation anything permitting an expansion of the value that enters into circulation, and, consequently, a creation of surplus-value.” 


But now we begin to see what Marx is getting at. He is trying to find out how, in the process of exchange, a real increase can be found. He already has the answer but he is content here to have the groundwork of his argument tested against the ideas of others, such as 
Monsieur Condillac and Colonel Torrens, as well as “Vulgar-Economy”, and so by degrees to refute “the delusion that surplus-value has its origin in a nominal rise of prices or in the privilege which the seller has of selling too dear.”

Marx shows that: 
“It is… impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation.” 


Marx finishes the chapter like this: 
“Our friend, Moneybags, who as yet is only an embryo capitalist, must buy his commodities at their value, must sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process must withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at starting... These are the conditions of the problem. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!


This is Marx’s way of saying “Here we are,” or “This is it!”

The problem is set. The solution is going to follow soon enough.

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13 July 2010

Money

Course on Marx's Capital: Week 6


Money

“The commodity that functions as a measure of value, and, either in its own person or by a representative, as the medium of circulation, is money.”

It would not be remarkable that in a work called “Capital” and in a chapter called “Money”, Karl Marx would proceed to define it; except that bourgeois economists cannot do so, even up today. 

Marx’s definition of money sits within a concrete overview of all the circumstances of capital, whereas bourgeois economists can never present a full picture of society, but only disconnected snapshots of abstract parts of the whole.

The second title of the book is “Critique of Political Economy”. Karl Marx had read everything of consequence that had been written, from the time of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” (1651), and had made notes of it in a manuscript called “Theories of Surplus Value”, which is also known as “Capital, Volume 4”. The table below is a list of names of political economists mentioned in that work, sixty altogether; and there are many others that are mentioned in the text or in the footnotes of Volume 1, including in the chapter given as a download for today, below.

Karl Marx was not an economist. Capital is not a book of economics. It is a critique of the entire body of Political-Economic thought up to the time of its writing, with conclusions drawn about the development of Political Economy (not economics) into the future. Political Economy is the study of human political relations, and not just money relations.

In this chapter Marx describes Money and Price, the conversions between Use-Value and Exchange-Value, and then the transformation of commodities into money and back again from money into commodities, which is the series “C – M – C”.  Marx spends time on this quite simple description, because he is going to build on it later. Therefore it is advisable to read it at least once in full. But don’t get stuck. If you stick, skip.


Finally, Marx deals in this chapter with hoarding of money, and with the practical use of money. All of these things are going to be useful while we go through the book.

Top picture: a 17th-century vision of the bourgeois state, from the cover of Hobbes’ “Leviathan”. Above: a 20th-Century vision of a miser (hoarder), “Scrooge McDuck”. Below (table): some authors covered by Marx during his preparations for writing “Capital”.


Names of “political economists” studied in Marx’s “Theories of Surplus Value” (Capital, Volume 4):

Sir James Steuart
John Stuart Mill
Massie
Robert Torrens
Quesnay
Germain Garnier
Buat
James Mill
Turgot
Charles Ganilh
Anonymous English Author
Prévost
Paoletti
Ferrier
Rodbertus
Thomas De Quincey
Adam Smith
Earl of Lauderdale
David Ricardo
Samuel Bailey McCulloch
Schmalz
Count Destutt de Tracy
Anderson
Wakefield
Verri
Nassau Senior
Darwin
Stirling
Say
Pellegrino Rossi
Roscher
John Stuart Mill
Storch
Chalmers
Hopkins
Ravenstone
Ramsay  
Necker
John Barton
Ramsay
Mercantilists
Linguet
Nathaniel Forster
Cherbuliez
Ricardo
Sir Dudley North
Carey
Sismondi
Sismondi
Locke
James Deacon Hume
Richard Jones
D’Avenant
Berkeley
Hodgskin
Proudhon 
Petty
Hume
Thomas Robert Malthus
Luther

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