Surplus
Value
In Chapter 6 we discovered the mechanism of Surplus-Value in the buying and selling of Labour Power, by which the overall increase in wealth that takes place under capitalism is achieved.
Chapter 7 (click
to download it, below) begins with a short summary of the book thus far, as
follows:
“The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it;
and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power
consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes
actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in action, a
labourer.”
The production of
surplus value in the dynamic relationship between the capitalist and the
working proletarian provides the answer to the question that the book is
intended to answer, before any other:
Where does the
wealth generated by capital come from?
Or:
How, precisely,
and exactly where, is the surplus taken?
For, early on in
his deliberations, Marx had determined that the observed general increase could
not be coming from overcharging, because in a market of pure trading, one
person’s loss is another’s gain, and all such losses and gains cancel out.
The answer is that
the surplus arises in the workplace, and not in the market place, and the only
source of surplus is this: that a worker can give more in the fruits of his labour
than it costs to develop and maintain his labour-power. This applies equally to
women as to men.
One of the
conclusions of this is that capitalists make their money from employing people.
It is the people that they employ, and not the machinery that the workers use, that
makes the money. Therefore the bosses’ threats to sack all the people and to
substitute them with machinery are always hollow threats.
Marx explains all this
patiently and with good humour in this chapter. Please download this 12-page chapter
and read as much of it as you possibly can.
Download:
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