Absolute and Relative

Course on Marx's Capital: Week 17

Absolute and Relative

The three short Chapters 16, 17 and 18 of Marx’s Capital Volume 1 (download linked below) have very interesting things to say about absolute and relative Surplus-Value, and about the old political economists’ mistakes about it. Here are some of the points made by Karl Marx in these chapters:

“Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital.”

“The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively upon the length of the working-day; the production of relative surplus-value, revolutionises out and out the technical processes of labour, and the composition of society. It therefore pre-supposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of production, a mode which, along with its methods, means, and conditions, arises and develops itself spontaneously on the foundation afforded by the formal subjection of labour to capital. In the course of this development, the formal subjection is replaced by the real subjection of labour to capital.”

“Assuming that labour-power is paid for at its value, we are confronted by this alternative: given the productiveness of labour and its normal intensity, the rate of surplus-value can be raised only by the actual prolongation of the working-day; on the other hand, given the length of the working-day, that rise can be effected only by a change in the relative magnitudes of the components of the working-day, viz., necessary labour and surplus-labour; a change which, if the wages are not to fall below the value of labour-power, presupposes a change either in the productiveness or in the intensity of the labour.”

“Bourgeois economists instinctively saw, and rightly so, that it is very dangerous to stir too deeply the burning question of the origin of surplus-value.”

“Capital, therefore, is not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over labor. It is essentially the command over unpaid labor. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent), it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labor.”

Please download and read the following document:

Capital V1, C16, 17, 18, Absolute and Relative Surplus Value, in MS-Word file format (9197 words)

Machinery

Course on Marx's Capital: Week 16

Machinery

Karl Marx begins this great chapter 15 of Capital, Volume 1, on “Machinery and Modern Industry”, (download linked below) by developing the idea of division of labour in manufacture, into the division of processes among machines.

“A real machinery system, however, does not take the place of these independent machines, until the subject of labour goes through a connected series of detail processes, that are carried out by a chain of machines of various kinds, the one supplementing the other. Here we have again the co-operation by division of labour that characterises Manufacture; only now, it is a combination of detail machines.”

“As soon as a machine executes, without man's help, all the movements requisite to elaborate the raw material, needing only attendance from him, we have an automatic system of machinery, and one that is susceptible of constant improvement in its details.”

“Modern Industry had therefore itself to take in hand the machine, its characteristic instrument of production, and to construct machines by machines. It was not till it did this, that it built up for itself a fitting technical foundation, and stood on its own feet. Machinery, simultaneously with the increasing use of it, in the first decades of this century, appropriated, by degrees, the fabrication of machines proper. But it was only during the decade preceding 1866, that the construction of railways and ocean steamers on a stupendous scale called into existence the cyclopean machines now employed in the construction of prime movers.”

“Modern Industry raises the productiveness of labour to an extraordinary degree, [but] it is by no means equally clear, that this increased productive force is not, on the other hand, purchased by an increased expenditure of labour. Machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to the product that it serves to beget.”

The last paragraph of Section 3 is one of the most memorable and shocking in the whole of Capital, Volume 1, and the long last paragraph of Section 4 is a denunciation of the horrors of the factory system.

Section 5 shows the brutal effect of machinery on the working class from the beginning of machine-working, which effects have been felt all along and still are felt today, two centuries after the “industrial revolution”. Marx was an eye-witness to a great expansion of this system and a true witness of its terrible consequences for the working class.

Please download and read this chapter:

Capital V1, C15, Machinery and Modern Industry, in MS-Word file format

Division of Labour

Course on Marx's Capital: Week 15

Division of Labour

Karl Marx makes use of the original distinction between Manufacture, meaning organised co-operation of many workers in a single workshop, and Industrial Production, which is the same, but with powered machinery. In modern usage, this distinction is not always clear. So, Marx begins this chapter thus:

“That co-operation which is based on division of labour, assumes its typical form in manufacture, and is the prevalent characteristic form of the capitalist process of production throughout the manufacturing period properly so called. That period, roughly speaking, extends from the middle of the 16th to the last third of the 18th century.”

The rest of Section 1 of this chapter is a description of division of labour in the early form of capitalism: Manufacture.

Then, in Section 2, Marx describes the effect on an individual or “detail labourer”, and on production, as a consequence of division of labour.

In Section 3, Marx looks at the gain that is made when serial production can be achieved, as opposed to batch or individual piece production.

“The different detail processes, which were successive in time, have become simultaneous, go on side by side in space. Hence, production of a greater quantum of finished commodities in a given time. [11] This simultaneity, it is true, is due to the general co-operative form of the process as a whole; but Manufacture not only finds the conditions for co-operation ready to hand, it also, to some extent, creates them by the sub-division of handicraft labour. On the other hand, it accomplishes this social organisation of the labour-process only by riveting each labourer to a single fractional detail.”

In Section 4, Marx compares division of labour in a factory, with division of labour in society.

Section 5 is a readable essay on division of labour as treated by the bourgeois Political Economists, including Adam Smith.

In short, this is another chapter of “Capital” that you can conquer without difficulty.

Image: Walter Crane was a 19^th-century artist who illustrated many socialist pamphlets. This work was done for May Day, the Workers’ Day, in 1895.

Please download and read this chapter:

Capital V1, C14, Division of Labour and Manufacture, in MS-Word file format

Co-operation

Course on Marx's Capital: Week 14

Co-operation

Chapters 11, 12 and 23 of Capital, Volume 1 (download linked below) which follow the enormous Chapter 10, are short, and require little introduction, because they are straightforward.

They are plain enough to provide plenty of material for study-circle discussion, especially if there are people with work-experience present.

The following two excerpts demonstrate how well Karl Marx understood the workplace.

The co-operation Marx writes about here is co-operation in general, whereby people work together under a capitalist.

Rate and Mass of Surplus Value

“Within the process of production, capital acquired the command over labour, i.e., over functioning labour-power or the labourer himself. Personified capital, the capitalist takes care that the labourer does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity.

“Capital further developed into a coercive relation, which compels the working-class to do more work than the narrow round of its own life wants prescribes. As a producer of the activity of others, as a pumper-out of surplus labour and exploiter of labour-power, it surpasses in energy, disregard of bounds, recklessness and efficiency, all earlier systems of production based on directly compulsory labour.

“At first, capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions in which it historically finds it. It does not, therefore, change immediately the mode of production. The production of surplus value — in the form hitherto considered by us — by means of simple extension of the working day, proved, therefore, to be independent of any change in the mode of production itself. It was not less active in the old-fashioned bakeries than in the modern cotton factories.”

Co-operation

“When numerous labourers work together side by side, whether in one and the same process, or in different but connected processes, they are said to co-operate.”

“By the co-operation of numerous wage-labourers, the sway of capital develops into a requisite for carrying on the labour-process itself, into a real requisite of production. That a capitalist should command on the field of production, is now as indispensable as that a general should command on the field of battle.”

“The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, [14] and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible extent. As the number of the co-operating labourers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance by counterpressure. The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature of the social labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but it is, at the same time, a function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is consequently rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and labouring raw material he exploits.”

Please download and read this file:

Capital V1, C11, 12, 13, SV - Absolute, Relative, Co-operation, in MS-Word file format

African Revolutionary Writers

African Revolutionary Writers

Comrades of the CU Africa Forum,

I am compiling a new series on African Revolutionary Writers.

It will be channelled through the CU Africa Forum in due course. First, it will go out as work-in-progress to the Communist University list (read it on the blog if you wish, here).

Please send any suggestions of other authors to include, and if possible, texts, be they articles, speeches, links to pages on the Internet, or text files.

Here is the African Revolutionary Writers list as it is at present. Click on the names for further information (mostly from Wikpedia).

Name	Dates	Main Candidate Text	Date
Olaudah Equiano	1745 - 1797	Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano	1789
Toussaint L’ouverture	1743 - 1803	Haiti Constitution	1801
Frederick Douglass	1818 - 1895	My Bondage and My Freedom	1855
Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje	1876 - 1932	Native Life in South Africa	1916
George Padmore	1903 - 1959	What Must Be Done?	1931
Moses Mauane Kotane	1905 - 1978	Cradock Letter	1934
CLR James	1901 - 1989	Notes on Dialectics	1948
Gamal Abdel Nasser	1918 - 1970	Memoirs of 1st Palestine War	1955
Paul Robeson	1898 - 1976	Here I Stand	1958
WEB Du Bois	1868 - 1963	Africa in Battle Against Colonialism	1960
Albert Luthuli	1898 - 1967	Peace Prize acceptance	1960
Ousmane Sembene	1923 - 2007	God’s Bits of Wood	1960
Patrice Lumumba	1925 - 1961	Speech in front of Baudouin	1960
Frantz Fanon	1925 - 1961	The Wretched of the Earth	1961
Govan Mvuyelwa Mbeki	1910 - 2001	The Peasants Revolt	1964
Kwame Nkrumah	1909 - 1972	Neo-Colonialism, Last Stage of Imperialism	1965
Oginga Odinga	1911 - 1994	Not Yet Uhuru	1967
Martin Luther King	1929 - 1968	Beyond Vietnam	1967
Ayi Kwei Armah	1939 -	The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born	1968
Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane	1920 - 1969	The Struggle for Mozambique	1969
Oliver Tambo	1917 - 1993	Speeches ex ANC web site	1970
Malcolm X	1925 - 1965	By Any Means Necessary	1970
Alex La Guma	1925 - 1985	In the Fog of the Season’s End	1972
Ngugi wa Thiong’o	1938 -	Homecoming	1972
Henry Winston	1911 - 1986	Strategy for a Black Agenda	1973
Walter Rodney	1942 - 1980	How Europe Undeveloped Africa	1973
Agostinho Neto	1922 - 1979	Sacred Hope	1974
Julius Kambarage Nyerere	1922 - 1999	Freedom and Development	1974
Samora Machel	1933 - 1986	Sowing the Seeds of Revolution	1974
Sékou Touré	1922 - 1984	Strategy and tactics of the revolution	1978
Bantu Stephen Biko	1946 - 1977	I Write What I Like	1978
Amilcar Cabral	1924 - 1973	Unity and Struggle	1980
Cheikh Anta Diop	1923 - 1986	Civilisation or Barbarism	1981
Angela Davis	1944 -	Women, Race and Class	1981
Ruth First	1925 - 1982	Mozambican Miner: Proletarian and Peasant	1983
Jabulani “Mzala” Nxumalo	1955 - 1991	Cooking the rice inside the pot	1985
Thomas Sankara	1949 - 1987	Thomas Sankara Speaks	1987
Albert Memmi	1920 -	Coloniser and colonised	1991
Mahmood Mamdani	1947 -	Citizen and Subject	1996
Issa Shivji	1946 -	The Struggle for Democracy	2003
Samir Amin	1931 -	The American Ideology	2004
Ahmed Ben Bella	1918 -	Liberation still unachieved	2006
Muammar Gadaffi	1942 -	The One-State Solution	2009

  

VC

Image: Amilcar Cabral

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