week 6!

Let’s go comrades, we can catch up and hold pace! I made it through 3 weeks this week and now almost back at pace

What would be your counter-response in an argument to that, if I can ask? (In good faith, of course)

Personally, my counter would be “who would operate, repair et replace the machines again?”…

I’m not reading capital right now, but I’m enjoying these threads and can’t wait to get to capital after I get through some other stuff.

In any case, I like your little distillation here.

Profit comes from surplus value i.e. unpaid labor, not from surplus use-value.

It really gets at the idea I’ve recently been reading about in the Grundrisse, that under capitalism we’re working to generate profit, not to meet needs. The implication, I suppose, is that you’re never liberated. Even if all needs are or could be met, the cycle of capital still needs another round of profit.

There is no Andrew Yang-style solution here, hoping that technology will make mankind so productive that we don’t have to work as much. Profit comes from surplus value i.e. unpaid labor, not from surplus use-value.

I’m reminded of Keynes’s prediction that, due to technological advances, within a couple generations we would only be working 15 hours work weeks. This is such a common idea, that technology will increase the productivity of labor, and so we will soon be producing more commodities for the same amount of labor, and so the amount of labor hours will decline. And that indeed might be what happens under a communist system, where capital is commanded by labor. But that’s not the system we have, and Marx’s insight about where profit actually comes from explains the cold logic of why we just end up running on a hamster wheel of endless commodity creation. Capitalists don’t care about the actual lived experience of workers, they just care about the mechanism whereby they can extract profits. And in fact, they can’t care about it, because if they do, they will soon find themselves without capital, and so no-longer capitalists.

I’m perpetually a couple weeks behind, but on the flip side it means all the old threads are populated.

Gl comrade

it was hard not getting mad at this chapter

Definitely agree. Marx doesn’t let his mask of academic impassivity slip often, but when it does (particularly common in these history-focused chapters) it becomes very clear that he’s very angry too.

it was hard not getting mad at this chapter

It’s an infuriating read, am I’m glad Marx blasts all the whining that factory owners do when they receive even the most modest push-back. How the bakers are treated is particularly outrageous; reading between the lines, I assume they’re not being paid while they’re forced to sleep at the bakehouse.

but like literally thanks to that workplace she ended up hardly being able to move much at all. and she had to quit.

This is where the comparison of capitalists to vampires is not even a metaphor. They give no consideration to the health or lives of their workers, and are literally devouring their life force to transform it into capital.

This “flaw” is sometimes pointed out by critics…

Notably Ludwig von Mises –

*Yet such a manner of regulating distribution would be unworkable, since labor is not a uniform and homogeneous quantity. Between various types of labor there is necessarily a qualitative difference, which leads to a different valuation according to the difference in the conditions of demand for and supply of their products. For instance, the supply of pictures cannot be increased ceteris paribus, without damage to the quality of the product. Yet one cannot allow the laborer who had put in an hour of the most simple type of labor to be entitled to the product of an hour’s higher type of labor. *

This “flaw” is sometimes pointed out by critics but I see no problem with it.

I’m not totally convinced by a lot of Marx’s arguments, but it’s obvious that a lot critics are just shadowboxing. As others point out, a lot of people seem to point at marginal utility theories of wage determination as this big Gotcha that Disproves Marx… but he’s just describing what any MBA would obviously agree with about how laborers’ wages would be determined. Capitalists are obviously always going to pay as little as they can get away with, and will simply shift their capital to a different enterprise if the profit (unpaid labor) ever shrinks to zero due to market forces.

Yeah the big story chapters are nice breaks. Ch15 is also like this, and most of part 8

I think Marx associated Protestantism with capitalist ideology and Catholicism with feudal ideology. I forget which writing but it was probably in The Holy Family.

Yeah, and if anything it’s an understatement— he doesn’t mention 1. the expropriation of church lands; 2; consequent collapse of what little organised aid for the poor there was; 3. destruction of local religious/cultural/social organisations (saint cults); 4. stricter enforcement of orthdoxy, 5. destruction of the (admittesly limited) fetters of church law and “sacred world”

Lots of anti-vampire sentiment in these chapters, oh dear oh dear

Marx also only uses the term “capitalism” a handful of times. I think he just didn’t like referring to -isms.

Despite not using the specific term liberalism I think he means the same thing any time he refers to bourgeois ideology or bourgeois political economy. Since Marx’s thought was radically opposed to bourgeois thought I think it’s fair to say that criticizing liberalism is important to communism, it’s not just a meme.

For example, the paragraph on “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” at the end of chapter 6 is making fun of liberal thought.

If I’m reading your comments right, you are looking for a clarification on Ch9 section 3 right? What is Marx’s argumentation against Senior’s claim that all net profit is earned in the last (12th) hour of labor?

Senior’s Last Hour

Nassau W. Senior was a vulgar economist who sought to prove that the working day could not be reduced from 12 hours because all of the net profit was earned in the final hour. Therefore reducing the working day even by an hour, from 12 to 11 hours, would wipe out the industry. Increasing the working day by just an hour, from 12 to 13 hours, would double profits by doubling the time devoted to profit.

His “analysis” goes as follows:

1. Assume some rate of profit, say 15%. If a capitalist advances $100k on capital ($80k mill and machinery, $20k raw materials and wages), they will have $115k worth of gross product at the end of the labor process, before deducting for expenses like wear and tear on machinery.
2. Divide $115k by the number of working hours (here 11.5 hours, since 0.5 hours are allowed for a meal). This works out to each working hour producing $10k of the gross product.
3. Assume some amount of deductions, say $5k for wear and tear in a working day.
4. All of the above means that the $100k capital advanced is replaced in 10 hours, wear and tear is replaced in 0.5 hours, and the remaining hour is profit.

Marx’s Refutation

Senior’s mistake is confusing constant capital and variable capital.

Dividing $115k by 11.5 hours means that $10k of value is contained in each hour’s gross product, but it does not distinguish between how much of that value was preserved or pre-existing in the constant capital, and how much of that value was created by labor-power. Even with a profit rate of 0%, labor would still preserve the value of the constant capital, and produce a gross product each hour. Value of the gross product ≠ value added.

Here Marx makes a small additional assumption that “in accordance with the calculation of the manufacturers” the wages would be reproduced in 1 working hour, i.e. the variable capital is $10k. So variable capital = surplus value or v = s.

c = $95k, v = $10k, s = $10k (note I added the $5k wear and tear to c). The rate of surplus value s/v is 100%. That means that half of the working day was necessary labor, and half of the working day was surplus labor. I.e., the surplus-value was not formed in one hour, but in 5¾ hours, with the variable capital being replaced in the other 5¾ hours.

In each hour, c/11.5 = $8,261 of the hourly gross product is purely pre-existing value transferred from the constant capital; v/11.5 = $870 new value merely replaces the variable capital; and s/11.5 = $870 new value is appropriated as surplus value. These sum to the full $10k hourly gross product from Senior’s analysis.

Conclusion

A laborer produces both use-value and value in one and the same act of labor. It is not possible to produce only surplus-value in one hour, without preserving the value of the constant capital, and in the other 11 hours to only preserve value without creating value.

Profit (equal to surplus value in this case) is created linearly over the entire working day, not all at once in the gross product of a single chunk of that time. Or said another way, surplus value only arises from the fact of having worked longer than necessary, not from a qualitative difference in the labor performed in the last hour compared to the rest.

Constant capital has no bearing the rate of surplus value s/v because its value exists prior to the labor process. Constant capital does affect the rate of profit (c+v+s)/(c+v), and this will matter a lot in volume 3 since constant capital tends to dominate as technology develops. But in any case, the absolute amount of surplus value depends only on the amount of unpaid labor, and does not depend whatsoever on the amount of constant capital that absorbs the labor.

If I understood one of your other comments right, you are correct that for a given length of the working day s/v is constant per unit time, be it hours or seconds. But it is not the case that s/v is constant with a varying length of the working day. If the length decreases, then surplus labor decreases, and so does s/v. But not in the proportions Senior uses, which includes constant capital. Senior’s mistake is precisely why Marx “sets to 0” constant capital in his derivation of the rate of surplus value s/v.

I have thoughts on this but I won’t have time to write them out til later today. It’s a good question

Oh I just realized that the concrete total value necessary might be what a worker needs to survive, the value that they need to reproduce their labour (of which a daily basis is a pretty fine way to analyze it). So could we make it fractions relative to that number, then fill in the “x” everywhere with that value to find the exact hours?