Das Kapital Chapter 15 Section 2 is hopelessly confusing. [Archive]

Zanthorus

6th August 2011, 15:03

Devrim

Apparently the last time Devrim read Marx was several years ago so you're not going to have much luck with that :tt2:

Anyway, the following explanation will probably be terrible, because I have a cold and I'm just jotting things down as I reread the chapter, plus by the time I've finished ZeroNowhere will probably have written a much more elegant explanation that he's been working on for months or something like that. It can't hurt to try though I suppose. It's probably worth begginning with the context of the chapter which is the section of Capital on the production of relative surplus-value. Everyone should be familiar with Marx's derivation of surplus-value from the difference between the value of labour-power and the value created by the expenditure of labour during the working-day. Assuming that the value of labour-power stays constant then the only way to increase surplus-value is through the extension of the working-day, and surplus-value gained in this way Marx calls 'absolute' surplus-value. In this connection Marx details the struggle between workers and capitalists in England over the length of the working-day. However even without legislation on the length of the working-day however the is a physical limit to the time beyond which the capitalist can stretch the working-day without making his labourers physically useless.

There is another way for the capitalist to increase the amount of surplus-value produced during the working-day however, which is to decrease the value of labour-power, and hence the amount of time which the labourer will spend reproducing that value in the labour process, and hence increasing the time which the labourer spends producing surplus-value for the capitalist. In chapters 13 and 14 Marx details how the capitalists increase the productivity of labour and decrease the price of the necessities which the workers need to reproduce themselves first of all through co-operation and then through the division of labour. So far therefore this increase of productivity has taken place through the amalgamation of the labour of a number of labourers and also through their specialisation to different tasks, but there still remains another method, the revolutionisation of the technical instruments of production themselves.

Marx begins by trying to give us a definition of machinery, although he warns that there are limits to any hard and fast delineations since "epochs in the history of society are no more separated from each other by hard and fast lines of demarcation, than are geological epochs." Nevertheless, in general we can say that machinery general involves some kind of motive power like steam, electricity or in some cases human labour itself which is transformed through some form of mechanism into the end result of a movement of a tool working on raw material to produce the desired product. Whereas previously the labourer himself immediately produced the desired effect on the raw materials by hand, and hence could only apply their labour-power to a single operation at a time, now the effect is produced by the machine with man reduced to a simple motive power or overlooker, and a single motive power is now capable of performing several operations at once.

I won't go through everything else Marx says about machinery since I think that's all fairly straightforward. The one thing I want to note at this point is that whereas in simple co-operation and even to a certain extent production based on the division of labour the labour process was based on a simple amalgamation of pre-capitalist artisan forms of production, with the advent of machinery the methods of individual production give way to methods of production which can only be utilised by a collectivity of workers. "In simple co-operation, and even in that founded on division of labour, the suppression of the isolated, by the collective, workman still appears to be more or less accidental. Machinery, with a few exceptions to be mentioned later, operates only by means of associated labour, or labour in common. Hence the co-operative character of the labour-process is, in the latter case, a technical necessity dictated by the instrument of labour itself."

The second section discusses the transfer of value from the machine to the product. Marx notes that the increase of productivity which arises from combining labourers together under a single workshop costs nothing more than it would to employ the labourers individually, and similarly with division of labour. Moreover, the laws of nature which allow the functioning of machinery are a given. However, the exploitation of these laws for the purposes of production requires an apparatus created by human labour which in the situation under consideration is expended in a capitalist manner to be sold on at it's value. In the previous section Marx talked about how originally machines were created by workers operating with artisanal methods of production and the development from this stage into the production of machinery by means of machinery and I've just realised how that relates to this part of the chapter but oh well, that's the dialectical method of exposition for you. Anyway, machinery therefore, in contradistinction to other methods of increasing productivity, involves an increase in the constant part of capital.

The transfer of the value of the machinery to the end product will depend first of all on the total value of the machinery and secondly by the rate at which that value is transferred to the machinery which will depend on the productivity of the machine in question and the the amount of wear and tear it endures during operation. In general the tendency is for the value given to the end product by machinery to be smaller and smaller in terms of individual commodities but larger relative to the total product. In general the capitalist use of machinery will be determined by the relation between the value of machinery and the value of labour-power that it replaces. If the former is greater than the latter then the impulse to introduce machinery will be produced.

The third section endeavours to explain the effect of introducing machinery on the working-class itself. The first part of this is the introduction of child labour and of, er, women, who are apparently naturally weaker than men. There seems to be a confusing mix of male chauvinism and anger at the horrors of child exploitation in the first part of this third section but moving quickly along...

The second and third parts of this section explain the extension of the working-day and the intensification of labour thanks to the introduction of machinery. Despite the appearance of an automaton, it's clear that machinery cannot operate without human intervention, and the active life-time of a machine will be determined by the length of the working-day. By lengthening the working-day the capitalist can appropriate the surpus-value produced by machinery faster than if the working-day was kept shortened. Further, in time the machine will be put into competition with other cheaper or better machines, the socially necessary labour-time for the particular product it produces will be lessened and it's value will depreciate despite remaining at the same level of productivity. The best counter to this is to reproduce the total value of the machine in as shorter time as possible which of course means the worker working for as long as possible. This tendency, Marx says, will be especially marked if the capitalist has a machine which is more productive than anyone elses, and hence for the moment can produce commodities for which the individual labour-time necessary to produce them is a bit below the socially necessary labour-time, and the capitalist will attempt to exploit this advantage as much as possible in the time he has it by making his labourers work extra hard. The irony here then is that the machines which make possible the shortening of the working-day, under capitalist conditions of society are actually implements for the lengthening of the working-day. As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse "The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does."

Machinery also involves the production of a surplus working population, since the usefulness of the machinery to the capitalist lies in it's cheapness compared to the value of the labour-power of the workers which it replaces. This creation of an unemployed section of workers furthers the motive on the part of the capitalists to increase the labour-time of the employed workers to compensate for the lack of surplus-value which would have been produced with the employment of the surplus population.

Of course at a certain point eventually society reacts against the tendency for the increase of the working-day and fixes the length of it by law. At this point develops the tendency to increase the intensity of the labour process rather than developing it extenseively in the form of expanding the working day. This section seems fairly self-explanatory and I'm already getting bored of this so moving even further along.

Briefly skimming through the rest of the chapter most of it seems to be historical exposition. The only thing left of theoretical note appears to be the section on the theory of compensation of workers displaced by machines. Essentially Marx is attacking the notion that despite the fact that machinery sets free a certain portion of the working population it nevertheless sets free enough capital as to allow for the re-employment of this part of the population and hence if things are left to their own course there should be no tendency such as Marx describes for the creation of a permanently unemployed section of the population. Basically Marx says that this is false because the expulsion of variable capital from the production process is precisely caused by the increased usage of capital and not it's freeing up.

Skipping over again most of this seems fairly easy, I'm getting bored and most of this chapter reads like John Zerzan so I think I'll stop there. If I failed to describe something you wanted or the above is completely incoherent just say. Otherwise I'm stopping there.