Marx's Kapital for Beginners

[KC]

What follows is the book "Marx's Kapital for Beginners" by David Smith & Phil Evans. It is a rather short book, and very informative, on Marxist economics. Keep in mind that this book is somewhat in comic/cartoon form, so you get more out of reading the actual book, but this will suffice for many that wish to learn a little about Marxist economics.

If you have any questions, please feel free to pm me. Also, if you find any grammatical/spelling errors, please pm me and I will fix them. Thank you very much and enjoy!

Table of Contents:

A Biography of Karl Marx (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619253&postcount=2)


1. Commodities (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619254&postcount=3)
2. Products For Use (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619255&postcount=4)
3. Alienation of Use-Value (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619256&postcount=5)
4. Overproduction (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619257&postcount=6)
5. Exchange-Value (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619258&postcount=7)
6. Abstract Labour (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619259&postcount=8)
7. Alienation of Useful Labour (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619261&postcount=9)
8. Fetishism (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619263&postcount=10)
9. Money (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619264&postcount=11)
10. The Accumulation of Capital (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619266&postcount=12)
11. Labour-Power (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619268&postcount=13)
12. Expropriation (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619269&postcount=14)
13. A History Lesson (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619271&postcount=15)
14. The Making of the Working Class (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619274&postcount=16)
15. Surplus Value (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619275&postcount=17)
16. The Rate of Surplus Value (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619277&postcount=18)
17. Labour-Power and Class Struggle (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619278&postcount=19)
18. Abolition of Wage-Labour (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=619279&postcount=20)


You can buy the book here: Marx's Kapital for Beginners (Paperback) (http://www.amazon.com/Marxs-Kapital-Beginners-David-Smith/dp/039471265X)

[KC]

A Biography of Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany, near the French border, in 1818. This was just after the Napoleonic wars, one year before David Ricardo published his pathbreaking work, The Principles of Political Economy. The industrial revolution was well underway (Watt had invented the staem engine in 1769) and factory production was sweeping Europe.

After receiving a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena, Marx soon turned to revolutionary politics. He arrived at the conclusion that capitalism oppresses and exploits working people. Analysing how this happens, and organizing working people to replace capitalism with communism, became Marx’s lifelong preoccupation.

Marx remained an ardent revolutionary until his death in 1893. He never wavered in his conviction that the working class can – and must – abolish production for profit, and build, instead, a society based on ‘freely associated labour’ engaged in production for use.

Though Capital was Marx’s lifework – a gigantic multi-volumed project started in the mid-1840’s and never completely finished – Marx was hardly an armchair revolutionary. As editor of the Rhenish Gazette in 1842, in backward, absolutist Prussia, Marx (then only 24) was quickly immersed in politics. Already a radical philosopher – an exponent and critic of Hegel and Feuerbach – Marx was deeply impressed by an uprising of Silesian weavers, and by the misery and oppression of the Moselle wine-growers.

As a journalist, Marx took sides in the battles he reported, putting forward a radical defence of the revel Silesian weavers and strongly arguing for their democratic rights.

The Prussian authorities grew increasingly unhappy with Marx, deciding, after several months, to suppress the Rhenish Gazette altogether. So dramatic was this turn of events in the eyes of Marx’ German contemporaries that Marx became a celebrity of sorts – shown in one editorial cartoon as the mythical Prometheus, chained to a rock in punishment for stealing the fire of the gods – to share with suffering humankind.

From this point on, Marx’s odyssey begins. Expelled from Germany, Marx went to France – where he was again expelled…to wind up, finally, in England, years later.

In France, Marx converted to socialism. The first fruits of Marx’s initial foray into economics included The Holy Family, published in collaboration with Frederick Engels in 1843. In 1845, Marx signed a contract for ‘a book of economics.’ Thinking he would finish this book quickly, Marx little realized that the project would soon grow out of hand. It would get bigger and bigger…

Marx often had this problem. In 1851, he told engels that “this economic crap should be finished in five weeks!” As it happened, 16 years elapsed before even Volume one of Capital was published. The remainder of the work wasn’t published until after Marx’s death, with Engels as editor.

Soon after Marx began his itensive work on economics, Karl and Jenny were thrown out of France – as ‘politically undesirable’ aliens. Moving to Brussels, Marx joined the secret League of the Just, a radical workers’ organization which soon changed its name to the Communist League. Engels joined, too. After completing his first published work on the capitalist economy – an essay against Proudhon entitled The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) – Marx was asked to collaborate with Engels on The Manifesto of the Communist League, better known as The Communist Manifesto. This incomparably famous pamphlet, encapsulating Marx and Engels’ theory of the class struggle, was issued in 1848, ‘the year of revolutions’.

Revolutions broke out in France, Germany, Hungary and elsewhere in 1848. They were revolutions of the rising capitalist class against feudal reaction, combined with revolts of artisands and workers. Marx and Engels rushed back to Germany to publish the New Rhenish Gazette. It was in the pages of this revolutionary democratic newspaper that Marx published the series of lectures he had first delivered in 1847, ‘Wage-Labour and Capital’.

After the defeat of the revolution in Germany, Marx went on trial for sedition. After a stirring speech to the jury, Marx was acquitted. Even so, Karl and jenny were booted out of Germany again. This time, they went to England, where Engels settled, too. (His father owned a factory in Manchester.) Marx began 12 years of work as foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and several other newspapers, including the Vienna Presse.

At first, Marx and Engels tried to keep the Communist League alive, but they soon decided it was no longer useful. Without a mass movement to sustain it, the group was becoming and émigré sect, splitting hairs in political isolation.

In 1858, Marx’s studies had progressed to the point that he was able to draft a 1,400-page outline of his entire projected ‘critique of political economy’. This outline, known as the Grundrisse, is a major work in its own right, presaging most of the themes in Capital. It is a tour de force of incomparable breadth and insight.

In 1859, Marx published A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, summarizing some of the basic ideas developed in the Grundrisse. This is an extremely valuable prologue to Capital, far more important for the understanding of Marx’s ‘theory of value’ than is often realized. It is even more thorough than Capital on the question of Money…

In 1865, as a leading member of the General Council of the International Workingman’s Association (which had formed the year before to be a formidable force), Marx replied at length to an argument against strikes by a Council member, John Weston, a carpenter. Marx’s reply, later published in pamphlet form by his daughter Eleanor, expresses in a concise form many of his most vital ideas. These ideas won general approval in the IWA (perhaps better known as the ‘First International’).

At long last, in 1867, Volume One of Das Kapital rolled off the presses, to be greeted immediately and warmly in the workers’ press. The capitalist press ignored it entirely.

Marx felt that he had reached an important milestone with the publication of Das Kapital, placing a necessary theoretical weapon in the hands of the workers’ movement. In Volume One, Marx demonstrates that capitalism is based on the exploitation of working women, men, and children. All the basic facts of modern society are analysed, from prices and profits to wages and the working day. Why labour products are ‘commodities,’ why money is so all-powerful, where capital originates and why money is so all-powerful, where capital originates and why economic crises happen – all these Marx analyses with searching care.

Engels had, indeed, been busy promoting Capital, as had others in the International. Still, Das Kapital didn’t sell very briskly at first.

In 1871, the Paris Commune took place! A spectacular uprising of Parisian workers and small independent producers occurred during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Bitterly discontented with the repressive regime of the first emperor Napoleon’s adventurer nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the workers of Paris decided to take their lives into their own hands.

In March 1871 the Prisian working people toppled the government and seized the reins of power. By means of energetic, determined, and radically democratic measures, these working men and women reconstituted Paris as a socialist commune. Speaking for the International, Marx declared the Paris Commune the first example of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. He meant the working class ruling itself democratically, in its own name, while fighting off the counter-revolutionary efforts of the displaced capitalist class.

But now something unusual in military annals took place. After two glorious months of the Commune, the French and Prussian armies – once at each other’s throats – harbouring not the slightest tender feelings for one another – united to oppose the Parisian workers. Before long, the military effort to overwhelm the Commune met with success. A White Terror much more brutal than the terror of the French Revolution of 1793 followed. More than a hundred thousand Communards were killed. Thousands were exiled.

It was at this fateful juncture that Marx set about revising Das Kapital for a French translation. This appeared as a series of penny pamphlets, intended for Parisian working people, between 1872 and 1875. Marx’s French publisher, Lachatre, was an exiled Communard. Marx’s goal was to communicate his analysis of capitalism and the class struggle to the survivors of the Commune. He hoped that this would help them regroup and rethink their strategy.

Is Das Kapital an obscure, lifeless, esoteric work? No. Capital is for everyone who works for a living in the shadow of a boss. It argues that capitalism is a world system based on wage-labour. The relevance of Marx’s Capital grows as wage-labour extends to all corners of the earth.

[KC]

1. Commodities

People make commodities; sell commodities; buy commodities. That’s what the hustle and bustle is all about. Every day, on every side, we encounter an immense accumulation of commodities. All these worldly things – ready for sale, waiting to tempt money from our pockets, are ‘commodities’, bearing odious, white paper labels with familiar symbols.

This is how commodities appear – with prices on their foreheads, talking dollars and cents. The price tag is the unique insignia of the commodity. This accumulation of commodities; this mass of objects bearing price tags – this we may call THE WEALTH OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY.


The Commodity As An Oddity


‘The commodity is an oddity because it leads a double life. It is a product of labour made not just for use, but for exchange. ‘For sale’, the product acquires a quality not present in nature – exchangeability. As a commodity, it is not only useful but exchangeable. Furs, for example, can be used either to protect us from the cold – or to attract money. Spices can flavour our food – or sell for a price. Here we have the unique feature of the product as a commodity. It has two dimensions: both what it is, and what it is worth. The commodity is not just an object, but an object with a price. In the language of the early economists, we may say with Adam Smith, that “a commodity is both a use value and a value!”

To grasp value we must fully understand the relationship between use-value and value. Together, use-value and value are the twin sides of the commodity – they are the opposite poles of its double life.


‘A use-value is anything outside us that we find necessary, useful, or pleasant. By the use of its properties, the useful thing allows us to satisfy some need or desire.’


There is purely no mystery here! As a useful product, the commodity is not an oddity. But the commodity is far more than a simple use-value. Materially useful as a use-value, the rose is socially useful (exchangeable) as a commodity. Fragrant and lovely, the rose also sells for a dollar, and trades for a handful of chocolates. In a nutshell the commodity is valuable both for use and for exchange.

[KC]

2. Products For Use

Before capitalism began (in Europe in the 15th century) and even afterwards (until quite recently, in fact), production in most parts of the world was production for use. Dresses were made to be worn, not sold. Chocolates were made to be eaten, not exchanged. Only with the ascent of capitalism did production for exchange become predominant.

During the lifetime of Aristotle – circa 220 B.C. – commerce was a lively but very minor part of overall economic life. ‘Economics’, in fact is the name Aristotle applied to production for use. Production for exchange Aristotle called ‘Chrematistics.”

The same was true for slaveholding antiquity – in Egypt, Greece Carthage, Rome, and elsewhere. Though slaves produced for the use of others – their masters – they seldom produced for exchange. Nor were commodities typically produced by European serfs, Chinese peasants, Indian patriarchal families, or working people of other pre-capitalist societies.

Use-value, not exchange-value, was the goal and result of pre-capitalist production. Indeed, producing to sell and profit was typically regarded as immoral, a perverse way of life inspired by greed, pride, gluttony, and vanity. Only in capitalist society does exchangeability become an established feature of the labour product. Only in capitalist society, thus, does the product lead a double life – as a value and a use-value.

[KC]

3. Alienation of Use-Value

If we are fully to grasp capitalist production, we must recognize, above all, that the double life of the commodity is neither peaceful nor harmonious. On the contrary, value and use-value clash. The capitalist quest for profit – for ever greater sums of value – radically clashes with human desires for food, shelter, and other use-values. We are speaking now of the distortion, repression, and abuse of the product as a useful object – its misuse as a use-value. To the extent that the product is treated as a value, it is alienated as a use-value.

A commodity must be useful or seem useful if anyone is to buy it. But usefulness is not the main issue. As a commodity, the product must be sold to be used. Sale is the necessary and indispensable prerequisite for use. Without exchange, there can be no use. If a commodity should fail to demonstrate exchangeability, its usefulness, too, will be cancelled. Thus does ‘alien’ exchange dominate ‘natural’ use.

Take a loaf of bread, for example. Sitting in a supermarket, its usefulness lies completely dormant. Though perfectly edible, it must prove its exchange-value before it can be eaten. If no one buys it, the bread will rot on the shelf – even though people will starve. The same is true for every commodity: NO SALE, NO USE. This is a principle of private property. Commodities are not made to be given away. Capitalists do not share with workers.

Another example of the distortion of use-value resulting from production for exchange is the sabotage of the product. Business cares about product quality only from the standpoint of sales. If sales are unaffected, business will happily cut costs by skimping on labour, safety precautions and materials, - typically making useless, dangerous, even deadly products.

[KC]

4. Overproduction

Still another example of how exchange-value eclipses use-value is evident in so-called ‘overproduction’. Periodically, production results in what business regards as an ‘excess’ of commodities. The consequence is that prices and profits fall – to the chagrin and mortal fury of capitalists. The market, they say, is ‘glutted’. To reverse matters, business intentionally and cheerfully destroys part of its product. Why? Simply to raise prices and profits. Never mind that people lack adequate housing, medical care, or food. From the profit-standpoint of business, the market ‘glut’ is a catastrophe. It must be disposed of. Not by making surplus use-values freely available to people – heavens, no! Rather, by destroying them.

This is what happened, for example, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Agribusiness found itself burdened with an ‘excess’ of pigs and milk, causing prices to fall. The result was that pigs were killed and milk disposed of, in vast quantities, to safeguard profits – though many went hungry. To keep profits up, supply is kept down. Production is restricted as a matter of course.

In the US, for example, barely 70% of the total productive capacity is used. Much of the general production apparatus remains idle – to say nothing of the millions of unemployed workers. As we see, capitalism requires products universally endowed with exchangeability. Business places a premium not on what the object is, but on its value.

[KC]

5. Exchange-Value

If value exists and appears only in exchange, it is imperative for us to grasp the meaning of exchange. Aristotle is once again a helpful guide.


“Consider an exchange of five beds for one house. These products are not alike. Beds and houses have different qualities and different uses. How, then, can they exchange as equals? Are they really equal? No! Though exchanging them seems to imply their equality, beds and houses are not really equal. The appearance of equality is false. In reality, people simply decide to exchange unequal things.”


However, Aristotle ultimately came to the conclusion that real equality between commodities is impossible. After all, Aristotle reasoned, no two objects are really the same. Though mistaken in his conclusion, Aristotle at least seriously grappled with the problem of ‘equality’ in exchange. This elevates him head and shoulders above most contemporary economists, who refuse even to consider the possibility that exchange embodies an inherent principle of equality.

That just so much (not more, not less) is the price of a commodity when supply and demand balance indicates that something else is the basis for this price. If we agree with Aristotle that no two objects are exactly alike – and if they were, why would we exchange them? – we face a difficulty. How can objects that are materially unlike, with unlike properties, systematically exchange for each other in established proportions?

Imagine for a moment that there are just two objects in question – say, a deer and a beaver – and just two owners (both of them hunters). Suppose that it requires one day of hunting to capture a deer, but seven days to capture a beaver. If both hunters are equally skilful at catching both types of quarry, then parting with one beaver for one deer seems unreasonable. Why trade the product of seven day’s labour for the product of one day’s labour? Why hunt for seven days to wind up with a deer requiring only one day of hunting?

It is possible to make this exchange – what would prevent it? Any producer can make an unequal exchange either unwittingly or if s/he so desires. But the matter changes when we talk about systematic commodity exchange, that is, capitalism. Here, the principle that regulates commodity exchange is labour-time. Materially, commodities may be totally dissimilar – but they do have one thing in common: all require human effort for their production or appropriation. This provides a basis for exchange. By this standard, seven deer are equal to one beaver. That is, each embodies an equal quantity of labour. This raises a problem: what does it mean to say that a product ‘embodies’ labor?

Just this: that so much labour ‘goes into’ the product. In production, the material object existing before production changes. The body of the object changes with the labour expended upon it. This labour thus has ‘bodily’ results – it is embodied in a material thing.

Before work begins, the object already has a particular form derived from nature. Labour adds to this, changing the form of the object. In this way, the purpose guiding labour is ‘objectified’ – it goes into the object.

[KC]

6. Abstract Labour

A moment ago, we said that the basis for comparison between different commodities is the amount of labour required for each. But a problem arises: what kind of labour are we referring to? If useful labour adds to the usefulness of the product – what makes it exchangeable? What type of labour makes a rose, for instance, a commodity? Useful labour?

No. That was David Ricardo’s mistake. Brilliantly perceiving that value is embodied labour, Ricardo failed fully to analyse this proposition. Above all, Ricardo fell short of the concept of abstract labour. Though different kinds of labour are not materially equal, they can be treated as if they were. This is vital! This is the secret we’ve been seeking.

Materially unequal different forms of useful labour – say, watchmaking and bedmaking – can be treated as if they were equal, to facilitate exchange. Activities involving different skills, different operations, and different tools can be treated as the same – so that the products of different activities can be regarded as equal. In other words: useful labour can be treated as abstract labour. Before exploring abstract labour in detail, it will be useful to draw a preliminary contrast:


Useful Labour: Work activities as they really are with unique material qualities. Embodied in use-value.

Abstract Labour: Work activities treated as if they had no distinguishing qualities. Embodied in value.


When tailors and weavers exchange products, for example, they view their work not as it really is, but as work, pure and simple, as labour per se. Equating one coat to 20 yds of linen means equating coatmaking (the labour of a tailor) to linenmaking (the labour of a weaver). The products are equated – and so is the labour that goes into them. Trading products means treating them as equal.

Sans qualities, all labour is alike. X hours of one type of quality-less labour is equal to X hours of another type of quality-less labour. Thus, abstractness permits exchange. Equal quantities of abstract labour may exchange for one another. With the fact of exchange itself, abstract labour is certified as real. The product proves itself to be a commodity, an embodiment of value.

Producers don’t usually think to themselves ‘Aha! By trading my watch for a bed, I simultaneously disregard the material qualities of both products, viewing them as qualitatively equal and thus rendering them the result not of useful but of abstract labour.’

But this is what people do…whatever they may think. When a palace is traded for so many tins of boot polish, the labour embodied in each is treated, de facto, as if it were identical to the other. The same is true when a volume of Shakespeare’s works is exchanged for so many ounces of snuff. Clearly, the use-value of each product differs – and so does the useful labour corresponding to the use-value. They are values.

This means that the qualitatively unequal useful labour embodied in them is treated as qualitatively equal. When we exchange watches, dresses, beds or houses we diregard their material properties. The basis for this is that we disregard the material differences between watchmaking, dressmaking, bed-making and house-building. A certain number of watches – made of metal, jewels, and glass – are exchangeable for a certain number of beds – made of goosefeathers, wood, foam rubber and cloth – because the different kinds of labour required to assemble them are treated as equal.

It isn’t that two kinds of labour lurk in the body of the commodity. Rather, the useful labour inherent in the product as a use-value can be treated as qualitatively abstract to facilitate exchange.

No matter how slowly you work, the commodity you produce contains only the amount of ‘equal’ labour-time that the average producer would expend. If you try to charge a price for your product on the basis fo the exact, actual time it takes, you will soon discover that the actual time spent performing useful labour is not the point. It’s how much socially standard labour – abstract labour – the product normally requires. Average, equal labour is what people pay attention to – and it can change suddenly for reasons independent of the nature of concrete, useful labour.

When the power-loom was introduced into England, for example, it halfed the time required to make cloth. Hand-loom weavers, unable to afford power-looms, now found their product just half as valuable as before – not because their own, actual labour had changed, but because the level of socially standard labour had changed.

So it should be very clear that ‘equal’ labour is not real, material labour, but real labour regarded as socially abstract labour.

[KC]

7. Alienation Of Useful Labour

If, as we have said, every commodity ‘contains’ or ‘embodies’ abstract LABOUR – where is it to be found? Take a coat for example. Is the abstract LABOUR in the lining, in the sleeves, in the collar? No. No matter how threadbare and ragged this coat may become, the abstract LABOUR it contains can never be materially found.

Only useful things and useful labour can be discerned by the senses. Since value is not material, it cannot be materially perceived. It is social, a ghostly social reality. “The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their bodies, not an atom of matter enters into it.” A king is a man like any other man, that is, different from all others – in manner, looks and temperament.

You can’t tell by looking at him that he’s king – he appears to be just a man. But the monarch is treated as a king. He may not possess the ‘Divine Right’ imputed to him, but, because his subjects treat him royally, he is a king. He has ‘kingly powers’. Kingly powers and qualities are social, not natural. No coroner examining a king’s dead body would discover a trace of royalty in his blood. (It isn’t blue). Naturally, materially, the king is just a man. His material powers are just human powers. But socially, in his activities, in the way people respond to him, the king is what his subjects imagine him to be. People make him a king by treating him as one.

So it is with value. No useful object materially embodies abstract LABOUR. A useful object can be a commodity – an embodiment of value – only by being treated as a commodity. But if it is treated as a commodity, then it becomes a commodity – socially.

In nature, there are no commodities. Just try to find value in Davy Jones’ locker, or at the center of the earth, or in outer space. Indeed, nothing is ‘exchangeable’ where there are no people. Exchange is an act of human relations. Exchangeability is a property possible only in the context of human social relations. But though unnatural, exchangeability can exist. People can make useful things exchangeable – by producing for exchange. When exchange becomes the universal, systematic principle of production – as it is in capitalist society – then exchangeability becomes a socially real attribute of products in general. ‘Ghostly’ value is very, very real. Try to survive in capitalist society without buying or selling things! With minor exceptions, everyone in capitalist society buys and sells commodities.

[KC]

8. Fetishism

The word fetishism denotes the belief that particular objects – say, religious idols or gold bars – have mystical powers. A fetish is precisely such an object. So-called primitive religions – and advanced ones, too – imagine that special entities have supernatural powers. So it is with the fetishism inherent in the world of commodities. It seems that commodities have spontaneous, natural relations with each other…

What really happens is that society divides its labour between a multitude of ‘private producers,’ who relate to each other by exchanging their products. It is this process which transforms simple use-values into magical values.

Though commodities and money do have special powers, these powers are not natural. This is, however, what people imagine. Seldom is it realized that money and commodities only have the power of exchangeability because people relate to each other as private producers. Producing in isolation from others working ‘privately’, producers must produce for exchange.

Only by exchange can products change hands. Without exchange, a private apple grower would have – only apples! To get wine, books, shoes, and other products, producers must burst from the shell of their privacy at least long enough for exchange to take place. No one producer can use indefinite quantities of any one use-value. Beyond a certain point, the producer’s product becomes a non-use-value for the producer, something of redeeming value only in exchange – where it appeals to some other producer as a use-value.

The appearance is that apples exchange for money (and thus, indirectly, for wine, books, and so on) naturally, as an expression of their inborn exchangeability. Commodities seem to attract money just as a magnet attracts iron. It seems natural for commodities to have particular prices; to be ‘worth’ just so much, no more and no less. This is fetishism.

[KC]

9. Money

Money exists in three forms: as commodities, money, and capital.


COMMODITIES are use-values produced for exchange.
MONEY is the universal commodity, equivalent to all others.
CAPITAL is money invested to generate more money.


To discuss capital, the very highest form of value, we must better understand money. How does money emerge from the exchange of commodities? How does money come to dominate the exchange of commodities as capital?

In the simplest case – where a single commodity is exchanged for just one equivalent commodity – the value – relation is not well established. Deciding how much ‘socially average’ labour is required to produce this or that is mostly a matter of guesswork. But when products are generally produced for exchange, value-relations grow more established. When one coat = 20 metres of linen = 10 kilos of tea = 40 kilos of coffee = 20 grammes of gold, exchange ratios become more fixed, less haphazard. Ever more products are treated as units of abstract labour. Finally, a system of commodity production arises, in which the relative value magnitudes of the different commodities are systematically fixed.

When one relative commodity is confronted by not one equivalent commodity, but by many, its value is expressed independently by an array of equivalents. But turn the situation around. We can also say that each commodity in this array of equivalents views the ‘one relative’ commodity as itself an equivalent. If this one commodity is used to express the value of many – it becomes money. It plays the role of money most fully when it is recognized universally as the one equivalent commodity, expressing – and measuring – the value of all others.


Gold


Historically, gold has been the particular commodity most universally used as money. With the rise of the ‘gold standard’, it became appropriate to say not that 1 coat = 20 metres of linen, but that 1 coat = $15 and that 20 metres of linen = $15. Coat and linen can still be exchanged, but it is now customary to use money to effect the trade. The equivalence of the coat and linen is expressed, not directly, but by their common relationship to gold (using one of its money-names). Gold emerges as the power of powers when it becomes the single commodity uniquely exchangeable for all others. Coats and linen can now buy only money. The same is true for all ordinary commodities (with trivial exceptions). But gold – and its paper, copper, and other representatives – can buy any and every other commodity. This is what makes it money, and sets it apart from all other commodities.

The playwright Ben Jonson conveyed a sharp sense of the real social power of money when he spoke of “riches – the dumb god that giv’st all men tongues, that can’st do naught, and yet mak’st men do all things!” In most early societies, gold was merely one product among others. Now it is the one and only universal commodity, the only product that can never fail to sell. It moves faster, farther, and does more. It’s SUPERCOMMODITY!! And its powers are multiplied more than ever when it functions as capital. As capital, money does indeed “mak’st men do all things.”

[KC]

10. The Accumulation of Capital

What is profit, and where does it originate? If an entrepreneur starts with a given sum of money, how does an extra sum enter his pocket? If we start with a given sum of value, where does surplus value come from?

Take our friend Lessner, a hired tailor; his father, a self-employed tailor; and Moneybags, a capitalist. Each relates to money in a different way. Both Lessner and his father sell in order to buy. One sells the ability to make coats (Lessner) and the other sells coats (Lessner’s father). Both seek specific, needed commodities.
The father makes and sells coats not for money as an end in itself, but as a means to obtain food, shelter, and other commodities. The same is true for friend Lessner – he sells his ability to work not for love, but for money; for wages, as a means to obtain life’s necessities. What we see here is the Commodity-Money-Commodities cycle C-M-C, where Money is a step on the path from making Commodities to buying Commodities.

It is different with friend Moneybags. He enters the scene not as a direct producer, but as a money-owner. His goal is to buy commodities to sell them. He spends money to get money. Money, for the capitalist, is the beginning and terminus of exchange. The cycle in which Moneybags lives is the reverse of C-M-C: Money-Commodities-Money (M-C-M).

Moneybags spends money not merely to reap an equal sum of money. He does not invest 10 merely to get 10 back. No, Moneybags aims to get more money than he spends – to profit from exchange. A victim of ‘the accursed hunger for gold’, Moneybags finds himself on a passionate chase after value, a boundless quest for enrichment. Profit-making is his one and only goal. ‘More value for less’ – that is the capitalist’s motto.

The miracle of money is that, properly used, it does produce profit. Money makes money! An initial sum of money, M, gives rise to an expanded sum of money, M1 (pronounced M-prime). Not simply M-C-M, then but M-C-M’ is the capitalist’s cycle, where M’ is greater than M. It is here that we find the origin of surplus value – the difference between M’ and M. An original sum of money is replaced by an expanded sum of value. Moneybags actually achieves ‘more value for less.’

Money used to generate money is ‘self-expanding value’, or capital. We speak now of the initial M. Once invested capital gives rise to surplus value, the difference between M and M’. This surplus value takes three basic forms: profit, interest and rent. A portion of surplus value pays the interest on M – since it is likely that Moneybags borrows at least part of the initial capital. Another portion of surplus value is used to pay rent – since it is likely that Moneybags rents at least part of the land or equipment he uses.

What remains is profit – surplus value belonging directly to Moneybags, to use as he pleases. There are basically two such uses: profit can be used either as dividends, for Moneybags’ personal pleasure, or as capital – as a new M, to generate still further surplus value.

Though the wealth of capitalist society presents itself as an accumulation of commodities, it is, in reality, an accumulation of capital. Capital accumulation is the defining principle of capitalism, the economic goal and process besides which all others pale into insignificance. Capitalism is just the nickname for the system of production based on the accumulation of capital. As we have seen, profit-making is the means by which capital accumulates. Profit keeps the system going – like wind in the sails of a boat, or uranium in a nuclear reactor.

Money has proven its capacity to expand itself. Like the goose that lays the golden egg, money has shown that it possesses the occult power to add value to itself. Money begets money. ‘The rich get richer’. As capital, money tends to accumulate when invested. Profits are made.

Patting himself on the back, Moneybags characteristically says that profits result from ‘buying cheap and selling dear’, that is, exchange. Suppose that Moneybags sells his commodities above their value. He sells what is worth 100 for 110 – thus adding a surcharge of 10. But what prevents all other sellers from doing the same? If this should happen, our friend Moneybags is at a loss – what he gains as a seller he loses as a buyer.

Swindling and shady dealing are rampant, of course. But, in general, overcharging for products is disallowed by competition. Rivalry between competing capitalists for limited markets and profits tends to keep prices hovering in the vicinity of value. The result is that commodities tend to sell for what they cost in terms of average, socially required labour.

Moneybags would of course like to overcharge for his products – but if he does, his competitors will cut into his sales by ‘underselling’ him. What Moneybags gains with his surcharge he loses in sales – if he isn’t driven out of business altogether.

Consider, finally, one particular instance of swindling. Suppose that Mr. A is ingenius enough to take advantage of Messrs. B and C. Fine – but will this produce surplus value? No! Some gain may occur, but this is at the expense of the gentlemen swindled. No new value is created. When monopolies enter the picture, it changes somewhat – but not fundamentally. Though it is possible for monopolists to raise prices above values, unconstrained by competition and thus free to reap ‘windfall’ profits, profits, in general, are not the result of monopoly. Without monopoly, even when production is perfectly competitive, profit is still the name of the game. The accumulation of capital started, remember, on the basis of competition. So we must look elsewhere for an explanation of profit…

Capital is created not merely in exchange, as a by-product of buying and selling, but in production. Between M and M’ there is a process of production. It is to this what we must turn if we are to grasp the origin of capital. More happens in M-C-M’ than exchange. Moneybags does not simply re-sell the very same commodities he buys. On the contrary, Moneybags buys commodities which give rise to new commodities.

If the value of the commodities produced is no greater than the value of the commodities purchased, Moneybags will make no profit. So Moneybags must be lucky enough to find a special commodity on the market, which, once purchased, can be used to generate surplus value. As it happens, Moneybags is in luck! He does find a special, value-creating commodity on the market.

[KC]

11. Labour-Power

Where money is the supercommodity, human labour-power is the SUPER supercommodity. Money buying labour power for the generation of surplus value is what capitalism is all about. Only by purchasing labour power can money act as capital – and only in this way can capital be accumulated. Capitalism ultimately defends on the commodification of labour-power. But how? By what historical process did the human capacity for labour become ‘commodified’? By what process did direct producers become proletarians, sellers of labour-power, workers?

‘We know by experience that a relatively feeble development of commodity circulation suffices for the creation of money. But capital requires more than the mere circulation of money and commodities. Capital arises only when the money-owner, as the owner of factories, tools, etc., finds the free worker available on the market as the seller of labour-power. This one historical precondition comprises a world’s history. Capital arises on this basis, announcing a new epoch in social production.’

‘But how are we to explain the strange phenomenon – that we find on the market a set of buyers (owning money, land, and machinery) and a set of sellers (owning nothing but labour-power, their working arms and brains)? How does it come about that one class buys continually to make profits and grow rich, while the working class continually sells its labour-power just to earn a livelihood?’

One thing is clear. Nature does not produce capitalists, on the one hand, and workers, on the other. Social classes don’t fall from the sky, or leap fully-formed from the earth. The bourgeoisie – the ruling class – and the proletariat – the working class – in particular, resulted from a long chain of historical developments.

[KC]

12. Expropriation

The means of production are crucial. These include implements, machinery, buildings, raw materials, resources, and all other items required for production. Production as such is the active combination of human energy – labour-power – and production resources – means of production. When production resources are controlled by direct producers, labour-power and means of production combine organically. Take small farmers, growing wheat or artisans, making hats. Directly in possession of the needed tools and materials of their trades, these direct producers simply make use of production resources. The resulting production is independent, and self-sufficient.

‘But take away the land – the livestock – the energy resources. Wrench the tools from the producer’s hands, and what is left? An uprooted vagabond, whose only possession is labour-power.’

This expropriation of the producer is precisely the historical precondition for capitalism. Formerly united, means of production and labour-power are now sundered. The capitalist takes possession of the means of production. Without means of production, the direct producer has nothing – except labour-power. To survive, the producer must sell his or her labour-power for wages, thus becoming a proletarian. In this way, labour-power and means of production reunite – combining not organically, however, but perversely, as the playthings of a capitalist.

The proletarian finds her or himself abjectly dependent on the capitalist, for ‘employment’, for ‘a chance to make a living’, for access to means of production. Though the proletarian does all productive labour, the capitalist alone controls production – simply by owning the means of production, which allows him to buy and thus own labour-power as well.

[KC]

13. A History Lesson

The historical expropriation of the direct producer took place originally in England, in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and, later, throughout Europe and most of the world. In some places, this process is still going on, as producers the planet over become wage-earners. Let’s review the start of this process in England, that majestic isle, land of light and harmony where capital and the proletariat were born. It is a tale told in blood and fire…

Many moralists and politicians tell an edifying story designed to enlighten us about the happy origins of wealth and poverty. ‘Long, long ago,’ they say, ‘there were two sorts of people: one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their wealth, and more, in riotous living. Thus it came to pass that the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority (who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves), and the wealth of the few (that increases constantly, although they long ago ceased to work).’ In real history, conquest, enslavement, robbery and murder play the greatest part. Not only the working class, but poverty, welfare, colonialism and all the rest are the result not of frail ‘human nature’, but of an epic assault on the common people by bosses and aristocrats of every type.

Exploitation is nothing new. By ‘exploitation’ we refer to the control of surplus labour by an armed oppressor class. Such oppressor control of surplus labour has typified every society since the introduction of slavery. It is, in fact, the hallmark of class society. Only its form is different in capitalist society – where surplus labour becomes surplus abstract labour, or surplus value. But what exactly is surplus labour?

Above and beyond labour necessary for survival – necessary labour – people may perform extra labour resulting in surplus product – surplus labour. The capacity for surplus labour is something that people acquire in stages. At first, in the most primitive societies, labour-power is relatively undeveloped – people are capable only of reproducing themselves, and living at bare subsistence, picking fruits and berries, and so on. By arduous self-development, however, people master labour skills of greater power, like handicrafts and agriculture. When labour-power finally develops to the point where surplus labour is possible, human existence is revolutionized.

Once the earliest communal structures had waxed and waned, surplus labour fell under the sway of a sequence of exploiting classes. In slave societies, from Greek antiquity to the ‘New World’, slaveowners controlled surplus labour (and necessary labour, too). In feudal cultures, serfs performed surplus labour for landlords, working several days a week on the lord’s land. In each case, the cream was skimmed from the top by an armed class of owners, the slave-owners and land-owners. ‘Exploitation’ is nothing else but the control exercised by oppressors over the surplus labour of the oppressed.

[KC]

14. The Making of the Working Class

In capitalist society, surplus labour is extracted from the proletariat in the form of surplus value. How this came to pass we can best understand by exploring the history of the expropriation of the producer. We must cast our eyes back to that time in English history when great masses of men, women and children were suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of production and hurled onto the labour-market as sellers of labour-power. The basis of this process was the expropriation of the peasant from the land.

By the end of the 14th century, English serfdom had practically disappeared. The immense majority of the population consisted of free peasants. In contrast to earlier times, these peasants did relatively little work for the nobles, working instead on land commonly or privately owned. Though gigantic baronies were strewn about, small peasant properties were much more common. The violent expropriation of these small properties and proprietors occurred in several phases. Thus was formed a propertyless proletariat. The opening shot in the campaign was fired by the monarchy. In a bold move to strengthen the king against the nobles, the royal power took action to dissolve the bands of retainers surrounding the various luminaries of the nobility. These aides de camp thus became the first to be hurled in appreciable numbers onto the early labour-market.

In defiant opposition, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat, undertaking the forcible seizure of peasant land-holdings in a ruthless effort to magnify aristocratic power. The direct impulse for this process of expropriation was provided by the rapid expansion of wool manufacture in Flanders, and the corresponding rise in wool prices. Seeking money, that emerging power of powers, the nobility decided to convert farm lands into sheepwalks. To do this, they concentrated all their military might on the peasantry in a vast, brutal, ultimately successful effort to uproot it, pillaging and razing countless villages in the process.

An Act from the time of Henry VIII speaks of the resulting transfer of control over the means of production, ‘whereby many farms and large flocks of sheep became concentrated in the hands of a few men; whereby marvelous numbers of people have been deprived of the means wherewith to maintain themselves and their families.’ Henry’s minister, Thomas More, speaks in Utopia of the curious land where “sheep swallow down the very men themselves’. As Francis Bacon declared, ‘This bred a decay of people, towns, churches and the like’. Once owners of several acres, the peasants now were virtually landless. To this day, the typical worker is lucky to own even a small garden.

The expropriation process received two new and terrible impulses during the 16th centry: the theft, on a colossal scale, of Catholic Church lands (during the Protestant Reformation) and of State lands (during the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688). The overall result was that by methods of ruthless terrorism the lands of England were converted from community property and small holdings into a set of gigantic private business ventures. Meanwhile the number of uprooted, propertyless, and rightless ex-peasants swelled beyond measure. Where did these peasants go?

‘Paupers are everywhere, and everywhere subjected’. Thus spoke Queen Elizabeth after a journey through England. Soon after, it proved necessary to recognize pauperism officially by the introduction of the poor-rate.

But the powers-that-be did not generally treat the refugee peasantry with anything like kindness. Just the reverse. Incredible new violence was visited upon these already terrorized people, to transform them into a passive, docile working class, to discipline them to the regime of industry, to break them of their rebellious spirit. Far from all of the uprooted labourers created by the expropriation of the peasantry could be employed by nascent industry. Abruptly dragged from their accustomed life, with few opportunities for wage-work, these unfortunates were turned in huge numbers into beggars, robbers, and vagabonds.

The state promptly showed its great and tender regard for the newly impoverished by enacting Draconian lawas treating beggars and vagabonds as ‘voluntary criminals’.

-During the reign of Henry VIII, in 1530, vagabonds were condemned to whipping for a first offence, loss of an ear for a second, and execution for a third – with no help offered in finding work.
-During the reign of Edward VI, in 1547, anyone refusing to work – at what? With what means of production? – was condemned as a slave.
-During the reign of Elizabeth, in 1572, unlicensed beggars 14 or older were severely flogged and branded. A second offence brought death.


‘Thus were the farming folk of England expropriated, chased from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage labour.’


With this background, money was at long last free to function as capital, buying great quantities of labour-power to carry on manufacture and, later, industrial production. Spindles, looms, and other means of production – once dispersed through the countryside – were now gathered together in primitive factories. Trade penetrated everywhere, powered by the incipient ‘industrial revolution’. The combination of concentrated means of production and hired labour-power proved tremendously dynamic.


‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the elimination, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the original American population, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of Black skins – these are the idyllic proceedings that characterized the dawn of capitalist production.’


At first, capital could absorb a mere fraction of the surplus population driven from the land, leaving beggars and vagabonds unemployed in droves. But, once underway, capitalist production gathered momentum. As decades and centuries passed, the immense majority of the English population became proletarians. The same happened elsewhere, too.

The terroristic methods and harsh laws by which the landless population had initially been introduced to labour discipline became decreasingly necessary as capitalist production stabilized, becoming the ‘normal’ form of production.


‘Now, the silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, workers can safely be left to the gentle mercy of production relations – to fears of joblessness, to hunger and need…’


Because they possess no means of production, workers have no option but to ‘freely’ sell their labour-power. It is in this way that the proletariat becomes the principal actor on the economic stage. The proletariat differs from openly unfree classes like serfs and slaves in two ways. Proletarians are ‘free’ to sell labour-power, and (unlike serfs) ‘free’ of all means of production. This is the double basis of the celebrated ‘freedom’ of bourgeois society.


-Freedom, because both buyer and seller are determined only by their own free will, contracting as free persons equal before the law.
-Equality because each relates to the other as a simple owner of commodities, exchanging equivalent for equivalent.
-Property, because each disposes only of what is his own.


When we leave the sphere of exchange – when we enter the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold hangs the notice, ‘No admittance except on business’ – a certain change takes place in the manner of our leading characters. The money-owner now strides forward as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is deferential and fearful. We are now speaking about the alienation of labour – the subordination of the worker to an alien power. As the direct outcome of the sale of labour-power, the subordination of the worker is an intrinsic feature of labour-power’s status as a commodity. Comprising a false freedom – the ‘freedom’ to enter a subservient role – labour’s alienation is the vital prerequisite for its exploitation.

The worker’s freedom is a curious matter. It should be evident, on balance, that the worker, as a participant in commodity exchange, is free to do just one thing: sell time and energy for wages. Different bosses and different jobs are available but workers can avoid bosses and jobs only if they don’t care about ‘making a living’. Everyone knows that there are just two kinds of workers: employed and unemployed.

With the sale of labour-power, working people lose all control over what they do. What is produced and how – the purposes and methods of labour – are questions only the capitalist may answer. And the result of labour – the product itself – unquestionably belongs not to the producer but to the capitalist. An alien will, concerned not about the worker but about profit, decides what the worker does. The motives of working people are entirely discounted in production, trampled by the profit-motive.

Moneybags sternly warns the worker: ‘Just do what you’re told! That’s what you’re here for – you’re not paid to think! What you do on your own time is your own affair, but here you do what I say. What you produce is none of your business. If you don’t like making nerve gas, or neutron bombs or defective cars or adulterated foods, you can look for work elsewhere. Do I make myself clear?’ Workers are never allowed any say about what to produce, or why. ‘Investment decisions’ – how and why to employ labour-power and means of production, say, whether to make nuclear weapons or candy – are the prerogative of capital.

By selling labour-power – a matter of ‘free choice’ in name only – the worker surrenders control over labour. In this way labour, the use of labour-power, is alienated, just as the use of commodities is alienated in general. The difference is that labour, once sold, can never be recovered.

Bread, though its usefulness is repressed while it awaits sale, can at least be eaten when it does sell. The use of labour-power, by contrast, is most fully alienated after its sale. Though working people may resist the tyranny of the capitalist in various ways, this is done at personal risk. Workers can be fired. The capitalist can refuse to continue buying labour-power. At this point, the worker is severed both from the means of production and means of subsistence. Though resistance, to be sure, is possible and necessary it doesn’t alter the basic fact: that being a worker means being dependent on the capitalist.

And moneybags has the law on his side. After all, he buys your labour-power, doesn’t he? So it’s his – to use as he likes. If you object, just ask the police – or the courts. You’ll learn quickly enough that the use of labour-power belongs to its rightful, legal owner – Moneybags.

[KC]

15. Surplus Value

Alienation of labour is the fundamental prerequisite for its exploitation. Sold to be used, labour-power must be alienated to be exploited. It then becomes the source of surplus value. Overcharging for commodities does not create surplus value; exploiting the working class does. How so?

People have had the capacity to perform surplus labour for millennia, ever since the first revolution in agriculture. In contemporary, capitalist society, the primary result of surplus labour is surplus value. Remember M-C-M’? Capital seeks to expand – to multiply – to embody more abstract labour after investment than before.

Moneybags wants to buy ever more labour-power, ever more means of production. To do this, ever more money is needed. This expanding stock of money is supplied by the exploitation of the worker.

What is the value of a commodity? Just this: the average, socially required labour-time necessary to make it. Since labour-power in capitalist society is also a commodity, it too, has a value. This is the average labour-time required to ‘produce’ the worker; to keep the worker alive and productive…just what it costs to replenish the worker’s energy, so that tomorrow’s labour-power will be roughly the same as today’s. Historically, the work of reproducing labour-power has been reserved for women, as wives and mothers…

Take any worker, at random. If $50 is the cost of supplying the worker with means of subsistence, a capitalist is foolhardy to pay this unless the worker’s product (say, bread) turns out to be worth more than $50. Otherwise, the capitalist will go out of business. But if the worker does produce commodities worth more than the initial investment, all is well. The investment ‘works’: money is ‘made’.

If it happens that the worker produces commodities equal in value to the worker’s labour-power in just part of a workday – say, in 4 hours – there is nothing to prevent the capitalist from employing the worker for more than 4 hours – say, 8 hours. When this does, in fact, happen (as it regularly does!), surplus value is the result. The 4 hours necessary to produce commodities as valuable as the worker’s labour-power we call (surprise!) – necessary labour. The extra time spent producing commodities we call surplus labour. Assuming that the worker spends roughly the average labour-time socially required to produce whatever is produced, this labour counts as so much abstract, socially equal labour-value. The surplus accumulated is surplus abstract labour – surplus value.


‘If the worker’s labour is sub-average, it may still produce surplus value – but less. It counts as less abstract labour than it would have if it had been at least average. For example: 8 hours of less-than average labour might result in the production of commodities normally requiring only 6 hours to produce. It would thus count as only 6 hours of abstract labour – but if necessary labour requires only 4 labour hours there is still a surplus of two. This is only half as much surplus as average, but it is a surplus. On the other hand, if the worker’s labour is so sub-average that the worker fails to produce commodities of enough value to compensate for payment of wages then the boss will go bankrupt. This is why it is absolutely vital for capitalists to have standard ‘state of the art’ equipment, and workers whose skills are at least average!’


‘Moneybags buys two types of commodities to set the production process in motion. Our old friends labour-power and means of production! Money thus functions as capital in two principal ways: 1. Buying living human energy, and, 2. Buying production resources, the product, in part, of previous human energy! Surplus value results from the use of just one of these two commodities – labour-power. Means of production do add value to the product, but no more than they embody. No surplus, that is!’


Variable Capital

This gives us our criterion for distinguishing different forms of capital. Since the value added to the commodity by labour-power varies, introducing the possibility of a surplus, we call the money spent for labour-power variable capital.

Constant Capital

Since the value contributed in production by means of production does not vary, we call money spent for means of production constant capital.

Why does constant capital generate no surplus value? Why, for example, does the contribution machinery makes to production not add more value than the value of the machinery itself? Take any commodity at random, say, a watch. The value of the watch is the total quantity of average labour socially required to produce it. Right? This ‘total quantity’ of average labour includes, however, not only the useful labour directly spent making the watch – the labour involved in assembling the mechanism, connecting springs to wheels, setting the timer, inserting the glass, and so on – but also the labour embodied in the various tools and accessories necessary to make the watch. In this case, we are speaking about the various delicate instruments and machines, plus springs, wheels, glass, and so on.

Moneybags buys these tools and accessory products so that a hired watchmaker can use them to make a watch. In general, we assume that Moneybags buys this watch-making equipment for what it’s worth – that is, an exchange of equivalents takes place, in which Moneybags pays as much for the equipment as the equipment is actually worth in terms of the abstract labour it contains. If this happens, no surplus value will be created by the use of this equipment. Why not? Here’s why:

Imagine, for a moment, that Moneybags purchases just enough watchmaking equipment (machinery and materials) to produce 100 watches. By the time these watches are completed, every machine will be used up and every accessory product will be used. Assume further that the total value of this equipment is $1,000 – just what Moneybags pays for it. Now, if the total value of the watches is the quantity of average labour socially required to produce them, how much value will the watchmaking equipment add to these watches? Just as much abstract labour as this equipment actually contains – no more, and no less. Moneybags has paid for a specific sum of abstract labour – and this abstract labour then goes into the product Moneybags sponsors.

The total value of the watches is the sum of two elements: the number of average labour hours expended in producing this equipment; and the number of average labour hours expended in assembling the watch. Once the equipment is produced, the total number of hours it contains will not change. If the watches sell at their value, say, $5,000, then we can be sure that the value added by the watchmakers is $4,000. We already know how much average labour went into the equipment – the equivalent of $1,000. The value of this equipment cannot rise during the production process; we can’t pretend that more average labour goes into this equipment than actually does.

Set labour-power to work with no special equipment – just raw materials and skill – to produce means of production, i.e., the machinery and semi-finished materials necessary to make watches. Assume that zero socially required labour-time is embodied in the raw materials. If it now takes 5 hours of socially required labour to transform these genuinely ‘raw’ materials into watchmaking machinery and semi-finished materials – what is the value of this watchmaking equipment? Just 5 socially required labour hours:


Zero labour hours to produce raw materials

+

Five to transform raw materials into equipment.


Since 3 labour-hours are socially required to reproduce power, surplus labour here = 2 hours: the difference between the time socially required for watchmaking equipment (5 average hours) and the time required for labour-power (3 average labour-hours).

If it requires 5 hours to produce watchmaking equipment, and then 12 hours to use up this equipment making watches, what quantity of total, socially required labour-time goes into these watches? That’s simple arithmetic: 5 + 12 = 17. Exactly 17 labour-hours are required to produce and use means of production for the production of watches for sale. All socially required labour-power is now present and accounted for. But how much surplus value is generated in this watchmaking process?

If necessary labour-time – the value of labour-power – equals 3 average labour-hours, and total labour-time – the value of the labour product – equals 12 average hours, the difference is surplus value: 12 – 3 = 9. Assuming that the watchmakers receive the equivalent (in wages) of 3 labour-hours, Moneybags thus accrues the equivalent of 9 labour-hours. That’s surplus value.

Do the means of production add to this surplus value? No! The total value of the product unquestionably includes the labour-time socially required to produce the means of production. As we’ve seen, the total value of the watches = 17 labour-hours: 12 using means of production plus 5 making means of production. But surplus value results only from the difference between the value created and the value presupposed – and only labour-power creates more value than it presupposes. Means of production, used up in production, add just the value they contain; in this case, 5 labour-hours.

To be sure, production of means of production may generate surplus value. (Indeed, as we saw earlier, if it takes 5 labour-hours to produce watchmaking equipment but only 3 labour-hours to reproduce labour-power, surplus value does accrue.) But again: this surplus value is created by the exercise of labour-power, which thus shows itself capable of creating products more valuable than itself (by a ratio of 5:3, in this case).

[KC]

16. The Rate of Surplus Value

In M-C-M’, the basic change is from M to M1. We can now show this by two new equations:

1. Capital = constant capital + variable capital, or Capital = c + v.
2. Capital’ = constant capital + variable capital + surplus value, or Capital’ = c + v + s.

C = constant capital
V = variable capital
S = surplus value


The difference between Capital-Capital’ (or between M-M’, if this is how we choose to depict it) is surplus value, s. Since v is the source of s, it makes sense to compare s and v. Surplus value/variable capital is the rate of surplus value. When v = 5 and s = 5, s/v = 1 – in other words, this represents an exactly 100% rate of surplus value.


The Rate of Profit

The rate of profit is the ratio between s and total investment, both constant and variable capital – that is, s/v + c, or s/Capital. Whenever c is greater than zero, the rate of profit is less than the rate of surplus value. This is very important. Why? Because it helps to explain why there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall; why capitalism tends to profit-crunches; why, in a word, economic crisis is such a basic part of life in capitalist society. When c rises, there tend to be crises!

The ratio of constant to variable capital we call the organic composition of capital. When c rises relative to v, we say that the organic composition of capital rises. In other words, the more means of production are employed relative to labour-power, the higher is the organic composition of capital.

As everyone knows, capital production tends to rely ever more on increasingly powerful means of production. Every day, high technology gets higher – more powerful machines enter production, and productivity soars. From simple hand tools – spindles, looms, hammers, anvils – production advances to nuclear power plants, automated factories, advanced computer systems, and much, much more. Historically, the most important reason for the rapid growth of capitalist-owned means of production is competition. When Moneybags decides to buy labour-power and means of production to produce watches, he embarks on a risky venture. There are other firms making watches, and a less-than-infinite market. Who can sell watches? How many can be sold? For what price?

If Moneybags is fortunate, he, rather than his competitors, will get a large share of the market. To do this, though, Moneybags needs to sell his products as cheaply as possible. Unless he is willing to sell products for less than they are worth (which sometimes happens, but as an exception, not the rule), this means that he must cut the average labour-time socially required for the production of workers. If it originally requires 20 hours of average labour-time to make a watch, moneybags must find some way to produce a watch in less than 20 hours.

When he does, he can then charge less for his product with no loss in surplus value, and win a higher percentage of the market. If his competitor, Cashbox, finds a way to cut prices by cutting labour-time, Moneybags must follow suit – or go out of business when Cashbox ‘ corners the market’. To make a long, unlovely story shorter and sweeter, the point is that competition forces capital to use ever less labour-time per commodity. First, Moneybags cuts the time required to produce a watch from 20 hours to 18. Then Cashbox retaliates by cutting it still further. And so it goes, like a tug of war. Cutting prices, as we will see, is a way to cut throats – to eliminate competitors.

The golden rule of competitive profit-making is to produce more for less – to cut costs by cutting the average labour-time required for production. How? By increasing the power of the means of production. It’s a simple rule – but one with earthshaking consequences. Productivity, revolutionized, rises steeply. The world fills with commodities, and the danger of economic crisis approaches. What’s the connection? Jus this: that s derives from v. Variable capital, not constant capital, produces surplus value. If competition forces capital to employ an ever higher ratio of constant to variable capital – as it clearly does – then the rate of profit (s/v + c) tends to fall.

When more is spent on means of production relative to labour-power, the rate of profit tends to decline. Say, for example, that initially c = 16, v = 8, and s = 8 ( so that a 100% rate of surplus value, s/v, obtains). If c rises with no corresponding rise in v and s, the rate of profit grows smaller (even though the rate of surplus value does not). Say c changes to c = 24. Then s/v + c changes from (8/8 + 16 = 1/3) to 8/8 + 24 = ¼). From the standpoint of the capitalist, this is a big and appalling drop.

Producing for exchange is risky – it’s possible that the product will fail to sell, either as a result of competition or for other reasons. To make the gamble of investment worthwhile requires a certain minimum prospect of gain. If the rate of profit falls too low, investment ceases to be a wise use of money – the risk of loss is too great, the potential for gain is too slight. This is all the more true when investment becomes, typically, a matter of ever increasing billions of dollars – a tendency which parallels the tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This is not just hypothetical. That the rate of profit has a tendency to fall is borne out by myriad facts of economic history. This tendency is not, however, absolute. There are countertendencies as well. But who can fail to notice the profit squeeze now stalking the world?

Previous profit squeezes have led to trade wars, often culminating in shooting wars. For competition leads not just to cutthroat business – Moneybags and Cashbox battling over prices and markets – but to the business of cutting throats. War is the ultimate means of securing economic advantage, letting your competitors suffer whatever losses must be incurred while you seize resources and markets directly without recourse to the genteel etiquette of exchange. For the victor, it is an excellent means of evading a fall in profits.

Some of the countertendencies to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall are vastly important, not only as such, but in their own right. These countertendencies revolve around v (variable capital) and s (surplus value). If c rises, what can maintain or improve the rate of profit? A comparable increase in s or a decrease in v? Let’s consider these in turn.

If necessary labour is still 4 hours, and if the number of workers stays constant, then extra surplus value can be extracted by adding extra hours to the working day. A working day of 8 hours will yield 4 hours of unpaid surplus labour-time – but a working day of 10 hours will yield 6, and a working day of 12 hours will double the original surplus value. With no change in v – neither the value of the labour-power nor the total number of workers changes – s rises. This we call the extraction of absolute surplus value.

By compelling the worker to work longer hours, Moneybags forces an absolute increase in surplus value. This is pure, unbridled joy for the capitalist, the pleasure of getting something for nothing. For the worker, the compulsory performance of absolutely more surplus labour is something else entirely – a journey through purgatory, into the hell of overwork. Is it accidental that the antagonistic relations between capital and labour so constantly revolve around the length of the working day? No! Starting with legal enactments of the 14th century, capital has fought long and hard to keep the worker at work as much as possible.

In the brutal glory days of early English capitalism, when capital was organized but labour wasn’t, horror stories abounded. Countless thousands of children between 7 and 12 were literally worked to death – forced to work from before sunrise to midnight or later. Capital’s voracious, vampire appetite for labour brought death to innumerable workers. Even in the unusual event that restrictions were imposed at all, it remained legal and ‘respectable’ to keep small children at work from 5.30 a.m. to 8.00 p.m. The majority of the time, there were no restrictions at all – just the ceaseless torment of hard, hot, dangerous work in lightless, chokingly dirty factories and mines.

Children, women and men perished by the multitude, after brutish and nasty lives shortened by overwork. Penniless even when employed, workers in these ‘dark satanic mills’ (so-called by the visionary poet William Blake) were crippled and maimed in untold ways and numbers. Family life was totally disrupted, with fathers, mothers, and children chained to machines… The only power serving to limit capital’s effort to turn every waking hour into a working hour was the proletariat itself. By means of bitter struggles against unequal, seemingly impossible odds, against greedy and complacent foes defended by the armed might of the State, workers organized to reduce the working day to more acceptable dimensions. Intense and intricate battles ensued. The result was that organized labour showed capital its power by shortening the working day. Moneybags and his vulture-brothers yielded with bitter resentment, forced to swallow gall and wormwood in the guise of first a 10 hour workday, and later an 8 hour day.

Capital hates and despises this misfortune, resisting the reduction of the workday with all its might – to this day seeking to subvert the workers’ gains and seeking places elsewhere in the world where less organized workers may be coerced into 16 hour and 18 hour days. In many places, where the process of industrial production and the creation of the proletariat is still a recent development, capital succeeds in its quest. Just ponder Taiwan, Korea, Brazil, India, South Africa… So the battle over absolute surplus value continues. S rises and falls at different times and in different parts of the world as the balance of power between capital and labour see-saws back and forth. Here labour forces absolute surplus value down – there capital forces it up.

Meanwhile, there are other fronts in the battle over surplus value. Say, for example, that workers are forced to work faster. If the value of labour-power remains unchanged, then it now requires fewer labour hours to produce commodities equal in value to the value of labour-power. Working faster, our harassed worker produces in three hours what formerly required 4 hours to produce. Where once 4 hours comprised necessary labour-time, now 3 hours does so. Even without lengthening the working day, capital can thus extract surplus value. An extra hour of surplus labour is extracted – and every hour of surplus labour is now equal to 4/3 of one labour hour before the work was speeded up. If we assume that the earlier labour was socially average, the present, faster labour is above average in intensity, resolving itself into more hours of average labour than before.

Or suppose that the value of labour-power falls. This occurs, willy nilly, whenever the average labour-time socially required to produce the means of subsistence falls. By means of rising productivity in the food industry, the construction trades, and related industries, foodstuff and other basic subsistence necessities may be sold at cheaper prices. When this happens, the value of labour-power – roughly, the cost of reproducing labour-power through the purchase of basic necessities – also fails. The result is that fewer hours of labour are now required to produce commodities as value as labour-power – since the value of labour-power has fallen.

By reducing that part of the workday devoted to necessary labour in either of these two ways – by speedup, or by cutting the value of labour-power – capital extracts what we call relative surplus value. Without absolutely lengthening the workday, capital nevertheless succeeds in expanding s by freeing relatively more of the workday for unpaid surplus labour. Again, s rises – counteracting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. And again, it is only the working class that can defend itself.

Speedup can be prevented from reaching a killing pace only by the action of workers organized for their own ends – as the telling lessons of sweatshop labour make clear. In countless places, Moneybags, Cashbox, and their bloodthirsty colleagues try to push labour faster, faster, and still faster – typically, by the ploy of speeding up the machines until the workers keel over. Or they turn to the ruse of ‘scientific management,’ bringing in ‘efficiency experts’ with stopwatches (a la Frederick Winslow Taylor) to reduce ‘wasted motions’ and thus generate higher productivity. Or management psychology is used: ‘What colour should we paint the factory, and what muzak should we play, to lull the workers into working harder?’ Or direct force is employed, with the use of brutal foremen and supervisors.

In places where labour is strong, decisive steps have been taken to combat speed-up. But where labour remains weak, capital is overjoyed to speed workers as fast as it can and for as long as it can. Until labour is strong everywhere, capital will scour the earth for unorganized sectors of the world proletariat to exploit more ruthlessly and thoroughly than organized workers will allow. Right now, as the world working grows rapidly, capital enjoys many options. Labour in many places can be absolutely and relatively forced to provide more and still more surplus value – a factor definitely counteracting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Add to this that v can be lowered by the reduction of the workforce, of by the reduction of wages, and we begin to glimpse the battery of approaches open to capital in its effort to avert the crises which threaten as c rises.

[KC]

17. Labour-Power and Class Struggle

Speaking of the value of labour-power raises several related questions. To begin with, how can we say how much labour-time is ‘socially required’ to reproduce labour-power? It is clear that most working people live not at the level of bare subsistence required for simple biological survival, but at a level of subsistence defined socially. What workers need is not determined by nature alone, but by social custom. AN historical, social, and moral element is present in the definition of the value of labour-power.

Vitally, therefore, the antagonism between capital and labour expresses itself in conflict over just how much workers require. When the working class is strong in particular regions or countries, workers can enforce a relatively higher standard of living – a relatively higher value of labour-power – than in places where they are weak. This reveals several basic facts. On the one hand, we are reminded of the reality that value is not natural, but social – people treat some labour product as a commodity, making the labour going into the commodity ‘ abstract, socially standard.’

The social nature of value is never more strikingly clear than in the case of the value of labour-power. Though people are generally agreed that workers should be paid ‘a living wage’ – ‘enough to lead a decent life’ – ‘enough to keep the wolf away from the door’ – in other words, enough to buy life’s basic necessities so that labour-power may be reproduced – it is not generally agreed how much ‘a living wage’ is. This is a matter of judgment – and struggle!

Always, Moneybags declares a ‘living wage’ to be less than workers want. If free of opposition, Moneybags will gleefully lower wages to the level of bare subsistence – and even lower, counting on public relief to ‘make up the difference’ (using tax money taken from better-paid sectors of the working class to finance this relief). The only way capital’s effort to impoverish the workers can be reversed is by the self-organization of workers – to stop Moneybags dead in his tracks, wrestle him down, and force higher wages. The actual value of labour-power fluctuates with changes in the relative strength of the contending classes, like a needle on a compass. When Moneybags, Cashbox & Co. prevail, wages are driven down. But when the workers unite for self-defense – in unions and political parties, for example – they gain the power to fight back. With strong labour organizations, workers are enabled to fight capital effectively, resisting wage cuts, often winning wage rises. At any given moment, the level of wages reflects the balance of power between capital and labour.

When working people are powerful enough to put the fear of labour into capital, they push wages up. But capital has many resources. Sly as a fox, and no angel – with no mercy in his heart, and his heart in his wallet – a wondrous thing! – Moneybags relies on many stratagems. Forced to pay high wages in one place, Moneybags will invest elsewhere to secure ‘cheap labour,’ that is, labour power requiring less socially average labour for its reproduction than the labour-power of better paid workers.

If workers in one part of the world accept a ‘living standard’ lower than that of workers elsewhere, the higher standard can be directly challenged – Moneybags will simply hire cheap rather than expensive labour-power, forcing better paid workers to moderate their wage demands (if they desire to keep their jobs). This is merely one example of competition between workers – competition between sellers of labour-power, who, like all sellers, must keep their prices ‘competitive’ if they hope to sell.

Sometimes, capitalists will accede to relatively high wage payment: to encourage worker loyalty when profits are high, to divide higher from lower paid workers, or to hire workers with special skills. But never is this done altruistically. Moneybags wants surplus value, and surplus value is the difference between the value of labour-power – represented by wages – and the value of the labour product – represented by price. All else being equal, the lower the wages, the higher the profits. Moneybags wants low wages!

Competition between workers is exploited to the fullest. This is one of the primary factors, in fact, accounting for the dividedness of the world proletariat. Capital has it both ways: when workers in one place (the US, for example) obtain relatively high wages, their employers use every trick in the book to undercut this high pay – above all, by pitting well-paid US workers against foreign ‘cheap labour,’ seeking to reduce US wages by investing capital in foreign countries. At the same time, with the trumpet blasts of hired politicians, they demand the loyalty of US workers ‘to God and country’. Their argument? That workers in the US are better off than elsewhere!

Moneybags is all too happy to have his cake and eat it, too… to drive US wages down by hiring cheaper labour-power available elsewhere, while mobilizing US workers to fight in wars and ‘police actions’ designed to quash the revolts of the foreign poor.

So the question of imperialism arises. For a variety of reasons the capitalists of one nation find it desirable to invest in other, usually poorer nations. Fresh markets, investment opportunities, cheap labour-power and cheap resources are available, to say nothing of coveted political and military influence. When these assts are jeopardized by the aggressive self-organization of the poor and oppressed in these countries, Moneybags calls upon the poor and oppressed of his own homeland to combat the insurgency. Serving as the basic pool from which soldiers may be drafted into imperialist armies, the workers of the imperialist powers are thus doubly important to capital. Fear and dislike of the foreign poor must be cultivated. Though largely psychological in origin and effects, this fear and dislike nonetheless has a basis as well, in the competition between workers. The usually better paid workers of the great powers prize their relative affluence. They fear the reduction of the value of their labour-power, which the competition of poorer foreign workers threatens. Jealously eager to preserve their hard-won pay gains – as well as they should be! – better paid workers too often direct their fire not against Moneybags and his fellow capitalists – the enemy – but against poorly paid workers in other lands, viewed as competitors. This allows Moneybags the best of both worlds – to militarily repress the low paid and economically contain the better paid. And more’s the pity – because it is only the alliance of workers from all lands that can put a stop to predatory capitalism, reaffirming the human needs and capacities that capital alienates and distorts.

[KC]

18. Abolition of Wage-Labour

So far, all our talk has been about labour-power as a commodity – bought and sold, turning into alienated labour when exercised under the thumb of a capitalist’s alien, profit-oriented will. We have seen that the value of that remarkable commodity, labour-power, is an issue of permanent interest to capital and labour, as capitalists bend every effort to cheapen labour-power while workers try to increase its value.

Nor is the ultimate answer to this question often grasped: That workers can seek not merely to elevate the value of labour-power, but to abolish its status as a value. The ability to work does not have to be a commodity with a particular exchange-value, sold for wages. Rather, living labour-power – real working people – may unite for democratic, nationless, sexually equal cooperative production, production for shared use. This would be communism in the authentic sense of the word – ordinary working people democratically in control both of production and the rest of social life, producing for use, not exchange and profit. Freedom and power for working people would be the hallmark of communist society – a society without bosses of any kind.


‘Working people should not be exclusively absorbed in the unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from capital’s never-ceasing efforts to cut wages and job security, its attacks on unions, etc. Workers should understand that, with all the miseries it imposes, the capitalist system engenders production so powerful that a new society of material abundance and social freedom is possible. Instead of the conservative motto ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’, workers should inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword – ‘Abolition of the wages system’! Why, then, does the proletariat so often ask just for higher wages or tiny reforms, when the wage’s system itself should be abolished? In part, this happens because the wage-relationship itself obscures exploitation, making the sale of labour-power for a wage seem necessary, while a ‘fair wage’ seems possible. The predominant tendency is for workers to think that they are paid for their ‘labour,’ not their labour-power, and that a ‘fair day’s wage’ is all they can hope for.’


In reality, workers are not paid for their ‘labour’ – nor is there such a thing as a ‘fair wage.’ Capitalist production is based on exploitation. Once labour-power is sold, the capitalist uses it as he likes. Workers are paid not for their own labour, either useful or ‘socially average,’ but for the average labour-time required to reproduce labour-power. This payment is equivalent in value only to the part of the average labour performed by the worker – beyond this, there is unpaid surplus labour. Workers seldom realize this. Instead, it is common to believe that working people are paid for all their labour – so that profits do not result form the exploitation of labour.

The wage-form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid and unapaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour.

Feudal Labour

Under the corvee system, in feudal times, it is different. There the labour of the serf for himself, and his compulsory labour for the lord of the land, are demarcated very clearly both in time and space.

Slave Labour

In slave labour, even the part of the working day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of subsistence, in which he therefore actually works for himself alone, appears as labour for his master. All his labour appears as unpaid labour.

Wage Labour

In wage-labour, on the contrary, even surplus labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid.

The exchange between capital and labour seems just like the sale of any commodity. The sale itself seems preordained. After all, reasons the worker, it is the nature of labour to sell! It attracts money naturally, and inevitably. The sale of labour-power resulting in the alienation of labour appears to be a datum of nature, unalterable by human intervention. And what appears to sell is not labour-power, but labour.

Fetishism – the belief that labour-power’s commodity status is an immutable fact of life – is thus coupled with a misperception of the commodity itself that disguises the reality of exploitation. Since workers are paid after they work, it seems that their work, not their ability to work, which is purchased. Moreover, working people imagine that it is natural for labour-power to sell. ‘What else is possible?’ This is fetishism: the perception that the commodity is intrinsically exchangeable.

Like all other commodities, ‘labour’ seems to have a certain natural exchange-value – a natural price. Hence the widespread faith in that phantom, ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.’ The truth of the matter is that the unicorn is more common – or the dragon, the griffin, the leprechaun, the kind-hearted corporation and the honest politician. But people don’t usually realize this. Thinking that labour must sell as a commodity because this is its nature, workers hope for nothing more than a fair wage. In this way they mistake exploitation for nature, seeing no chance for real, unalienated freedom and power.

All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism’s illusions about freedom, all the apologetic tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis the appearance that wages are ‘natural’ and potentially ‘fair.’ They are not, nor can they be. It is not ‘natural’ for workers to be divorced from the means of productions. This, we have seen, is the result of an agonizing and bloody historical process – that of expropriation. Labour-power is sold to capital only because capital possesses a monopoly on the means of production. So-called ‘free workers’ – who are free above all to alienate their labour for the privilege of exploitation – experience a travesty of freedom.

Without capital – without bosses empowered by the possession of money to buy and control labour-power – workers could genuinely be free. It would once again be possible to combine labour power and means of production organically, directly. No sale of either labour-power or means of production would transpire. Democracy between workers, rather than the tyranny of capital over workers, would become possible. Collective labour-power – workers united – would freely associate for cooperative control of the means of production.

This requires the self-organization of the working class for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism – for an end to commodity production – for the defeat of imperialism and the capitalist state – for the creation of a new and truly free system.

Some lessons about the possible meaning and likelihood of socialist revolution can be gleaned from a renewed look at the Paris Commune, prototype of proletarian self-rule. Though revolutionary struggle is immensely difficult – the Paris Commune, don’t forget, was defeated, and France, a century later, remains capitalist – the possibilities are no less immense. The past century has witnessed the spread of revolutionary politics among workers the world over, so that, in France, for example, millions of workers view themselves as socialists, enemies of exploitation. This is true of many other countries, too, and even where class-consciousness is little developed, its potentialities remain vast.

Working class parties and trade unions are necessary for working people to act in concert, whether for self-defense or self-emancipation. No one can ‘give’ socialism to the working class. Socialism has no possible meaning for working people as the idea of a ‘new boss, same as the old boss’. Socialism, as Rosa Luxemburg observed, is not some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who put up with a dictatorship over the workers in the name of the workers. Rather, socialism must be the self-emancipation of working people: the conquest of power for workers by workers, by means of the development and exercise of working class power.

If the proletariat isn’t united, self-active, and resolute, it will be unable to break capital’s stranglehold. No ‘substitute’ for the proletariat can be found. If exploitation is to end, it must be the exploited who end it. Politically organized – revolutionary parties and geographic or industrial councils – workers must take their fate into their own hands.

This is what happened in Paris, in 1871, with the formation of the Commune. Though the radical democracy and cooperation of the revolutionary Paris uprising didn’t last – it was crushed by force of arms – the spirit and aims of the Communards radiated outwards to tens and hundreds of millions in the decades which followed. Some Paris revolutionaries – Blanqui, for example – had elitist misconceptions about what the revolution portended. Though an admirable and indomitable agitator, Blanqui failed to see that the proletariat must organize as a class for revolutionary change.

When big groups and the class itself are unavailable for action, small groups must organize. But the goal of organizing must be proletarian self-emancipation and self-rule. A small dictorial group exploiting the working class is no better than a class of private capitalists exploiting the working class. What is required is an uprising like the Paris Commune, but on an infinitely greater, broader, more sustained scale – for the abolition of the wage and commodity system. THE EXPROPRIATORS ARE EXPROPRIATED!


‘With the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market – and with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime – there arises a world proletariat, and a growing revolt for the proletariat. This exploited class, prevented by capital from realizing its potential for freedom and unrestrained productivity, may yet oppose itself to the capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.’

[Led Zeppelin]

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