Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin ed. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1848, 1976. Reprint, 1976.
For my first project this semester, I read sections of Volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital. This paper consists of a selection of notes that I have taken on the reading, then edited, along with my reactions to the ideas and evidence presented in the book. I found this book to be interesting, and not as difficult to read as I expected, but very densely packed with ideas and evidence. I suspect I’ll be reading and re-reading it for years. My initial observations seem to me to be somewhat superficial – I found nothing particularly difficult to understand or overly subtle in the points Marx makes, but I was impressed by the insightful observations, and the way in which they can still be applied to the history of labor and industry. The sections I read include chapter 7: “The Labor Process and the Valorization Process,” Chapter 10: “The Working Day,” chapter 15: “Machinery and Large Scale Industry,” chapter 26: “Primitive Accumulation,” and chapter 27: “The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land,”
In “Chapter 7: The Labour Process and the Valorization Process”, Marx tries to relate labor power to its place in the capitalist system by explaining that labor is a commodity – a process by which raw materials are turned into what Marx calls a “use-value” – a commodity that satisfies some need, and is therefore marketable.[1] The capitalist controls the production because he has purchased the raw materials, and the location of the work, with his capital. According to Marx, he then goes out and purchases labor on the open market with his capital, as a commodity, but one whose role is to transform the other commodities – the raw materials, into a use-value that he can then sell to increase his capital.[2]
However, Marx in this chapter explains that the key problem here is that the capitalist is not interested in producing just anything, nor is he interested in producing use-values that for his own use. The interest of the capitalist is to increase his capital by engaging in the production process. Therefore, he needs to find some way to increase the value of the goods produce. According to Marx, raw materials have an intrinsic value which cannot be altered, unless the material is itself altered to meet a specific need. The process of alteration, then, the labor process, is also the only place where value can be added to goods. However, as the labor process is itself only a commodity, and has, therefore, an intrinsic value – namely, what is required for the laborer to survive, then the capitalist can make no money on this process, unless he finds a way to increase value without increasing cost. This can be done, according to Marx, by increasing labor productivity without increasing its cost.
Marx says that a laborer can sell his labor power – defined as the potential to effect change in raw materials through the process of work – at market value. The capitalist, though can pay the laborer the cost of subsistence, and if the laborer produces enough goods to return than cost in four hours, the capitalist can insist that he will pay the same amount, but only for six hours’ work. In this way, the capitalist gets more for his money than the actual cost of the labor power, thus allowing him to realize a profit on the goods produced.
I found this interesting, but rather limited. It certainly brought home to me some of the realities of labor in Marx’s day. Obviously, ideas such as extra pay for over time work were not in practice at the time. It also makes me wonder to what degree modern wages are based on this same principle.
However, it also seems quite limited in its understanding of the production process and the process of the market. It places all surplus value within the envelope of labor, and gives no account for other market forces such as demand, the relative and changing value of commodities, and the degree to which commodities as raw materials are or are not renewable. Marx also seems to assume that laborers are only interested in subsistence-level life. This seems a narrow view, and I wonder to what degree it is informed by the times, and to what degree Marx is assuming a limit to the intelligence or desires of laborers themselves.
In “Chapter 10: The Working Day”, Marx seems to have several goals. The first goal is to elaborate on the ideas of the relation between capital and labor that he discussed in Chapter 7.[3]
His longest argument, though, is a historical narrative of the process by which laborers were able to shorten the length of the working day, and how in many cases the legislation that accompanied worker attempts to limit work time actually worked in reverse, giving capitalists legal permission to use workers for certain lengths of time, rather than limiting their rights to equalize their market power with that of workers. This, he wants to claim, only becomes a struggle when those selling labor on the market come together to demand certain rules in the process of the sale of labor – and groups of capitalists come together to protect their own interests – what Marx calls, “a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labor, i.e. the working class.”[4]
The history Marx gives begins much earlier than the Industrial Revolution, and seemed to me to be the foundational arguments for the historical dialectic that Marx and Engels discuss in the Communist Manifesto. He begins with a brief description of the abuses of laborers by pre-industrial systems, and makes a connection to his theory of the valorization of capital by showing how in Medieval Europe, and Russia, by example, aristocrats essentially accomplished the same over exploitation of labor power by providing serfs and peasants on their farms with contracts and laws that required huge amounts of work, and allowed the workers only the time necessary to subsist. By holding on to the means of production – the raw materials and place, and tools, of production, these landlords and aristocrats were able to command tremendous extra labor with the potential threat of removing all means of production.
However, the critical factor in making labor into the commodity that he sees in his industrial era is money. Money, capital, is the means by which labor and other commodities are purchased, but, as Marx explains, they are purchased by the capitalist not for themselves, and not even for the use-value of the goods they produce, but because the capitalist believes he can sell that use-value for more money – what Marx calls “exchange value”. He says in this chapter that so long as a political economy works to produce use-value, and not exchange value, the horrifying drive for surplus labor will not arise.[5] I disagree. It seems that there is plenty of evidence of horrific overexploitation of laborers in Europe’s middle ages. However, I see what Marx is driving at here – he wants to show that the primary difference between a commodity economy and a capitalist economy is the form of exchange, and when we apply money to the process of exchange it is possible to see changes in value for commodities that might otherwise always operate in the market based on their intrinsic value. This is apparently Marx’s definition of capitalism. While it has its flaws, it seems to me to be a good place to begin. In fact, Marx seems to be somewhat cognizant of my own objection above in that he also mentions that in the non-exchange economies, overexploitation of surplus labor did occur in the mining of precious metals – gold and silver – which were the monetary medium of exchange at the time, and so prefigured, or imitated, capital.
This historical narrative stretches as Marx gets into his stride and begins discussing the early 19th century legislation in England meant to reduce the working day for laborers. He goes into dramatic detail, providing some useful and interesting facts and figures about the difficulties of laborers, child labor time statistics, and even interviews with laborers and capitalists of the time regarding their thinking about the length of the working day. His primary point, particularly with his discussion of the English Factory Act of 1833, is that the legal limiting of the working day to 12 hours was interpreted by factory owners as both an obstacle to be got round, and a legal permission to require work for 12 hours. This is well above the limits to the working day established even as early as the 14th century.[6]
Along with his evidence of child labor, and exceedingly long labor hours even for adults, and his acid castigation of the arguments presented by capitalists, Marx surprised me by claiming that because this is a collective problem, individual capitalists were as much captured by the system as individual laborers were. He says on page 382, “Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.”[7]
In Chapter 15: Machinery and Large Scale Industry, Marx elaborates on some of the labor and mechanization themes from his earlier chapters. He explains how the application of machines to large scale manufacturing is really a process of increasing labor productivity by replacing laborers with machines.
Marx begins this chapter with an idea that surprised me, and yet made sense. He says that the aim of machinery is not to “[lighten] the day’s toil of any human being,” but that “machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing.”[8] From the point of view given in chapters 7 and 10, with the idea that capital gains only through the exploitation of surplus labor, this would seem to be the obvious view of the purpose of machinery.
What Marx does next I also found interesting. He takes issue with the definition of the word “Machine” because the technical definition which identifies a machine as a complex tool, and in which a machine is considered to be a tool powered by other than human hands, he says, are both insufficient in that they do not take history into account. Marx chooses to replace these definitions with one that both suits the Industrial Revolution, and his own argument: “The machine,” he says, ” is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools.”[9] I found this interesting not only because it redefines machines in a way that I am not familiar with, but because it seems to call up such historical phenomena as the Luddite machine breakers of the period before and during Marx’s writing of Capital. I was again surprised by the degree to which this book is of its time, as well as the degree to which it is relevant to understanding capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
In the same way, I am very interested in Marx’s view that the steam engine did not constitute the Industrial Revolution, but the machines that required the steam engine as motive power did. In other words, for Marx, the Industrial Revolution was not about machinery and power per se, but instead about the revolutions in productivity that machines and the application of motive power to them could create. This reflects my own view, but is so well put in this case that ideas I have had about the nature of industry and capitalism are clarified by it. In fact, I get a distinct impression that every history I have ever read of the Industrial Revolution is primarily informed by Marx’s view of it. If this is the case, nearly all that Americans learn about the Industrial Revolution must be to some degree Marxist history. I have for a long time been aware that Marx’s influence here was heavy, but this makes me recognize that his views are the prevalent ones, even today, in textbooks and general histories.
Perhaps what surprised me most about this chapter is Marx’s discussion of the effects of massive automation. As he says, “[as] soon as a machine executes, without man’s help, all the movements required to elaborate the raw material, and needs only supplementary assistance from the worker, we have an automatic system of machinery, capable of constant improvement in its details.”[10] This seems like only a few steps away from 20th century idea of “Scientific Management” – the Ford Motor Co style of production in which the machinery, rather than the workers, dictates how workers go about their work – the workers become a part of the machine.
In his discussion of examples of large scale manufacturing, Marx seems less prescient, and much more impressed simply with the scale of the factories he is describint, so it seems that he did not make the leap himself to the idea of worker as part of the machine, but instead rested with the idea of workers becoming superfluous. Still, the short intellectual distance from Marx’s description to the ideas of Scientific Management impressed me very much.
In Chapter 26, Marx finally comes around to answering a question that I have often thought of myself. I am not fully satisfied with Marx’s answer, but it is useful. Marx here points out the central problem that seems so vexing about the growth of capital and industry – namely, that the production of surplus value requires surplus value to begin with as investment capital. This means that in some way prior to the advent of capitalism, as Marx has described it, there must have been some spare capital accumulation already occurring. Marx calls this “Primitive Accumulation.”[11]
I was put off by Marx’s discussion about what he calls the fairy tale that “primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology.”[12] He discusses the idea of the existence of an economic Adam and Eve – early people who were frugal, and early people who were not. Quite rightly, I think, he dismisses this as a fairy tale, told by those who have wealth in order to explain themselves. However, he goes on to give an explanation that is not much more satsifying – he divides even the earliest societies into groups who own the means of production – the resources – and those who own and sell their labor but are “free from…any means of production of their own.”[13] While I still think that this is within the context of the historical place and time that Marx was writing, during which much less was known about early human societies, it is disappointing as a set of assumptions with no evidence or explanation – no more clear than the ideas of the State of Nature set forward in the previous century by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. This seems really to be an extension of his ideas backward in time to support their scientific reality, but they rest on a claim that is not scientific at all. This is quite different from the earlier sections of the book that I read, where nearly every statement had evidence behind it, almost in a journalistic fashion.
Perhaps my own discontent here comes from the fact that there is much more knowledge about the transition not only from agriculture to industry, but from pre-agricultural to agricultural societies, and where Marx is content to assume that agricultural societies show that humans have always shown the division between labor and the means of production that he is interested in, today we have reason to believe that such a division of labor was not necessarily the case – that this is not a human State of Nature. This reaction is, on my part, somewhat unhistorical, since I cannot ask of the historical Marx an understanding of history that was not yet available to anyone in his time. Still, it does speak to the viability of at least some of his ideas. I think it is a valid critique of the theory, if not of the historian.
I was, though, most interested to read “Chapter 27: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land,” as this was the link to social class in the historical dialectic that I have always been curious about. Marx’s inclusion of peasants, and even of wage laborers, in the class of “free peasant propietors” – in effect, if not in feudal legal terms, real landholders who made a living from the working of their own soil – was quite a surprise for me. This realization will force me to rethink my own understanding of the process of the historical dialectic and the creation of the industrial working class. Marx seems to make a distinction here between what he calls “absolute ownership” – which is a kind of de-facto possession and use of land, and legal land ownership, which rested with landlords and the upper class. More than I have ever understood, then, for Marx, it is labor for another who possesses all the means of productioon, rather than for oneself, that constitutes membership in the working class.[14]
Marx here showed me how very important the process of enclosure was, beginning in the 15th century. As I mentioned earlier in these notes, it strikes me now how very important Marx’s interpretation of these events, and even his choice of the evidence, has been in the writing of the history of industry and capital since. Still, I had thought of enclosure and subsidiary event, hastening the growth of the working class, but not playing the central role that Marx gives it, along with the expropriation of Church property during the Reformation. The connection, as Marx makes it, seems to clearly support his argument of the creation of a laboring class through the process of expropriation of the means of production. This is much more convincing than the previous chapter. I can be more easily convinced that these events could create a class of people who no longer control any means of production, and are therefore forced to sell their labor in order to subsist.
In general, having read only portions of Capital, vol. I, I understand much more clearly the arguments Marx made, and am far more capable both of seeing how those arguments are reified or reversed in more recent historiography, and in analyzing the way capital and labor are intertwined throughout history. I have always wanted to read this book, and I must say, despite numerous critiques I have, it did not disappoint.
[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Penguin ed., 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1848, 1976; reprint, 1976), 340.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 340.
[4] Ibid., 344.
[5] Ibid., 345.
[6] Ibid., 388.
[8] Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 492.
[9] Ibid., 495.
[10] Ibid., 503.
[11] Ibid., 874.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., 877-81.