Forms of surplus value

I'm recording this video the weekend after the election in which the Labour Party made a such a total mess of its electoral program by its commitment to have a second referendum but run talking about that and thought I'd do a video on a basic piece of economics the theory of absolute and relative surplus-value in Marx's analysis of capitalism now to those of you who've read Marx's capital these ideas should be fairly familiar but I hope I can enrich them slightly by drawing on aspects of analysis which he presents in his drafts of capital of 1861 now there are going to be two columns of related ideas here the first relates to value analysis and in these terms the relevant concepts are absolute surplus value and relative surplus value but there's another domain which is the domain of technical analysis or analysis of the technical properties of the labor process and in this marx equates absolute surplus value with what he calls the formal subordination or sometimes translators the formal subsumption of labor to capital and relative surplus-value he equates to a different process which he calls the real subordination or real subsumption of labor to capital now what are these things mean well we're gonna go through first looking at absolute surplus value now the basic idea in absolute surplus value is that when capitalism came into existence it made people work longer than they had in pre-capitalist times it forced them to work longer working days and to work more days in the year than they had as independent peasants so let's have some idea of how long peasants work or did work some relatively recent figures done by a Japanese social scientists looking at labor allocation of peasants in Java in recent years showed that on average men worked 6 hours a day and women 2.7 hours a day now he was only or he or she was only taking into account farm labor labor which was to produce a crop they weren't taking into account child care and domestic labor which only produced something for the family but even so we can see that as a comparison with social neighbor done under capitalism six hours or two and a half hours is not not very much now that's comparatively modern peasants and in a rice agricultural system what about Europe well one of the striking things is that peasant agriculture in Europe was carried out under conditions with there were lots of whole days the ancien régime in France is reported guaranteed 52 Sundays off 90 rest days and 38 holidays so the number of days actually working was comparatively small by modern standards figures for a casual laborer and the pre-capitalist conditions in Britain in the 1400s in the 14th century rather not 14 and not in the year 1440 in the 14th century it's reckoned they did around 1400 hours a year that's on the basis of the actual working year being 120 days a year and that they worked from dawn to dusk 12 hours a day now that's probably a bit of an exaggeration but let's see how much changes once Britain is capitalist the average worker in the UK was working over 3100 hours a year that's to say they are working 45 a 45 week year in this case if we assume a 52-week years probably more realistic they would be doing 35 3588 hours and of course they wouldn't be doing it under rural conditions they'd be doing it under factory conditions of much more intense work if fourteen hundred and forty hours a year were enough to support a peasant and if her descendants in a factory had to work three thousand one hundred and five years hours a year then the extra 1,600 or so hours could go to make profit for their employer because actually until the late 19th century workers in Britain were probably paid less than they had been in the 1400s these extra hours that employees had to do are what Marx calls absolute surplus-value it calls it absolute surplus-value because capitalism forced them to work absolutely longer the image here is of the clock of the Singer sewing machine factory outside of Glasgow which was one of the major employers of women's labor in Glasgow now the first space of capitalism he says there is only a formal subordination of labor to capital he's then I'm quoting now from his 1861 manuscript I call the form which rests on absolute surplus value the formal subsumption of labour under capital because it is distinguished only formally from the earlier modes of production the essential features of formal subsumption of these there is a purely monetary relation between the person who's appropriating the surplus labor and the person who provides it and to the fact that the objective conditions of his labor the means of production and the subjective kameen conditions of his labor means of subsistence confront him as capital monopolized by the buyer of his labour power so what is saying is that in the early stages before the employment of machinery say in the 1700s people employed by capitalists were only formally subordinate to them it was only a change in the social form of the laborer there's no change in the real mode of production he continues as yet there is no difference in the mode of production itself the labor process seen from the technological point of view continues exactly as it did before except now that is a Labour process subordinated to capital so for example in the putting out system in the weaving trade where the yarn was put out by merchant capitalist worked on by workers at home who then had the merchant capitalist take the the woven cloth and pay them for the labor they did producing it this is still a situation with the actual machinery used the actual tools used are still hand operated looms and although these people are formerly subordinated to the capitalists who control the trade the real labor process remains the same the important point is he's saying the mode of production itself doesn't change so you can have capital formerly subordinating labor before the capitalist mode of production comes into existence and this is a very important point for people who are for example examining social relations in a country like India you should not assume or people should not assume that where there is wage labor you actually have the catalyst motor production you may have only a formal subordination of labor to capital the real subsumption of labor to capital he says on this basis there arises a mode of production the councilors motor production which is specific technologically in other ways and transforms a real nature of the labor process and it's real conditions only when this enters the picture does the real subsumption of labor under capital take place on the basis of this arises a new mode of production which is specifically specific the real subsumption labor under catalysts developed in all the forms which develop relative as distinct from absolute surface value so what he's saying is a relative surplus-value is something specific to the capitalist mode of production not specific to the formal wage labor relation Labor's social powers of production are developed and with labour and a large scale the application of science and machinery to direct production takes place on the one hand the capitalist mode of production which now takes shape as a mode of production so generous changes the shape of material production on the other hand this alteration of productions material shape forms the basis for the development of the capital of relation well what he's saying is the application of machinery means that there is a really different mode of production you have machine OFAC sure run manufacture and this new physical mode of production develops the capital relation in that is now impossible for the independent worker to take hold of the large machine like that steam engine it can only be operated as part of a collective labour process driving hundreds of looms what do we take away from this the first point is that catalyst motor production is machine industry that's what the catalyst motor production means and this is the basis for the real subordination of labor to capital it's real because the physical process of production is such that the workers can never afford to buy the means of production no could they individually operate them and it's characterized by what he calls relative surplus-value and he calls it relative because the relative portions of the working-day change the portions of the working-day that constitutes surplus and the portion of the working-day that constitutes necessary time relative surplus-value is generated when productivity Rises faster than real wages then you get relative surplus-value produced and there's a well known graph which has been circulating for some years now showing the rate of growth of productivity in the US which is the upper line and the rate of growth of real wages and this gap between them is the relative surplus-value that is being produced and this is looking at total wages and salaries against output measured in money and then deflated by an inflation index there is some controversy by cleamen and people as to whether this real wage line was correctly deflated I think it we can disregard that controversy because other data shows the real income per head for the bottom 50% of the u.s. working population has actually been stagnant that hasn't actually been any rise for half of the US population there's been no rise in real living standards since the late 1960s they have hovered around the same level now this is basically what Marx assumes when dealing with relative surplus-value the real living standards remain stagnant and the growth in productivity then goes to the upper classes and this is exactly what happened the if we this is data taken from peccatis database if you look at the share of income going to the bottom 50% of the population it's fallen from around 20% in the late 60s to around 10% now so the share of income going to the lower half of the working population as haft so the labor content of the income of the median earner has halved due to rising productivity on the other hand look at this other line this is the line showing the share of income of the top 1% over the same period the share of value going to the top 1% has gone from 8 percent to just over 20 percent now think about that that means that 1 percent of the population is now earning twice as much as 50 percent of the population so their per capita income is now a hundred times greater than the bottom half of the US population this is a process that monks called the general law of capitalist accumulation he says it is establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding of the accumulation of capital accumulation of wealth that one pole is therefore at the same time accumulation of misery agony of toil slavery ignorance brutality mental degradation at the opposite pole and this is what we see in the u.s. increasing misery and degradation the same process that Marx described in the 19th century continues from the mid 20th century down to now and it's getting worse and this is the process of production of relative surplus-value

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 2,881

Rating: 4.9823008 out of 5

Keywords: Exploitation, surplus-value, Marx

Id: zR2PM--u4qs

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Good man.