Jim.+321-341

24 May 2011 pp 321-341 321 //Surplus Value//

labor in motion only measurable by time

capitalist exchanges quantity of objectified labor for quantity of living labor

Translation of ‘realization’. Marx apparently uses “Realisation”, “Verwirklichung” and “Ververtung”

This is the labor theory of value proper. pp 323-324 is a good rendition of the explanation of the source of surplus value.

323: the worker as “presupposed perennial subject” rather than as an individual. Discussion of the reproduction of the working class

323-324: simple labor versus labor with special skills, which presumably is worth more because of the labor that goes into training

“The self-preservation of capital is its self-realization” does he mean here “valorization”? So it has to grow to survive as capital

“The second half of the labor day is forced labor; surplus labor.”

325: “...the development of the productive powers of labor, which capital incessantly ships onward with its unlimited mania for wealth...”

“...natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one.”

Jamaican plantation labor: wage labor = indirect forced labor

326: “Wealth confronts direct forced albor not as capital, but rather as relation of domination [Herrschaftsverhältnis].”

//Surplus value. Ricardo. Physiocrats. A. Smith. Ricardo//

You can see that Marx doesn’t invent his theory out of whole cloth. He has respect for and borrows from various bourgeois political economists, agreeing with them up to a point and then parting company.

Ricardo, Smith and even Malthus seem to have had merit, but “The newcomers are just plain simpletons.”

327: reference to the “Mercantile System” where “industrial capital” develops at the expense of non-industrial wealth and feudal landed property. Is this the inspiration for dependency theory, or Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession?

329: Physiocrats: nature produces value, not labor

331-332: comparing capital to Christ, as a mediator between God and man, but also the dialectical embodiment of opposites (use value and exchange value).

mention of differential ag productivity due to fertility of the soil

//surplus value and productive force//

surplus value proper: worker only needs to work half a day to reproduce himself. But works a whole day for the capitalist.

334: “Now suppose that the productive powers of labor double, i.e. that the same labor creates double the use value in the same time. (For the moment, use value is defined in the presetn relation as only that which the worker consumes in order to stay alive as a worker...).”

necessary labor is reduced to 1/4 day, and capitalist captures 3/4 of the day in surplus value

337: This is capturing “relative surplus value, i.e. relative to that present before in the first case...”

340: “Its surplus value rises, but in an ever smaller relation to the development of the productive force. Thus the more developed capital already is, the more surplus labor it has created, the more terribly must it develop the productive force in order to realize itself in only smaller proportion, i.e. to add surplus value -- because its barrier always remains the relation between the fractional part of the day which expresses necessary labor, and the entire working day.”

Marx illustrates all this in several pages of tedious repetitive math.