david harvey 6 relative surplus value

CHAPTER 12: THE CONCEPT OF RELATIVE SURPLUS-VALUE

Chapter 12 proposes a simple argument with a few complicated wrinkles. Yet it is a chapter that it is all too easy to get wrong. The initial argument goes like this:
The value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor-time congealed in it, and this value diminishes with increasing productivity. “In general, the greater the productivity of labour, the less the labour-time required to produce an article, the less the mass of labour crystallized in that article, and the less its value” (131).
The value of labor-power as a commodity is affected by all manner of historical, cultural and social circumstances. But it is also tied to the value of the commodities that laborers need to reproduce themselves and their dependents at a given standard of living.
The value of labour-power can be resolved into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of the means of subsistence, i.e. with the quantity of labour-time required to produce them. (276)
Other things remaining equal, therefore, the value of labor-power will decline with rising productivity in those industries producing the goods laborers need to reproduce themselves.
In order to make the value of labour-power go down, the rise in the productivity of labour must seize upon those branches of industry whose products determine the value of labour-power, and consequently either belong to the category of normal means of subsistence, or are capable of replacing them. (432)
For the capitalists, this means that they can lay out less in the way of variable capital because the workers need less money to meet their needs (as fixed by a given standard of living). If capitalists have to lay out less for variable capital, then even if the length of the working day is fixed, the ratio s/v, or the rate of exploitation, rises. A greater mass of surplus-value thereby accrues to the capitalist even though the length of the working day is fixed.
This process in no way involves any infringement of the laws of exchange. To be sure, capitalists will seek to purchase whatever labor-power they can at less than its value, and that will augment the mass of surplus-value they receive. “Despite the important part which this method plays in practice, we are excluded from considering it here by our assumption that all commodities, including labour-power, are bought and sold at their full value” (431). So once again, acceptance of the market logic and the theses of classical political economy take precedence over the study of actual practices, demonstrating once more Marx’s commitment to deconstructing the utopian theses of classical political economy on their own terms. One other peculiar result arises out of Marx’s mode of reasoning. “An increase in the productivity of labour in those branches of industries which supply neither the necessary means of subsistence nor the means by which they are produced leaves the value of labour-power undisturbed” (432). Therefore, reducing the value of luxury goods by increasing productivity does not yield relative surplus-value. It is only the declining value of wage goods that matters.
This produces a conundrum. Why would individual capitalists raise the productivity in their own particular industry producing a wage good, when all capitalists will benefit? This is what is now called a free-rider problem. The individual capitalist who goes out, innovates, reduces the price of a wage good and so reduces the value of all labor-power gains no particular or singular benefit from so doing. The benefit accrues to the whole capitalist class. Where is the individual incentive to do that?
Could relative surplus-value arise through a class strategy? While Marx does not mention it in this chapter, he earlier related a case where this was so—the abolition of the Corn Laws (tariffs on wheat imports) as a result of the collective agitation of the Manchester industrialists. The cheaper wheat imports that resulted brought down the price of bread, and this allowed wages to be reduced. This sort of class strategy turns out to have been of great historical importance. The same reasoning exists now in the United States with respect to the supposed advantages of free trade. The Wal-Mart phenomenon and cheap imports from China are welcomed because cheap goods reduce the cost of living to the working classes. The fact that money wages have not risen much for workers over the past thirty years is made more palatable since the physical quantity of goods they can acquire has increased (provided they shop at Wal-Mart). In exactly the same way that the nineteenth-century British industrial bourgeoisie wanted to reduce the value of labor-power by allowing cheap imports, so the reluctance to block cheap imports in the United States today derives from the need to keep the value of labor-power stable. Protectionist tariffs, while they might help keep jobs in the United States, would result in price increases which would create pressures for higher wages.
It turns out historically that there have been many state-organized strategies to intervene in the value of labor-power. Why, for example, does the State of New York not charge sales taxes on food? Because that is seen as fundamental to the determination of the value of labor-power. On occasion, the industrial bourgeoisie has supported rent control, cheap (social) housing and subsidized rents and agricultural products because that, too, keeps the value of labor-power down. So we can identify many situations where there have been and still are class strategies worked out through the state apparatus to reduce the value of labor-power. To the degree that the working classes gained a modicum of access to state power, they could use it to increase their income in kind (through state provision of many goods and services) and so raise the value of labor-power (in effect claiming back a part of the potential relative surplus-value for themselves).
Marx eschews any mention of these kinds of issues in this chapter almost certainly for the same reason he dismissed the way capitalists perpetually seek to purchase labor-power at less than its value. Conscious class strategies and state interventions are not admissable in the theoretical framework Marx has established. We don’t necessarily have to follow him all the way on this, particularly to the degree we are interested in actual histories. But he nevertheless accomplishes something very profound by sticking to the restrictive assumptions of free-market utopianism. He shows how and why individual capitalists might be impelled to innovate (without any class or state interventions) even though the return on their innovation goes to the whole capitalist class.
“When an individual capitalist cheapens shirts, for instance, by increasing the productivity of labour, he by no means necessarily aims to reduce the value of labour-power and shorten necessary labour-time in proportion to this.” The individual capitalist does not act on the basis of a generalized class consciousness even though “he contributes towards increasing the general rate of surplus-value” through his actions. Marx then warns: “the general and necessary tendencies of capital must be distinguished from their forms of appearance.” This peculiar phrasing signals that something special is going on (the odor of fetishism is in the air). So what’s he getting at?
While it is not our intention here to consider the way in which the immanent laws of capitalist production manifest themselves in the external movement of the individual capitals, assert themselves as the coercive laws of competition, and therefore enter into the consciousness of the individual capitalist as the motives which drive him forward, this much is clear: a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses. (433)
Now we need to think long and hard, critically and carefully, about what he is saying. I earlier suggested you remain alert for when the coercive laws of competition come into the argument, and plainly they do so here. Yet Marx seems to want to downplay their import even as he recognizes that he cannot do without them. At this point, I can only offer my own interpretation, knowing full well that many will disagree with me. I think there is a certain parallel between the way in which Marx analyzes the role of supply and demand fluctuations and the role of competition. In the case of supply and demand, Marx concedes that these conditions play a vital surface role in generating price movements for a particular commodity, but when supply and demand are in equilibrium, he argues, supply and demand fail to explain anything. Supply and demand cannot explain why shirts exchange for shoes on average in the ratio that they do. This has to be explained by something totally different, congealed socially necessary labor-time, or value. This does not mean that supply and demand are irrelevant, because without them there could be no equilibrium price. Supply and demand relations are a necessary but not sufficient aspect of a capitalist mode of production. Competition between individual capitalists within a particular line of commodity production plays a similar role. In this instance, however, it redefines the equilibrium position—the average price or value of the commodity—through changes in the general level of productivity in that line of commodity production. Competition as Marx here depicts it is a sort of epiphenomenon that occurs on the surface of society, but, like exchange itself, it has some deeper consequences that cannot be understood by reference to competition. This was the position he took in the Grundrisse: competition does not establish the laws of motion of capitalism
but is rather their executor. Unlimited competition is therefore not the presupposition for the truth of the economic laws, but rather the consequence—the form of appearance in which their necessity realizes itself … Competition therefore does not explain these laws; rather it lets them be seen, but does not produce them.1
Let use see how this process works out in this instance. “For the understanding of the production of relative surplus-value, and merely on the basis of the results already achieved, we may add the following remarks” (433). The value of a commodity, recall, is fixed by the socially necessary “labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society” (129). What happens if an individual capitalist departs from this social average and sets up a productive system which is super-efficient and instead of producing ten widgets in an hour produces twenty? If one capitalist does that but all the others still produce at the rate of ten, then this one capitalist can sell at or close to the social average of ten while producing and selling twenty. “The individual value of these articles is now below their social value; in other words, they have cost less labour time than the great bulk of the same article produced under the average social conditions” (434). The innovative capitalist gains an extra profit, extra surplus-value, by selling at or close to the social average while producing at a rate of productivity far higher than the social average. This gap is crucial and yields a form of relative surplus-value to the individual capitalist. In this case, it does not matter whether the capitalist is producing wage goods or luxuries. But how does this capitalist sell the extra ten widgets per hour at the old social-average price? Here the laws of supply and demand come into play. And the answer is, probably, that they cannot be sold at the old price. So prices begin to decline. As prices decline, the other capitalists are faced with less profit. This amounts to a redistribution of surplus-value from those with inferior technologies to those with superior technologies. Those working with an inferior technology, therefore, have an increasing competitive incentive to adopt the new technology. Once all capitalists in this line of production follow suit and adopt the new technology to produce twenty widgets an hour, so the socially necessary labor-time congealed in widgets declines.
This form of relative surplus-value, which accrues to the individual capitalist, only lasts as long as he or she has a superior technology in relationship to everybody else. It is ephemeral.
This extra surplus-value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalized, for then the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes. The law of the determination of value by labour time makes itself felt to the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value; this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method. (436)
So the first form of relative surplus-value considered in this chapter is a class phenomenon. It accrues to the whole capitalist class, and it is as permanent as conditions of class struggle over the value of labor-power allow. The second form is individual and ephemeral. It is this second form, the one that confers individual advantage, that individual capitalists are forced to pursue via the coercive laws of competition. The result is that all capitalists at some point or other are forced to adopt the same technology. The two forms of relative surplus-value are not unrelated, since ephemeral innovations in the wage-goods sector will also drive down the value of labor-power at a physically fixed standard of living. “Capital therefore has an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself” (436–7).
But if you are a savvy capitalist, you will know that you can always get this second ephemeral form of relative surplus-value, provided you always have a superior technology. This generates some interesting results. Suppose the new technology is a new machine. Marx has argued that machines, since they are dead labor, can’t produce value. But what happens when you get extra relative surplus-value because of your new machine? While machines are not a source of value, they can be a source of relative surplus-value to the individual capitalist! Once these machines become general, they can then appear to be a source of the relative surplus-value to the whole capitalist class because of declines in the value of labor-power. This produces a peculiar result: machines cannot be a source of value, but they can be a source of surplus-value.
From the way Marx has set up the argument, we see that there is a tremendous incentive for leapfrogging technological innovations among individual capitalists. I get ahead of the pack, I have a superior, more efficient production system than you, I get the ephemeral surplus-value for three years, and you then catch up with me or even go beyond me and get the ephemeral surplus-value for three years. Individual capitalists are all hunting ephemeral surplus-value through new technologies. Hence the technological dynamism of capitalism.
Now, most other theories of technological change treat it as some sort of deus ex machina, some exogenous variable outside the system, attributable to the inherent genius of entrepreneurs or simply to the immanent capacity of human beings for innovation. But Marx is typically reluctant to attribute something as crucial as this to some external power. What he does here is find a simple way to explain why capitalism is so incredibly technologically dynamic from the inside (endogenously, as we like to say). He also explains why capitalists hold the fetishistic view that machines are a source of value, and why all of us are also subject to the same fetish conception. But Marx is resolute. Machines are a source of relative surplus-value but not of value. Since capitalists are interested in the mass of surplus-value, and since they would generally prefer to gain relative surplus-value rather than confront class struggles over absolute surplus-value, then the fetish belief in a “technological fix” as an answer to their ambitions is all too understandable. We even have a hard time disabusing ourselves of it.
But there is another interesting inference to be drawn that Marx refrains from examining, though he does lightly allude to it elsewhere. Suppose workers live on bread alone, and the cost of bread is cut in half because of increases in productivity. Suppose that capitalists cut wages by a quarter. They gain the collective form of relative surplus-value, thus increasing the general rate of exploitation. But at the same time, the workers can buy more bread and raise their physical standard of living. The general question this poses is, how are gains from increasing productivity shared between the classes? One possible result, which Marx unfortunately neglects to emphasize, is that the physical standard of living of workers can rise, as measured by the material goods (use-values) they can afford, at the same time as the rate of exploitation, s/v, increases. This is an important point, because one of the criticisms frequently heard about Marx is that he believes in a rising rate of exploitation. How can that be, ask the critics? Workers (at least in the advanced capitalist countries) now have cars and all these consumer goods, so obviously the rate of exploitation cannot be increasing! Are not the workers so much better off? One part of the answer is that it is perfectly feasible, in the terms postulated in Marx’s theory, for steady increases to occur in the standard of living of labor at the same time as the rate of exploitation either increases or remains constant. (The other part might be to point to the benefits that accrue to one portion of the global working class as a return on imperialist practices of exploitation of the other portion, but that cannot be appealed to here.)
I say it was unfortunate that Marx did not emphasize this point in part because it would have easily forestalled an erroneous, spurious line of theoretical and historical criticism. But it would have also made us focus more clearly on the question of how benefits from gains in productivity get shared as a crucial aspect of the history of class struggle. In the case of the United States, some share of the gains from higher productivity went to the workers from the Civil War period onward. A typical union bargaining strategy is to agree to collaborate with increasing productivity in return for higher wages. If the benefits from technological dynamism are spread around, then opposition to that technological dynamism becomes muted even as capitalists are cheerfully raising the rate of exploitation. Political opposition to capitalism in general also may become less strident, even if the rate of exploitation is increasing, because workers are at least gaining a higher physical standard of living. The odd thing about the United States is that it is only in the past thirty years or so that workers have failed to gain from rising productivity. The capitalist class has appropriated almost all the benefits. This lies at the core of what the neoliberal counterrevolution has been about and what distinguishes it from the Keynesian welfare-state period, when gains from productivity tended to be shared more evenly between capital and labor. The result has been, as is well documented, a tremendous increase in levels of social inequality in all those countries that have moved down neoliberal lines. In part this has to do with the balance of class forces and the dynamics of class struggle in different places, while in the United States, cheaper imports (and imperialist practices) have also helped workers maintain an illusion that perhaps they may be benefiting from capitalist imperialism. But all this lies way beyond what Marx’s text is proposing. I find it helpful, however, to extend his key insights in these directions.
CHAPTER 13: CO-OPERATION

The three chapters that follow deal with the various ways in which capitalists can procure relative surplus-value of the individual sort. The overall focus is on whatever it is that raises the productivity of labor, and it is clear that this depends on organizational forms (cooperation and divisions of labor), as well as on machinery and automation (technology, as we usually think of it). This can create some confusion, since Marx sometimes bundles all these strategies together under the heading “productive forces,” but then on occasion uses the term “technology” as if it were the same thing. He is clearly as interested in organizational form (the software, as it were) as he is in the machines (the hardware). I think it best to assume that Marx’s theory of technology/productive forces is machinery plus organizational form. I find his stance on this particularly relevant since, in recent times, transformations in organizational form—subcontracting, just-in-time systems, corporate decentralization and the like—have played a major role in the quest to increase productivity. While the profitability of Wal-Mart has its basis in the exploitation of cheap Chinese labor, the efficiency of its organizational form sets it apart from many of its competitors. Similarly, the Japanese conquest of the US auto market at the expense of Detroit had as much to do with the organizational form (just-in-time and subcontracting) of the Japanese car companies as with the new hardware and automation they deployed. Indeed, ever since time-and-motion studies (and what became known as Taylorism) became fashionable around 1900, there has always been a strong link between the hardware and the software of capitalist production systems.
Marx begins by examining how two organizational forms—cooperation and divisions of labor—can be used by capital under existing technological conditions of artisanal and handicraft labor to increase productivity. Innovations in these two aspects of organizational form have been integral to the acquisition of relative surplus-value throughout the history of capitalism, and we should never forget them. As in the chapter on the labor process, however, where the potential nobility of the process is stressed in contrast to its alienated form under capitalism, Marx casts neither cooperation nor division of labor in an inherently negative light. He views them as potentially creative, beneficial and gratifying for the laborer. Cooperation and well-organized divisions of labor are wonderful human capacities that add to our collective powers. Socialism and communism would presumably have great need of them. What Marx will seek to show is how these positive potentialities are seized on by capital to its own particular advantage and thereby turned into something negative for the laborer.
“When numerous workers work together side by side in accordance with a plan, whether in the same process, or in different but connected processes, this form of labour is called co-operation.” Note the word “plan” here, since it’s going to become an important idea. Cooperation permits, for example, an increasing scale of production, and the resultant economies of scale can generate increases in labor efficiency and productivity. This is made much of in conventional economic theory, and Marx does not demur. “Not only do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one” (443). This collective power
begets in most industries a rivalry and a stimulation of the ‘animal spirits’, which heightens the efficiency of each individual worker. This is why a dozen people working together will produce far more, in their collective working day of 144 hours than twelve isolated men each working for 12 hours. (443–4)
Furthermore, “co-operation allows work to be carried on over a large area” while rendering
possible a relative contraction of its arena. This simultaneous restriction of space and extension of effectiveness, which allows a large number of incidental expenses … to be spared, results from the massing together of workers and of various labour processes, and from the concentration of the means of production. (446)
There is an interesting tension here between geographical expansion (work conducted over a large area) and geographical concentration (bringing workers together for purposes of cooperation in a particular space). The latter, as Marx points out, can have political consequences as workers get together and organize.
He insists, however, that “the special productive power of the combined working day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power arises from co-operation itself.” Furthermore, “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species” (447). This is one of those instances where Marx reverts to some notion of universal species being, which was an important theme in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. At this point, it is hard to view this discussion of cooperation in a negative light. We strip off the fetters of our individuality and develop the capability of the species. To the degree that this capability has not been realized, we have yet to realize the potentiality of our species being.
But what happens when we return to the world of “our would-be capitalist”? First off, the capitalist needs an initial mass of capital in order to organize cooperation. How much, and where does it come from? There are what we now usually refer to as barriers to entry into any production process. In some instances, the start-up costs can be considerable. But there are ways to ameliorate this problem. Marx here introduces an important distinction. “At first, the subjection of labour to capital was only a formal result of the fact that the worker, instead of working for himself, works for, and consequently under, the capitalist.” But as time goes on, “through the co-operation of numerous wage-labourers, the command of capital develops into a requirement for carrying on the labour process itself, into a real condition of production” (448). The distinction here is between the “formal” subsumption of labor under capital versus its “real” subsumption.
What does this difference mean? Under what was called the putting-out system, merchant capitalists would take materials to laborers in their cottages and return to collect the worked-up product at a later date. The laborers would not be supervised, and the labor process would be left up to the cottagers (it often entailed family labor and was dovetailed with subsistence agricultural practices). But the cottagers depended on the merchant capitalists for their monetary incomes and did not own the product they worked up. This is what Marx means by formal subsumption. When laborers are brought into the factory for a wage, then both they and the labor process are under the direct supervision of the capitalist. This is real subsumption. So the formal is out there, dependent, while the real is inside the factory under the supervision of the capitalist. The latter entails more start-up costs, more initial capital; in the early stages of capitalism, when capital was scarce, the formal system of exploitation could well be more advantageous. Marx believed that over time, the formal would give way to the real. But he was not necessarily correct in this. The revival of contract work, home working and the like in our times indicates that some reversion to formal kinds of subjection and subsumption is entirely possible.
When laborers are brought into a collective structure of cooperation in a factory, they come under the directing authority of the capitalist. Any cooperative endeavor requires some directing authority, much as a conductor directs an orchestra. The problem is that “the work of directing, superintending and adjusting becomes one of the functions of capital, from the moment that the labour under capital’s control becomes co-operative.” Furthermore, “as a specific function of capital, the directing function acquires its own special characteristics.” This function is to recognize that moments are the elements of profit and to squeeze as much labor-time out of the laborer as possible. On the other hand, “as the number of co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and, necessarily, the pressure put on by capital to overcome this resistance” (449).
The struggle between capital and labor, which we earlier encountered in the labor market, gets internalized on the shop floor. This happens because cooperation is organized through the power of capital. What was once a power of labor now appears as a power of capital.
The interconnection between their various labours confronts [the laborers], in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose. (450)
The capitalist’s purpose is to secure “on the one hand a social labour process for the creation of a product, and on the other hand capital’s process of valorization,” i.e., the production of surplus-value. This entails the development of a specific kind of labor process in which the “work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and groups of workers” results in “a special kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen, overseers).” A certain structure of supervision of the workers emerges which is both authoritarian and “purely despotic.” In this, the capitalist acquires a distinctive role as orchestrator of the labor process in all its aspects. “It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an attribute of capital” (450–1). Only by way of command over the labor process can capital be both produced and reproduced. Laborers, on the other hand,
enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with each other. Their cooperation only begins with the labour process, but by then they have ceased to belong to themselves. On entering the labour process they are incorporated into capital. As co-operators, as members of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital.
Workers lose their personhood and become mere variable capital. This is what Marx means by the real subsumption of the laborer under capital.
The socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital which places them under these conditions. Because this power costs capital nothing, while on the other hand it is not developed by the worker until his labour itself belongs to capital, it appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature—a productive power inherent in capital. (451)
An inherent power of labor, the social power of cooperation, is appropriated by capital and made to appear as a power of capital over the workers. Historical examples of enforced cooperation abound—the Middle Ages, slavery, colonies, slave labor—but under capitalism the connection of organized cooperation to wage labor is manifest in special ways. This had a key role in the rise of capitalism.
The simultaneous employment of a large number of wage-labourers in the same labour process … forms the starting-point of capitalist production. This starting-point coincides with the birth of capital itself. If then, on the one hand, the capitalist mode of production is a historically necessary condition for the transformation of the labour process into a social process, so, on the other hand, this social form of the labour process is a method employed by capital for the more profitable exploitation of labour, by increasing its productive power. (453)
This originary status of a certain form of cooperation is perpetuated throughout the whole history of capitalism.
Simple co-operation has always been, and continues to be, the predominant form in those branches of production in which capital operates on a large scale, but the division of labour and machinery play only an insignificant part … Co-operation remains the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production, although in its simple shape it continues to appear as one particular form alongside the more developed ones. (454)
It is impossible to imagine the capitalist mode of production without cooperation, albeit cooperation under the despotism of capitalists who organize and direct a supervisory authority and fragment the working class into distinctive hierarchical groupings. It is, therefore, no longer adequate to think merely about the wage laborer, because the working class is stratified according to both the status and the differential financial reward attached to the different functions required to constitute the despotism of a cooperative apparatus dedicated solely to the production of surplus-value.
CHAPTER 14: THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AND MANUFACTURE

Chapter 14 examines divisions of labor. Marx concentrates here on the reorganization of existing handicrafts, existing skills, existing tool technologies and the like into a new system that he calls “manufacturing.” The reorganization can be done in two ways. The first is to bring together in the same workshop, “under the control of a single capitalist … workers belonging to various independent handicrafts” (455). The example he uses is carriage making, where wheels, upholstery, frame, etc. all have to be made separately and then assembled. This contrasts with making nails or needles. In this case, the process starts with raw materials and passes through a continuous process until it comes out as a nail or a needle. But in both cases, “whatever may have been its particular starting-point, its final form is always the same—a productive mechanism whose organs are human beings.” That is, human beings are brought together into a certain kind of relationship to one another inside the cooperative regime of the production space.
Such reorganizations do not, however, leave the original skills untouched. “The analysis of a process of production into its particular phases here coincides completely with the decomposition of a handicraft into its different partial operations” (457). When the production process is seen as a whole, opportunities arise to split it up into smaller fragments and get specialized workers to engage on each fragment, either in terms of the continuous sequence or in terms of the heterogeneity of many different handicrafts. Nevertheless, “handicraft remains the basis, a technically narrow basis which excludes a really scientific division of the production process into its component parts.” This plainly constitutes a barrier to the progress of capitalist production, and as I have already argued, capital doesn’t like barriers and perpetually seeks to overcome them. The difficulty in this case is that
every partial process undergone by the product must be capable of being done by hand, and of forming a separate handicraft. It is precisely because the skill of the craftsman thus continues to be the foundation of the production process that every worker becomes exclusively assigned to a partial function and that his labour-power becomes transformed into the life-long organ of this partial function.
The result is that workers, instead of having the freedom to move from one activity to another, are increasingly locked into a particular skill, a particular handicraft, the use of a particular set of specialized tools. “A worker who performs the same simple operation for the whole of his life converts his body into the automatic, one-sided implement of that operation” (458). Is the worker in control of the tool or is the tool in control of the worker? Marx suggests that the social imprisonment of workers in a particular specialization within the division of labor puts them in a position of being so connected to their specialized tools that they lose their freedom. This has not always been so.
A craftsman who performs the various partial operations … must at one time change his place, at another time his tools. The transition from one operation to another interrupts the flow of his labour and creates gaps in his working day, so to speak.
But capital doesn’t like such gaps in the working day, since moments are the elements of profit. These gaps “close up when he is tied to the same operation the whole day long.” On the other hand, this can be counterproductive since “constant labour of one uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of a man’s vital forces, which find recreation and delight in the change of activity itself” (460).
This is a partial concession to Fourier’s view of the importance of variety and stimulus in the labor process as opposed to the dull imprisonment of one person, with one tool, in the division of labor, for a lifetime. The positive and negative aspects of how the division of labor is organized under capitalist control start to enter into the argument. This argument has not gone away, even within capitalism. The attempt to raise efficiency and productivity in the labor process by introducing “quality circles” and variety of tasking to counteract the monotony of labor has been the focus of many experiments by capitalist firms in certain lines of production.
In section 3, Marx sets up a more systematic contrast between two fundamental forms of manufacture—heterogeneous (bringing together many skills, as in carriage and locomotive making) and organic (continuous, like nail making). But he here takes the opportunity to introduce the concept of the “collective worker,” who, he says, is
formed from the combination of the many specialized workers, draws the wire with one set of tooled-up hands, straightens the wire with another set, armed with different tools, cuts it with another set, points it with another set, and so on. The different stages of the process, previously successive in time, have become simultaneous and contiguous in space. (464)
Productivity and efficiency depend not on the individual worker but on the proper organization of collective work.
This means careful attention must be paid to the space-time organization of production and the efficiencies that can be gained through spatiotemporal reconstruction of the labor process as a whole. Marx points out that by not losing any time, you gain in productivity. By rationalizing the way in which space is organized, you can save on movement costs. So the whole space-time structure becomes an organizational question for how capitalism works. This was the big innovation that the Japanese introduced into the labor process in the 1970s with just-in-time production, the tight scheduling of flows of goods in space and time such that you had almost no inventory anywhere in the system. This was the innovation which gave the Japanese car industry its competitive advantage over all others during the 1980s, and the Japanese raked in the ephemeral form of relative surplus-value until everyone else caught up. The downside of this system is that it is vulnerable to disruption. If one link in the spatiotemporal chain is stopped by, for example, a strike, then everything has to close down because there is no inventory.
Marx here clearly recognizes that a major organizational aspect of a capitalistic system is how space and time get set up and understood. The capitalist has to come up with a plan for an efficient spatiotemporal production system. But this in turn implies an important distinction between what happens in the marketplace and what happens within the firm. “The rule that the labour-time expended on a commodity should not exceed the amount socially necessary to produce it is one that appears, in the production of commodities in general, to be enforced from outside by the action of competition” (note the importance of competition once more). But “in manufacture, on the contrary, the provision of a given quantity of the product in a given period of labour is a technical law of the process of production itself” (465). This distinction (contradiction) between what market logic enforces and what can be done by internal planning is vital for the argument that follows. But the full flowering of this contradiction is hindered by the existence of a barrier due to the fact that we are still dealing with handicrafts and artisanal labor. This prompts a general comment of some importance:
The Roman Empire handed down the elementary form of all machinery in the shape of the water-wheel. The handicraft period bequeathed to us the great inventions of the compass, gunpowder, type-printing and the automatic clock. But on the whole, machinery played that subordinate part which Adam Smith assigns to it in comparison with division of labour. (468)
That is, up until the end of the eighteenth century, capitalists were not really homing in on new machinery as a primary way to improve their productive efficiency. They were generally content to use existing methods of production and reorganize them. Of course there were innovations, like compass and gunpowder and all the rest of it, but capitalism had not yet internalized the dynamic of perpetual technological innovation in the heart of the labor process itself. That happened later on, with the rise of machinery and modern industry (the subject of chapter 15).
The capitalist reorganization of labor processes has serious impacts on the worker. “The habit of doing only one thing converts him into an organ which operates with the certainty of a force of nature, while his connection with the whole mechanism compels him to work with the regularity of a machine.” Workers “are divided, classified and grouped according to their predominant qualities,” and the result is “a hierarchy of labour-powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages” (468–9). The distinction between skilled and unskilled laborers becomes particularly marked.
Alongside the gradations of the hierarchy, there appears the simple separation of the workers into skilled and unskilled. For the latter, the cost of apprenticeship vanishes; for the former, it diminishes, compared with that required of the craftsman … In both cases the value of labour-power falls.
Capitalist reorganizations and reconfigurations of tasks tend to produce deskilling, as tasks that were once complicated become simplified into component parts. This also has the effect of reducing the value of labor-power employed.
The relative devaluation of labour-power caused by the disappearance or reduction of the expenses of apprenticeship directly implies a higher degree of valorization of capital; for everything that shortens the necessary labour-time required for the reproduction of labour-power, extends the domain of surplus labour.
But “an exception to this law occurs whenever the decomposition of the labour process gives rise to new and comprehensive functions, which either did not appear at all in handicrafts or not to the same extent” (470). In any reorganization of the labor process there can be a double movement, it must be conceded, of mass deskilling alongside usually a much smaller group that’s reskilled (e.g., assembly-line engineers). The latter segments of the working class are usually empowered and privileged relative to other segments of labor.
Section 4, titled “The Division of Labour in Manufacture, and the Division of Labour in Society,” is significant and has some potentially fraught implications. Marx here returns to the distinction between the detailed division of labor in the workshop, which occurs under the planned design and direct supervision of the capitalist, and the division of labor achieved through competition in the market. These two forms originate from “diametrically opposed” starting points but relate to each other. Marx provides a brief and, I have to say, not at all satisfactory discussion of the historical movement. “Within a family and, after further development, within a tribe, there springs up naturally a division of labour caused by differences of sex and age, and therefore based on a purely physiological foundation.” This is an oversimplification based, as is the case with some of his other historical commentaries, on very little evidence. “Exchange,” he hypothesizes,
springs up at the points where different families, tribes or communities come into contact; for at the dawn of civilization it is not private individuals but families, tribes, etc. that meet on an independent footing. Different communities find different means of production and different means of subsistence in their natural environment. Hence their modes of production and living, as well as their products, are different.
Exchange relations arise between different communities with different assets, different resources, different products. “The foundation of every division of labour which has attained a certain degree of development, and has been brought about by the exchange of commodities, is the separation of town from country.” The dialectic of town-country relations is, he suggests (correctly, in my view), important historically, but he does not elaborate on how and where. Furthermore, an adequate “number and density of the population” is relevant to the rise of capitalism (471–2). This is, he says, “a pre-condition for the division of labour within society.”
[But] this density is more or less relative. A relatively thinly populated country, with well-developed means of communication, has a denser population than a more numerously populated country with badly developed means of communication. In this sense, the northern states of the U.S.A. for instance, are more thickly populated than India.
Marx’s appeal here to a relative theory of space-time relations is quite innovative. The geographical terrain on which capitalism developed was not fixed but varied, depending not only on density of populations but also on transport and communication technologies. His central point is that the division of labor in manufacture assumes that society has already “attained a certain degree of development. Inversely, the division of labour in manufacture reacts back upon that … society, developing and multiplying it further” (473). He argues for what is called increasing roundaboutness in and complexity of production. The movement is from a simple situation where somebody makes one thing to a situation where several people make parts of that thing and trade those parts in the market until all the parts get assembled by someone else at the end. This increasing roundaboutness generates increasing possibility for territorial specialization.
The territorial division of labour, which confines special branches of production to special districts of a country, acquires fresh stimulus from the system of manufacture, which exploits all natural peculiarities. The colonial system and the extension of the world market, both of which form part of the general conditions for the existence of the manufacturing period [an important point that we should note well], furnish us with rich materials for displaying the division of labour in society.
But while there are “analogies and links” between the division of labor in society and within the workshop, they “differ not only in degree, but also in kind” (something that Adam Smith, as Marx rightly acknowledges, was concerned with) (474).
The division of labour within society is mediated through the purchase and sale of the products of different branches of industry, while the connection between the various partial operations in a workshop is mediated through the sale of the labour-power of several workers to one capitalist, who applies it as combined labour-power. The division of labour within manufacture presupposes a concentration of the means of production in the hands of one capitalist; the division of labour within society presupposes a dispersal of those means among many independent producers of commodities. While, within the workshop, the iron law of proportionality subjects definite numbers of workers to definite function, in the society outside the workshop, the play of chance and caprice results in a motley pattern of distribution of the producers and their means of production among the various branches of social labour.
In the latter case, he argues, “the different spheres of production constantly tend towards equilibrium,” but they do so only through market mechanisms. And he then explains why, going back over the laws of exchange of commodities. This means that the “constant tendency on the part of the various spheres of production towards equilibrium comes into play only as a reaction against the constant upsetting of this equilibrium” (475–6). That is, when demand and supply get out of kilter (and here, note, we cannot do without supply and demand mechanisms), market-price fluctuations force the necessary adjustment toward the underlying value relations as producers change what they are producing and how much. The result is a marked contrast between “the planned and regulated a priori system on which the division of labour is implemented within the workshop” and, on the other hand, “the division of labour within society,” ruled by
an a posteriori necessity imposed by nature, controlling the unregulated caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the fluctuations of the barometer of market prices. Division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, who are merely the members of a total mechanism which belongs to him. The division of labour within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom, the ‘war of all against all’ more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species. (476–7)
In these passages, note the dependence on both supply and demand mechanisms and the coercive laws of competition as necessary to the achievement of some sort of equilibrium in which value relations prevail.
Capitalism, Marx concludes, lives always in the midst of contradiction between “anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour.” These two aspects of the division of labor, furthermore, “mutually condition each other.” Marx attaches, however, some controversial and fraught political commentary to this conclusion:
The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining ‘genius’ of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory. (477)
These statements require some careful parsing. Capitalists love the planned organization of production within their factory but abhor the idea of any kind of social planning of production in society. The ideological complaint that planning is a bad thing, and in particular for capitalists to attack it on the grounds that it would remake the world in the image of their own awful factories, is revealing. The condemnation of planning does not mesh with what goes on inside Toyota or Wal-Mart. Successful corporations deploy sophisticated planning techniques of total quality management, input-output analysis and optimal scheduling and design, and plan everything down to the finest detail. But it is one thing for Marx to point out the hypocritical approach of the capitalists to planning in the social realm, quite another to suggest that their undoubtedly sophisticated techniques, deployed in the quest for relative surplus-value, might be adequate for the planning of a socialist society seeking to augment the material well-being of everyone. Would it, in short, be reasonable to turn the world into a centrally planned economy, in effect into one large factory, in the quest for socialism? Obviously, there would be problems in doing so given Marx’s account of the appalling conditions of factory labor. But if the problem is not the techniques but the fact that they are used to gain relative surplus-value for the capitalist rather than to produce enough output to satisfy the material needs of all, then Lenin’s advocacy for Fordist productionism as a goal for Soviet industry becomes more understandable. We will return to this question later.
Certainly, the argument that centralized planning is impossible because of the level of complexity or because it infringes on private property relations does not wash, given the complexity involved in any large corporation, producing, say, electronics, and the dispossession of the laborer’s right to the fruits of his or her own labors. The incredible inefficiencies of the market system (particularly with respect to the environment) and the periodic brutality of the coercive laws of competition, along with the increasing despotism this coercion typically produces in the workplace, are hardly great advertisements for the superiority of market coordinations. And the idea that innovation is only possible given individual property rights and the coercive laws of competition is surely far-fetched both logically and historically. For what I think impresses Marx most here is the appropriation of the productive powers of labor by capital. Again and again, he insists to the working class that all these powers of cooperation and of divisions of labor are their productive powers and that capital is appropriating them.
The productive power which results from the combination of various kinds of labour appears as the productive power of capital. Manufacture proper not only subjects the previously independent worker to the discipline and command of capital, but creates in addition a hierarchical structure amongst the workers themselves.
The implications for the workers are far-reaching.
It converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house, through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations, just as in the states of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. Not only is the specialized work distributed among the different individuals, but the individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation, thus realizing the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which presents man as a mere fragment of his own body. (481–2)
So the body politics of this is that workers are reduced to being fragments of themselves. “Unfitted by nature”—and Marx is being ironic here—“to make anything independently, the manufacturing worker develops his productive activity only as an appendage of [the capitalist’s] workshop.” Sadly,
the possibility of an intelligent direction of production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the capital which confronts them. It is the result of the division of labour in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities … of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him.
Intellectual labor becomes a specialized function, separating mental from manual labor, with the former brought increasingly under the control of capital.
This process of separation starts in simple co-operation … It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. It is completed in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital. (482)
The result of this is an “impoverishment of the worker” and a serious loss of “individual productive power.” Political and intellectual subjectivities do not remain immune. And here Marx cites Adam Smith, not necessarily approvingly but as voicing what increasingly becomes a matter of fact:
‘The understandings of the greater part of men,’ says Adam Smith, ‘are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding … He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.’ After describing the stupidity of the specialized worker, he goes on: ‘The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind … It corrupts even the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employments than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this manner to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall.’ (483)
Marx seems partially inclined here to accept to some degree Smith’s characterization of the situation, and I, too, think it important to ask the general question: to what degree do our ordinary employments corrupt the courage of our minds? I think the problem is widespread, not confined to workers at all. Journalists, media personalities, university professors—we all have this problem (I have plenty of personal experience of it). The widespread reluctance to protest the militarism, the social injustices, the repressions, that surround us at every turn have as much to do (and in a more insidious way) with the mentalities and political subjectivities that derive from our ordinary employments as they do with the sophisticated organization of bourgeois repression. “Some crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from the division of labour in society as a whole,” Marx concedes, and results in what he calls “industrial pathology” (484). Again, we are treading on dangerous ground here. Surely it would not be right to pathologize the whole of the working class? Yet it would be utopian to suppose that all of this has no impact on people’s abilities to react, to think. For those of you who have ever organized with those working two jobs (eighty hours a week), you will know the problem all too well. Workers in that condition have little or no time to think about (let alone read about) most of the things that we think they should think about, given their working-class position. They are so busy trying to make ends meet, get enough food on the table for their kids and do other domestic chores that they don’t have time for anything else outside work. Smith took the argument to an extreme, drawing the unfortunate conclusion that therefore it was both the job and the duty of a small elite to do all the thinking and organizing, but there is something to Marx’s description that we deny at our political peril.
The reorganization of the division of labor, both within the labor process and in society at large, is the hallmark of what Marx dubs the “manufacturing period” in capitalism’s history. But this manufacturing system has limits. “Manufacture was unable either to seize upon the production of society to its full extent, or to revolutionize that production to its very core. It towered up”—and Marx is really admiring of it—
as an artificial economic construction, on the broad foundation of the town handicrafts and the domestic industries of the countryside. At a certain stage of its development, the narrow technical basis on which manufacture rested came into contradiction with requirements of production which it had itself created. (490)
The pressure was on to go beyond these barriers. It is, of course, “machines that abolish the role of the handicraftsman as the regulating principle of social production” (491). This takes us into the next chapter, in which machines and the organizational form of the modern factory move to center stage.