Value. Frederick Harry Pitts
this context, ‘moments are the elements of profit’. The means of production that lie dormant in workplaces overnight demand this, existing only to ‘absorb labour’. Starved of this, plant and equipment do not perform their function, constituting a loss to the capitalist. As such, Marx signifies here that ‘to appropriate labour during all the 24 hours of the day is the inherent tendency of capitalist production’.72 With a watchful eye on the clock, times extraneous to the labour process are carefully cropped. Workers see infinitesimal, yet ever-increasing, portions of their free time eroded at the beginning and end of the day and at break-times, accumulating over the year into a significant surplus under the command of the employer. Such is the capitalist’s ‘right’ as a buyer: the contract of employment signed, the capitalist possesses full discretion over the way in which the commodity at their disposal is used.73
But, likewise, it is the labourer’s ‘right as a seller’ to have a set duration to the working day.74 Although the working day can vary, certain limits do exist that cannot easily be transgressed by capital: firstly, the physical need for the worker to reproduce himself in order to arrive at the factory gates the next morning; and secondly, the ‘moral’ aspect related to the social standard of satisfaction, associated with spare time away from work, which varies between individual circumstances and social conditions.75 Where these limits are in place, raising absolute surplus value becomes more difficult for the capitalist. Other means must be found to increase the ratio of surplus to necessary labour, which do not extend the working day outwardly but restructure it internally. This centres on raising what Marx calls ‘relative surplus value’.
The prerogative of relative surplus value pertains to the ‘curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and [with it] the corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working day’.76 The necessary labour-time can only be lessened by a fall in the value of the labour power that needs reproducing. This implies that the means of subsistence must be produced over a shorter period, through an increase in productivity.77 By intensifying work and reducing that portion of the day in which the worker labours for her own reproduction, whether through advances in productivity-raising technologies or management regimes, the capitalist can keep the length of the working day the same whilst increasing the proportion of it given over to the production of surplus value. The immediate aim of capital is, thus, less the contraction in labour-time itself as a narrowing of the time necessary within the day for the worker to reproduce themselves, and thus for a set amount of commodities to be produced.78 The part of the working day ‘socially necessary’ to the reproduction of both capital and labour is proportionally shortened, whilst the ‘surplus’ part of the day that belongs to the capitalist and accrues as surplus value is proportionally lengthened, without infringing limits placed upon the length of the working day as a whole. Whilst the practical consequence of these dynamics might appear to be the theft of workers’ time, the capitalist, as the buyer of labour power, is simply exerting their legal right to derive as much use value as they can from the commodity they have purchased.79 And, in deriving use value from one commodity, they hope to profit from the exchange value in which it results, in the sale of another.
Time, thus, represents the means by which all else is calculated in Marx’s substantialist schema, and the basis for the surplus that accrues to the capitalist in the form of value. Commodities, for Marx, are to be understood as ‘congealed labour-time’, and, where the substance of value is human labour, the measure of its magnitude is nothing other than labour-time.80 However, it might be said that, if this state of affairs were really the case and labour-time directly determined value, then work conducted at a relaxed pace would be represented in a greater amount of value than more fastidious and efficient efforts.81 To clarify, Marx himself forewarns against the substantialist pitfall of regarding labour-time as the measure of commodity value whilst in the same instance ‘confusing the labour which is materialised in the exchange value of commodities and measured in time units with the direct physical activity of individuals’.82 This has implications that, as we will see in subsequent chapters, cannot be neatly contained in a substantialist approach to the value problematic.
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Scholars like Jean Baudrillard have suggested that Marx’s critique, in its continuation of themes from classical political economy, remains too close to its object in assuming the standpoint of one of its conceptual poles, labour.83 Indeed, partly owing to the political expendiencies of the time in which Marx was writing, in places he did endow production and labour with a ‘revolutionary title of nobility’. This ‘productivism’, Baudrillard argues, exhibits a tendency to ascribe to production the status of the ‘active moment’ in the determination of value, and to other moments, such as consumption, a relative and absolute passivity. This conceptually subordinates ‘[s]ocial wealth or language, meaning or value, sign or phantasm’ to some kind of ‘production’ at the hands of one or another type of ‘labour’. This productivist logic, Baudrillard suggests, mimics that of capitalist society itself in subordinating everything, ‘all human material and every contingency of desire and exchange’, to the ends of ‘value, finality, and production’.84 Delving into the realm of production brings us no closer to the truth of the matter, Baudrillard asserts, for, ‘instead of the shadows of the market place, we are sent to an equally obscure underside of the system: the place of production’.85 The latter cannot be understood in isolation from its contradictory unity with the sphere of circulation, just as use value has no existence independent of its contradictory unity with exchange value – the each being the precondition of the other – and concrete labour no existence independent of its contradictory unity with abstract labour.86 However, Baudrillard argues that this did not stop Marx positivizing the first term of each over the other as the underpinning principle of a wider social transformation, remaining mired in the ‘repressed side’ of the concepts of classical political economy and the capitalist society it sought to describe.87
As such, in basing itself in the perspective of production, a part of Marx’s critique was left incomplete, and, at its best, it merely served to ‘interiorize’ and ‘complete’ its object, substituting one naturalization – of Homo economicus in Smith and Ricardo – for another.88 In this way, Marx’s theories are ‘taken in by the [same] socially produced appearance (Schein)’ of economic objectivity that Marx’s critique itself attempted to decipher.89 In taking for granted the appearance of value as having been ‘created’ by a substantial, physical, concrete brand of labour, Marx adopted a part of the object he sought to critique, namely Ricardo’s labour theory of value. Since then, over the course of its reception, ‘Marx’s theory of value has been mistakenly identified with the classical, or Ricardian, labour theory of value’, and not, as we will go on to see, the study of ‘the specific social form of labour’ that we find elsewhere in Marx.90 Part of the difficulty arises from the fact ‘that Marx left behind no finished version of the labour theory of value’. In this context, ‘there remains … an urgent priority … to reconstruct out of the more or less fragmentary presentations and the numerous individual remarks strewn in other works, the whole of the value theory’.91 Rather than a question of theological correctness, uncovering the essence of Marx’s work is more a matter of where to place emphasis in his sprawling and unfinished output. Stressing the ‘labour’ theory of value or his theory of exploitation, as we have done here alongside other ‘substance’ theories of value, only serves to ‘neglect his originality and reduce him to something which was already reached before’.92 As we see next, it is rather the specific monetary character of his theory that distinguishes it from what went before, moving closer to later ‘subjective’ theories of value as a relation than the ‘objective’ theories of value as a substance considered in this chapter. This can be done only by ‘tearing the theory apart and putting it together in a new form to reach the goal that it has set itself better’, in the words of Jurgen Habermas.93
Notes
1 1 R. L. Heilbroner, 1983. The Problem of Value in the Constitution of Economic Thought.