Value. Frederick Harry Pitts
proletariat were therefore doubly free: free of feudal domination, and free to dispose of their capacity to labour in the labour market for a wage in order to subsist.55
For most, the selling of labour power for a wage became the dominant means of reproducing the conditions of life. In order for them to deploy that capacity to labour, means of production were needed, which a combination of new regimes of property and the rule of law, and brute force and violence, had placed in the hands of a rising merchant and industrial class at precisely the time their technological sophistication was accelerating. The ascendant bourgeoisie was therefore placed in a position to acquire the capacity to labour – the ‘labour power’ – sold by the new proletariat on the newly created market for labour. The consumption of the commodity labour power enabled the bourgeoisie to reproduce the conditions of their business operations, whose success workers depended on in turn, in order to continue being employed. The things produced were the property of the owners of the means of production. The results of production were sold as commodities on the market by means of money. The producers of these goods – the workers – in turn survived by purchasing their means of living with the wages paid for the disposal of the labour power they sold.
It should be noted here that, whilst these political and economic conditions were central to the rise of capitalism and a society that reproduces itself through the valorization of value, this understanding of the evolution of ‘free labour’ only gets us part of the way. For Marx, at the same time as ‘freeing’ labour, capitalism is historically and continuingly constituted in various states of unfree labour, including, notably, slavery.56 Rather than seeing these as a remnant of pre-capitalist modes of production contravening the intrinsically ‘free’ character of labour in capitalist society, Marx recognized that the revolution in social relations that paved the path for the rise of capitalism implied the exploitation and appropriation associated with plantation slavery and colonialism.57 Marx observed that ‘without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry’, and that ‘the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World’.58 Likewise, Marx contended that slavery was itself capitalist insofar as it was driven by the valorization process and the pursuit of profit through productivity gains.59 Unfortunately, this has not stopped subsequent Marxists neglecting or relegating not only the importance of slavery to the analysis of capitalism, but also the racial domination around which slavery was and is organized.60 Marx’s analysis, then, has also been used to locate – as well as class – racism, and specifically anti-blackness, not as an epiphenomenal consequence or superstructural distortion of capitalist social relations, but as a constitutive factor in its development.61
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In Marx’s account of the violence and subjugation at the origin and basis of capitalism, then, the development of labour, exchange and value looks very different than it does in the work of the classical political economists. Marx improved upon prior political economy by explaining how a society in which subsistence is mediated by wage labour came about. As we have seen, he did so through an explanation based outside the workplace itself, taking in broader changes in juridical, political and transactional relationships between class actors in the legal sphere, the market and society at large. But it was insufficient simply to stop there, and, having established this state of affairs in Capital, Marx took readers beyond the ‘realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ into the sphere of production to explore the implications of these changes for how work is performed and experienced, and the hidden mechanics and dynamics of value creation in capitalist society.62 What Marx called the ‘valorization process’ – the process by which the value invested in production is expanded in pursuit of profit and the reproduction of the conditions for business to continue – compels the process by which labour is bought, sold and engaged in the ‘labour process’.63 Profit, for Marx, arises where the capitalist is able to receive more from the sale of the good or services they produce than they have expended on its production – in other words, from surplus value. In order to understand how this surplus can be raised from the exchange of equivalents, we pick up where Marx’s account of the constitution of wage labour in the proletariat’s ‘double freedom’ left off. The individual’s labour power must be sold to a willing buyer in possession of the means of production required to put that labour to good use. This labour power presents at the point of sale a purely potential quantity, for which a wage is agreed in order for the willing buyer – the capitalist – to claim its ownership and thus the ability to turn what is merely a potential into actuality. In selling labour power to the capitalist, the individual thus gives over full and sole discretion as to how, when and for how long the labour power can be employed in its next stage of development – as labour in its concrete, practical existence.64
The secret of the surplus at first appears inscrutable because the capitalist purchases the commodity labour power at its value.65 This value is the ‘socially necessary’ minimum amount of time that the worker must labour to reproduce her labour power so that she might reappear for work the following morning.66 Yet for a profit to be turned and the value invested valorized, the monetary worth of what they produce must be greater than the employer has outlaid on wages. How can this be so? Marx contends that the commodity of labour power possesses a unique quality when inserted in the labour process and applied to the means of production: it can create more value than it is worth.67 For Marx, this cannot be determined in the market alone, but rests on a specific set of antagonistic and highly conflictual relationships situated in the labour process itself. This has to do with the way that the time, effort and productivity of workers is managed through organizational and technological means. The contract of employment having been signed, the employer has the power to wield control over the worker they have recruited, but there is no telling what the effectiveness of the labour capacity they have acquired may be in the production process itself – varying in skill or militancy, for instance. A struggle therefore ensues on the part of the employer to extract from that labour power as much effort and productivity as possible in combination with the means of production they own.68
For Marx, the production of commodities is divided up into two parts: necessary labour and surplus labour. Translated into time, the first ‘necessary’ portion has two determinations: the amount of time taken to produce the commodity demanded for sale by the capitalist, as a measure of general human labour in the abstract; and the amount of time the worker takes to produce the commodity in order to reproduce their labour power with the consumption of equivalent commodities through the provision of a wage. This demonstrates the dual nature of necessary labour-time: necessary for the worker, because of their sustenance, and necessary for the capitalist because ‘the continued existence of the worker is the basis of that world’.69
Whereas the necessary labour-time is that part of the working day where the labourer works ‘for himself’, what Marx calls surplus labour-time is time spent working for the capitalist. Here, labour power is consumed by the capitalist in order to produce surplus value: that part of the value generated from the labour process left over when the worker’s recompense and other associated expenses are taken into account. As such, it is in the capitalist’s interests to prolong this part of the working day for as long as possible and minimize the proportion of time spent on the reproduction of the worker. By manipulating the length and composition of the working day, the capitalist can secure a greater amount of value from the commodity of labour power than its value at the point of purchase.
This can be done in two main ways, according to Marx: through raising absolute surplus value or relative surplus value. Both centre on the rate of surplus value, or what Marx also called the rate of exploitation: surplus labour divided by necessary labour.70 If productivity and intensity are given, the rate of surplus value can only be raised by the prolongation of the working day – absolute surplus value – and if the working day is given, the rate of surplus value can only be increased by a shift in the ratio of necessary to surplus labour, achieved by a change in either productivity or intensity – in other words, relative surplus value.71
In raising what Marx calls ‘absolute surplus value’, employers extend the