A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey

      Let us look more closely at the different steps in this process. The capitalist has to buy means of production (MP): raw materials, machinery, semimanufactured items, all products of past labor (congealed values). The capitalist has to pay for those commodities at their value according to the rules of exchange. If a spindle is needed, then the socially necessary labor-time embodied in spindles fixes value. If somebody uses a gold spindle, then that is not socially necessary. For the labor process to work, the capitalist requires adequate access to means of production in the marketplace. What the purchase of labor-power (LP) enables is the reanimation of these “dead” means of production through the process of laboring (P).

      During the labour process, the worker’s labour constantly undergoes a transformation, from the form of unrest … into that of being …, from the form of motion … into that of objectivity … At the end of one hour, the spinning motion is represented in a certain quantity of yarn; in other words, a definite quantity of labour, namely that of one hour, has been objectified in the cotton. We say labour, i.e. the expenditure of his vital force by the spinner, and not spinning labour, because the special work of spinning counts here only in so far as it is the expenditure of labour-power in general, and not the specific labour of the spinner. (296)

      In other words, it is abstract labor which is being incorporated into this act of spinning, it is value being added in the form of socially necessary labor-time congealed in the yarn. The result is that

      definite quantities of product, quantities which are determined by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of crystallized labour-time. They are now simply the material shape taken by a given number of hours or days of social labour. (297)

      Furthermore, “in the process we are now considering it is of extreme importance that no more time be consumed in the work of transforming the cotton into yarn than is necessary under the given social conditions” (296).

      But at the end of the workday, if all goes well, the capitalists find themselves, magically, in possession of surplus-value. The “capitalist stares in astonishment,” writes Marx with heavy irony. Should not the value of the product be “equal to the value of the capital advanced,” a simple adding up of all the values of the inputs (297)? Where does the surplus-value come from, given the law of equivalence in exchanges? “The road to hell,” writes Marx with equal irony, “is paved with good intentions” (298).

      So the capitalists look for virtuous reasons to explain the surplus-value. First off, consider abstinence. Capitalists abstain from present consumption and invest the money they save. Do they not deserve some reward for their abstinence? This is a theme that echoes loudly in the long debate over the role of the Protestant ethic in the rise of capitalism. Second, capitalists provide employment to people. If capitalists didn’t invest their money, there would be no employment. Poor workers! Capitalists are doing them a favor by investing their money. Don’t the capitalists deserve some rate of return for that? This is a pretty general and on the surface rather convincing argument—does not investment create jobs? I used to have this argument with my mother all the time. She’d say, “But of course we need capitalists!” I’d say, “Why, why?” And she’d say, “Who would employ workers if we didn’t have capitalists?” She could not imagine that there might be other ways in which you could employ people. “Capitalists are vital,” she would say, “and it is very important we keep them around and treat them nicely, because if they didn’t employ laborers, the world would become a terrible place—look what happened in the 1930s!” The third argument is that capitalists say they work hard. They set up the production process, manage things, put in their own labor-time and take all this risk. Yes, indeed, many capitalists work, and some of them work hard, but when they work they usually pay themselves twice over, i.e., they pay themselves the rate of return on the capital they invest and they pay themselves as managers. They pay themselves as CEOs and then take stock options.

      Marx regards all these explanations as subterfuges and conjuring tricks:

      The whole litany [the capitalist] has just recited was simply meant to pull the wool over our eyes. He himself does not care twopence for it. He leaves this and all similar subterfuges and conjuring tricks to the professors of political economy, who are paid for it. He himself is a practical man, and although he does not always consider what he says outside his business, within his business he knows what he is doing. (300)

      Capitalists may indeed be frugal and abstain, and they may also sometimes exhibit a benevolent attitude toward their workers (desperately trying to maintain their workforce in employment when times are bad, for example). Marx’s point is that capitalists could not possibly sustain the whole system by appeals to virtue, morality or benevolence, that the individual behavior of capitalists, varying from benevolence to vicious greed, is irrelevant to what capitalists must do in order to be capitalists, which is, quite simply, to procure surplus-value. Furthermore, their role is defined, as Marx will later point out, by “coercive laws of competition,” which push all capitalists to behave in similar fashion no matter whether they are good people or proverbial capitalist pigs.

      The full answer to the problem of explaining surplus-value follows. You pay the value of labor-power, which is set, recall, by the value of the commodities needed to reproduce the laborer at a given standard of living. The laborer sells the commodity labor-power, gets money, then goes and gets that bundle of commodities needed to live. But it will only take a certain number of hours each day for the laborer to reproduce the equivalent of the value of labor-power. Therefore, “the daily cost of maintaining labour-power” and its daily creation of value are two totally different things. “The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter is its use-value.” Labor, recall, is in the C-M-C circuit, while capital is in the M-C-M + ΔM circuit.

      The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes … in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power … What was really decisive for him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. This is the specific service the capitalist expects from labour-power, and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the eternal laws of commodity-exchange. In fact, the seller of labour-power [the laborer], like the seller of any other commodity, realizes … its exchange-value, and alienates … its use-value. (300–1)

      There is a key distinction between what labor gets and what labor creates. Surplus-value results from the difference between the value labor congeals in commodities in a working day and the value the laborer gets for surrendering labor-power as a commodity to the capitalist. Laborers, in short, are paid the value of labor-power, and that is that. The capitalist then puts them to work in such a way that not only do they reproduce the value of their own labor-power, they also produce surplus-value. The use-value of labor-power to the capitalist is that it is the one commodity that can produce value and hence surplus-value.

      There