Capital (Marx) Part 3 chapter 5

Labor is nothing but the use of labor-power. A person who buys labor-power consumes it by putting to work someone who has sold his labor-power, and in this way, the latter person actually becomes what he previously only had the potential to be: a bearer of labor-power in action—a worker. In order to be represented in commodities, his labor must first and foremost be represented in use-values, or things that serve to satisfy wants and needs of whatever kind. Thus the capitalist has the worker make a par- ticular article or use-value. How use-values or goods are produced—the general nature of their production—doesn’t change when a capitalist takes control of this process and someone else carries it out for him. We will there- fore begin by considering the labor process independent of all particu lar social forms. Labor is a process involving human beings and nature; in it, their own activity mediates, regulates, and controls their metabolizing of nature. When human beings work with materials found in nature, they are act- ing as natural forces. They set in motion the natural powers that belong to their bodies—arms and legs, head and hands—in order to appropriate natural materials in forms in which such materials serve human life. In applying this movement to the natural world around them, human beings alter it and at the same time alter their own nature. They cultivate the potential that slumbers in their nature and bring the play of its forces under their conscious control. We are not speaking of the earliest forms of labor, namely, instinctual and animal-like forms. When a worker arrives in the commodity market to sell his own labor-power, he is operating under conditions very far removed from those in which human labor hadn’t yet advanced past the instinctual form it had initially (in primordial times). Here we are presupposing a form of labor that human beings alone are capable of. Of course, spiders carry out operations that resemble a weav- er’s work, and bees produce honeycombs that would put some human builders to shame.i What separates the worst builder from the best bee is that before the builder creates a structure in wax, he creates it in his head. The end result of the labor process already exists when the process begins; it exists as an idea—as something a worker imagines. The worker doesn’t simply shape natural materials into a new form; he also realizes a goal in doing so: a conscious goal that functions as a law determining both the work he performs and how he performs it, and to which, moreover, he must subordinate his will. When the worker subordinates his will to his goal, this is no isolated act. The whole time he is working, he must orient his will toward the purpose of his labor. He must stay focused, in other words, while he also exerts himself physically. The less the worker is drawn to the substance of his labor and the activities it involves, and, in turn, the less he enjoys his labor as the free play of his physical and mental powers, the more he has to train his attention on his work.ii The basic components of the labor process are purposeful activity, or labor itself, and the object and means of labor. Human beings encounter the land (which, economically speaking, includes water) as the ready-made general object of their labor, since, with- out their help, it supplies their original necessities or means of subsistence.1¹ Anything where human labor merely breaks its connection to nature as a whole is an object of labor provided by nature: someone catches a fish and thus takes it out of its natural element, water; someone chops down a tree in a naturally occurring forest; someone removes ore from a vein in the earth; and so on. However, if an object of labor has been filtered, so to speak, through previous labor, we call it raw material—for example, the ore already broken loose, which is now ready to be washed. Raw material is always an object of labor. But not all objects of labor are raw material. An object of labor begins to count as raw material only after human labor has changed it in some way. A means of labor is a thing or group of things that a worker puts between himself and the object of his labor. These things serve as conduits for his activity, conveying his labor to its object. He makes use of their mechanical, physical, and chemical properties, wielding them as means of power in order to purposefully alter other things. 2² With the exception of a ready-made means of subsistence that a person gathers using only his own body as his means of labor, such as fruits, the first thing a worker takes hold of is a means of labor, not an object of labor. Thus the natu- ral world itself comes to function as an organ in the worker’s activity, an organ with which he supplements the organs of his own body.iii He thereby enlarges his natural stature, despite what the Bible says. iv Just as the land is the worker’s original pantry, so it is also his first toolbox. It supplies the stones, for example, that he throws and uses to grind, press, cut, and so on. The land itself is a means of labor, yet a whole series of other means of labor have to be invented, and labor-power has to reach a relatively advanced stage, before the land can serve as a means of agricultural labor.3³ The moment the labor process starts to develop beyond its initial form, it requires means of labor that have been crafted by labor. We find tools and weapons made from stones in the oldest human dwellings. When human history was in its earliest stages, domesticated animals counted among the primary means of labor— i.e., animals that had been acted upon by labor or bred for particular purposes. So did stones, wood, bones, and shells that had been modified by purposeful human activity. 4⁴ Although some ani- mals create and use means of labor, albeit in very rudimentary ways, these activities are characteristic of a labor process that only human beings can carry out. Hence Franklin defines the human being as “a toolmaking ani- mal.” The remains of means of labor are as impor tant for understand- ing past economic formations of society as the remains of bones are for understanding extinct species of animals. The distinguishing feature of an economic epoch isn’t which things are made, but rather how things are made: which means of labor are used. 5⁵ Means of labor aren’t simply yardsticks that tell us how far human labor-power has advanced; they also reflect the social conditions under which labor is performed. Mechanical means of labor—taking them all together, let’s call them the skeletal and muscular system of production—have characteristics that say much more about a given epoch of production than means of labor that merely act as containers for objects of labor do—let’s call these the vascular system of production. The vascular system is made up of pipes, barrels, baskets, pitchers, and so on. It began to play a significant role only when chemical- based production processes emerged.6⁶ If we consider the means of the labor process more broadly, we can include not only all the things that mediate how labor acts upon its objects and therefore serve as conduits for human activity in one way or another, but also all the things that the labor process fundamentally requires. These things don’t enter into the labor process directly; without them, however, it either can’t take place at all or can’t run its full course. Here, too, the land itself is a general means of labor, for it supplies the worker with the very ground beneath his feet (or locus standi) and his labor process with its “field of employment.” Many such means of labor are mediated by pre- vious labor, including workshops, canals, roads, and so on. So in the labor process, human beings use means of labor to alter an object of labor, working from the start with a specific purpose in mind. The process vanishes in the product. Its product is a use-value, a piece of natural material whose form has been changed to make it suitable for sat- isfying human wants or needs. Labor is now bound up with its object. It has become objectified, while its object has been modified by labor. What appeared on the worker’s side in the form of restless activity now appears on the product’s side as a characteristic at rest—that is, now it appears in the form of being. A worker spins, and his product is something spun. When one views the whole labor process from the standpoint of its result—namely, its product—the means of labor and the object of labor appear as means of production, 7⁷ while the labor appears as productive labor. 8⁸ As some use-values or products are emerging from the labor process, others, the products of earlier labor pro cesses, enter into the process. The same use-value that was produced by labor later serves different labor as a means of production. The labor process doesn’t simply create products, then; it also requires them. Nearly all branches of industry apply labor to objects of labor that are raw material—in other words, objects that have already been filtered through previous labor and are thus themselves products of labor. The exceptions are the extractive industries, which find their objects of labor ready-made in nature: mining, hunting, fishing, and so on (farming counts only insofar as it begins by breaking up virgin soil). Seed used in agricul- ture, for example, is raw material. We tend to see plants and animals as natural products, but they aren’t, and neither were they produced by last year’s labor. Rather, as they exist today, plants and animals are products that took shape by being continuously transformed over many generations in a process controlled by human beings and mediated by their labor. But the vast majority of means of labor display such obvious signs of having been mediated by previous labor that even the most superficial observer won’t miss them. Raw material can constitute a product’s main substance, or it can play an auxiliary part when a product is made. Auxiliary raw material is consumed by the means of labor—for example, coal consumed by steam engines, oil consumed by wheels, or hay consumed by horses. It can also be added to the primary raw material in order to change the latter’s physi- cal constitution—for example, chlorine added to unbleached linen, coal added to iron, or dye added to wool. Or, auxiliary raw material can serve to facilitate the labor process, as it does where it is used to light and heat the workplace. The difference between primary and auxiliary raw material becomes blurry in chemical compounds, since none of the raw materials that go into them reappears as the product’s main substance. 9⁹ Because things have many properties, and can be put to use in differ- ent ways, one and the same product can function as raw material in very different processes of labor. Grain serves millers, starch manufacturers, distillers, and cattle breeders as raw material. In fact, grain as seed func- tions as the raw material needed to produce itself: grain. Similarly, mining both yields coal as its product and needs coal as a means of production. One and the same product can also function as both a means of labor and raw material in a single process of labor. This is the case where cattle are fattened: the cattle that workers apply their labor to as raw material also function as a means of producing manure. Some products that are ready to be consumed outside the labor process can be used as raw material for making other products, as grapes are used as the raw material for wine. On the other hand, human labor also turns out products in forms where they can serve only as raw material. Raw material in this state is called semimanufactured; “graduated manufacture” would be a better term and would apply to cotton, string, yarn, and so on. Although already a product, the original form of this raw material may have to keep changing as it goes through a series of further labor processes, functioning anew as raw material in each one, until it comes out of the final process as a finished means of subsistence or means of labor. We should be able to see that how a use-value appears at a given moment—whether as raw material, a means of labor, or a product— depends entirely on its specific function in the labor process, on its posi- tion there. As its position changes, so do its characteristics. When a product is put into new labor pro cesses as a means of produc- tion, it loses its character as a product. Now it functions only as an objec- tive factor, as a thing that aids living labor. A spinner treats the spindle merely as the means for his spinning and flax merely as the object of his labor. He needs them, of course. A person can’t spin without both mate- rial to spin and a spindle: the material and the spindle have to be present before he can start spinning. What doesn’t matter for this process is that flax and the spindle are the products of previous labor, just as for the pur- pose of eating, it doesn’t matter that bread is the product of the combined previous labor of farmers, millers, bakers, and so on. However, when the means of production in the labor process fail, their character as previous labor is keenly felt. A knife that doesn’t cut, yarn that constantly comes apart—these things make it hard not to think of cutler A and spinner B. But when we look at products that are working well, we don’t see that their useful characteristics were brought about by previous labor: this process dis appears in such cases. A machine that doesn’t play a part in the labor process is useless. Not only that, what isn’t used will succumb to the destructive force of nature’s metabolizing. Iron rusts; wood rots. Yarn that no one weaves or knits with becomes spoiled cotton. Living labor must take hold of these things, wake them from the dead, and transform them from potential use-values into actual use-values that satisfy wants and needs. Kissed by labor’s flames, these use-values are appropriated by labor as its own bodies, animated by it in the labor process so that they perform the functions, the work, they were made for; they are of course consumed, but they are consumed with a purpose. They become the elements that constitute new use-values— i.e., new products that count among the means of subsistence and satisfy individual wants and needs, or that are brought into new labor processes, where they serve as means of production. So finished products don’t merely result from the labor process; they also make that process possi ble. At the same time, the only way to main- tain these products of past labor as use-values and realize them is to put them back into the labor process, where they make contact with living labor. Labor uses up its own material elements, its objects and its means, devouring them, in effect, and it is therefore a process in which things are consumed. This productive consumption differs from the way an indi- vidual consumes in that in the latter case, products are consumed as the living individual’s means of subsistence, while in the former one, they are consumed as labor’s means of subsistence, as the means through which an individual’s activated labor-power subsists. Individual consumption pro- duces the consumer himself; what results from productive consumption is a product that isn’t the consumer.v To the extent that labor’s means and object are themselves products of labor, labor consumes some products in order to create others—it con- sumes products when it makes them into the means of production for other products. Yet the labor process originally involved human beings applying labor to the land as they first found it, and just so, some of the means of production that are currently serving in the labor process are naturally occurring and don’t represent a connection between natural material and human labor. We have laid out the labor process in terms of its simple and abstract ele ments. Presented in this way, it is an activity whose purpose is to create new use-values, the appropriation of natural materials to satisfy human wants and needs, and what universally allows the human metabolizing of nature to take place—the eternal natural condition of human life, which is therefore independent of all the ways people live, or common to all social formations. And so we didn’t have to show the worker in the context of his relations with other workers. It sufficed to present the human being and his labor on the one side, and nature and its material on the other. But how wheat tastes doesn’t tell us who grew it, and looking at the labor process in this way tells us just as little about the actual conditions in which it is carried out: whether it runs its course under the slave overseer’s brutal whip or the capi tal ist’s watchful eye, whether it is Cincinnatus who completes a labor process by tilling his couple of jugera or a savage who does that by slaying wild beasts with a stone.10¹⁰,vi Let us return now to our capitalist in spe.vii We left him after he had purchased (in the commodity market) all the components required for the labor process: the objective components, namely, the means of pro- duction, and also the subjective factor, namely, labor-power. With a sharp and practiced eye, he selected all the means of production and types of labor- power that his particu lar undertaking needs, whether it’s spinning, manufacturing boots, or something else. Our capitalist then set about con- suming the commodity he had bought, labor-power. He had the worker, the bearer of the labor-power, consume the means of production with the labor he performed. Of course, the general nature of the labor process isn’t altered when the worker carries it out for a capitalist instead of for himself. Nor do workers start to make boots and spin yarn differently the moment a capi talist inserts himself into the labor process. The capi tal ist must ini- tially take labor-power as he finds it in the market, which means that he must also take labor itself as it is handed down from the time before cap- i talists. Only later can the subordination of labor to capital transform the mode of production. We will therefore examine that transformation later. The labor process exhibits only two characteristic features as the process by which a capi tal ist consumes labor- power. First, workers work under the supervision of a capitalist who owns their labor. The capitalist sees to it that this work is done properly and also that the means of production are used efficiently. Raw materials aren’t wasted and the instruments of labor are spared as much as possible, or worn down only to the extent that the labor itself requires them to be. Second, the product belongs to the capitalist, not the person who pro- duces it most directly: the worker. When a capitalist pays what a day of labor- power is worth, he owns the use of the labor-power for a day, just as he would the use of any other commodity he rented for a day, say, a horse. The use of a commodity belongs to the person who’s bought the commodity, and when the owner of the labor-power gives his labor to its buyer, he is merely giving the buyer the use-value he has bought. From the moment the worker enters the capitalist’s workshop, the capitalist owns the use-value of his labor-power— or, in other words, the use of it, namely, labor. Having bought labor-power, the capitalist can incorporate labor as a live, fermenting agent into the dead components—also owned by him—that go into the product. From the capi- talist’s standpoint, the labor process is merely the consuming of a commod- ity that he’s bought, labor-power, although he can consume this commodity only when he provides it with some means of production. The labor process is a process that takes place between things a capitalist has bought, things he owns. A product that issues from this process therefore belongs to him as much as the product that results from the process of fermentation taking place in a wine cellar.11¹¹ The product, which is the capitalist’s property, is a use-value: yarn, boots, and so on. Although boots, for example, make social progress pos- sible (to some extent), and our capitalist is clearly a man of progress, he doesn’t manufacture boots for their own sake. Use-value is hardly the main thing—“qu’on aime pour lui-même”—in commodity production.viii Here use- values are produced only because and insofar as they are the material substrate, the bearers, of exchange-value. Our capitalist cares about two things: first, he wants to produce a use-value that has an exchange-value, i.e., an article made to be sold: a commodity. Second, he wants to produce a commodity whose value exceeds the combined value of the commodi- ties that go into producing it, namely, the means of production and the labor-power for which he has to advance good money in the commodity market. Our capitalist wants to produce a commodity and not merely a use-value; not merely use-value but also value; and not merely value but also surplus- value. Given this, and also that we are examining commodity production here, it should be obvious that up to this point, we have considered only one side of the process. Just as every commodity is a unity of use-value and value, its production process has to be a unity of two processes: the labor process and the process of creating value. Let’s now view the production process as being at the same time the process of creating value. We know that the value of every commodity is determined by the amount of labor materialized in its use-value—in other words, the amount of socially necessary labor-time that goes into producing it. This holds also for the finished product that our capitalist has in his hands at the end of the labor process. What we have to do first, then, is calculate the amount of labor objectified in his product. Suppose his product is yarn. The first thing that someone who wants to produce yarn needs is raw material, let’s say in this case 10 pounds of cotton. We don’t have to begin by investigating the cotton’s value, because our capitalist has bought it in the market at its full value, let’s say 10 shillings. The cotton’s price has already represented the labor it took to produce the cotton as general social labor. Now let’s assume as well that the amount of spindle used up in producing the yarn stands in for all the means of labor consumed, and that it has a value of 2 shillings. If it takes twenty-four hours of labor, i.e., two workdays, to produce an amount of gold worth 12 shillings, then two workdays are objectified in the yarn. We shouldn’t let ourselves be misled by the fact that the cotton has changed its form and the used-up part of the spindle has dis appeared. According to the general law of value, 10 pounds of yarn will be an equiv- alent for 10 pounds of cotton together with 1 /4 of a spindle if the value of 40 pounds of yarn = the value of 40 pounds of cotton + the value of a whole spindle—in other words, if the same amount of labor-time is required to produce both sides of this equation. In this case, the same amount of labor-time is represented in different things: the use-value “yarn” and the use-values “cotton” and “spindle.” Value doesn’t care whether it appears in yarn, a spindle, or cotton. The spindle and cotton become bound up with each other in the spinning process—they don’t just lie quietly side by side—but this doesn’t affect their value any more than converting them into their equivalent in yarn through an act of simple exchange would. The labor- time it takes to produce the cotton, the yarn’s raw material, constitutes part of the labor-time needed to produce the yarn, and this labor-time is therefore contained in the yarn. This is also true of the labor- time it takes to produce the part of spindle that has to be consumed in order for the cotton to be spun.12¹² For the purpose of considering the yarn’s value—i.e., the labor-time it takes to produce the yarn—we can regard as different, successive phases in one and the same labor process the different individual labor pro cesses that have to be carried out, separated by time and space, to make the cot- ton and the part of the spindle that is used up and, finally, to make yarn out of cotton and a spindle. All the labor contained in the yarn is past labor. It doesn’t matter at all that the labor-time that went into producing the yarn’s components is deeper in the past, that it is in the pluperfect, whereas the labor directly applied in the final process, the spinning, is in the perfect tense, nearer to the present. Let’s say that it takes a cer- tain quantity of labor, for example, 30 days, to produce a house. The total quantity of labor incorporated into the house is not affected by the fact that the labor performed on the last day goes into the product 29 days later than the labor done on the first day. Thus the labor-time contained in the material of labor and the means of labor can be regarded as though it were merely expended during a stage of the spinning process that precedes the labor added in the form of actual spinning. Expressed as a price of 12 shillings, the combined value of the means of production—the cotton and the spindle— thus figures as a component of the yarn’s value, in other words, the product’s value. But for this to happen, two conditions need to be met. First, the cotton and the spindle must actually serve to produce a use-value. In this case, they must be turned into yarn. It makes no difference to value if one par- ticu lar use-value acts as its bearer rather than another; what value needs is for some use-value to play that role. Second, it must be presupposed that the amount of labor-time spent doesn’t exceed the amount required under the given social conditions of production. So if under these conditions one pound of cotton is needed to spin one pound of yarn, then only one pound of the former can be consumed to produce a pound of the latter. The same holds for the spindle. The capitalist might dream of using gold spindles instead of iron ones, but the only labor that counts toward the yarn’s value is socially necessary labor—that is, the labor-time needed to produce iron spindles. We now know what part of the yarn’s value is made up by the means of production, the cotton and the spindle. It amounts to 12 shillings—in other words, the materialization of two days of labor. What we have to do next is examine the part of the yarn’s value that comes from the labor that the spinner bestows on the cotton. This means looking at his labor from a perspective very different from that of the labor process. What mattered there was the purposeful activity of turning cotton into yarn. The more effective the labor working toward this aim, the better the yarn will be, provided that all other conditions remain the same. The spinner’s labor was of a specific kind, different from other types of productive labor, and this difference came to light— subjectively and objectively—in the par ticular purpose of his labor, his particular mode of operation, the par ticular nature of his means of pro- duction, and the particular use-value of his product. The labor of spinning requires cotton and spindles, but these things won’t help anyone make grooved cannons. On the other hand, insofar as the spinner’s labor creates value, i.e., functions as a source of value, it is no different from the labor of a person who drills grooves or, to use examples closer to home, from the labor of the cotton farmer and the labor of the spindle maker realized in the yarn’s means of production. Only this identity of different forms of labor allows cotton farming, spindle making, and spinning to constitute merely quantitatively different parts of one total value, the yarn’s value. The quality of labor, its constitution or content, is no longer at issue here; all that matters now is its quantity. And all we have to do is calculate it. Let’s assume that spinning is simple labor, in other words, socially aver- age labor. Later we will see that it makes no difference if we assume that it isn’t. During the labor process, labor changes its form continuously, going from restless activity to simply being, from the form of movement to that of objecthood. At the end of an hour of labor, the physical movement of spinning is represented in a certain quantity of yarn; thus a certain quan- tity of labor, an hour of it, has been objectified in the cotton. We are using the general term “hour of labor,” because the labor of spinning counts for something here only as expended labor-power, and not as the specific labor of spinning. The process whereby cotton is transformed into yarn must consume only the socially necessary labor-time: this is now of decisive importance. If x pounds of cotton are made into y pounds of yarn in an hour under normal or average social conditions of production, then only a workday during which 12x pounds of cotton are turned into 12y pounds of yarn qualifies as a workday of twelve hours. For only socially necessary labor- time counts as labor- time that creates value. Both the raw material and the product look quite different than they did from the standpoint of the labor process. The raw material now counts only as something that absorbs a certain quantity of labor. As the raw material absorbs labor, it is in fact transformed into yarn, since the labor of spinning is being applied to it. But the product, the yarn, is now merely a yardstick that measures how much labor the cotton has absorbed. If 1 2 /3 pounds of cotton are spun in an hour—in other words, transformed into 1 2 /3 pounds of yarn, then 10 pounds of yarn indicate that a certain quantity of labor has been absorbed, namely, six hours. Definite quantities of products now represent only discrete masses of coagulated labor-time, while experience establishes how great or small these masses are. A given quantity of the product is now only the materialization of an hour of social labor, or two hours, or a day of it. It doesn’t matter that the labor is spinning, its material is cotton, and its product is yarn, just as it also doesn’t matter that as raw material, the object of labor is itself a product. If the worker were employed in a coal mine instead of as a spinner, then the object of his labor, coal, would be a naturally occurring material. Yet every definite quantity of coal that he broke loose from the earth would still represent a definite quantity of labor that has been absorbed into the object. We assumed that when the labor-power was bought, its daily value = 3 shillings, and that six hours of labor were embodied in this sum; so we assumed that it takes six hours of labor to produce the worker’s average daily means of subsistence. If our spinner turns 12 /3 pounds of cotton into 12 /3 pounds of yarn in an hour of labor,13¹³ then in six hours, he will turn 10 pounds of cotton into 10 pounds of yarn, and during the process of spin- ning, the cotton will absorb six hours of labor. The same amount of labor- time is represented in a quantity of gold worth 3 shillings, which means that the labor of spinning adds 3 shillings of value to the cotton. Let’s look at the total value of the product, namely, the 10 pounds of yarn. Two and a half days of labor have been objectified in these 10 pounds: the cotton and the used-up part of the spindle contain two days of labor, while half a day was absorbed during the actual spinning process. The same labor-time is represented in a quantity of gold worth 15 shillings. Fifteen shillings is therefore the price that corresponds to the value of 10 pounds of yarn, and 1s. 6d. is the appropriate price for a pound of yarn. Our capitalist can’t believe it. The product’s value merely equals the value of the capital he advanced. The value he advanced hasn’t valorized itself. It hasn’t created surplus-value; hence it hasn’t transformed money into capital. Fifteen shillings is the price of the 10 pounds of yarn, and in the commodity market our capitalist paid 15 shillings for the components that make up this product or, in other words, the factors of the labor process: 10 shillings for the cotton, 2 shillings for the part of the spindle consumed by labor, and 3 shillings for labor-power. It doesn’t help him that the yarn’s value is relatively large because its value is merely the sum of the cotton’s, the spindle’s, and the labor-power’s individual value, and surplus-value will never be generated when existing values are simply combined in this way.14¹⁴ Value is now concentrated in one thing, but it was also concentrated in the capitalist’s 15 shillings before he dispersed them by making three separate purchases. This result shouldn’t surprise us. If a pound of yarn has a value of 1s. 6d., then our capitalist would have to pay 15 shillings for 10 pounds of yarn in the commodity market. If a person buys a house to live in, the money he pays for it won’t increase just because he decides to have it built instead of purchasing his house ready-made. Neither way of acquiring a house causes what he has spent to grow. Our capitalist, who is well versed in vulgar political economy, will per- haps say that he advanced money in order to make more money. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as well have intended to make money without producing a thing.15¹⁵ He warns that he won’t be caught off guard again. From now on, he will buy his commod- ity ready-made in the market instead of producing it himself. But if all his capitalist brothers were to do that, where in the market would he find his commodities? And he can’t make a meal out of his money. He begins to sermonize. One should appreciate his abstinence. He could have frittered away his 15 shillings, but he spent them productively, using them to manu- facture yarn, and he has yarn now rather than pangs of conscience. What he must not do is amass wealth by simply taking it out of circulation: we have seen what such asceticism brings. Not only that, where there is nothing, the emperor has lost his rights, and whatever the merit of the capitalist’s act of renunciation may be, he can’t be compensated for it, because there is nothing to compensate him with.ix In this case, the process yields a product whose value merely equals the combined value of the commodities he put into it. Our capitalist might have found solace in the idea that virtue is its own reward, but instead he starts to raise his voice. The yarn is of no use to him—he made it in order to sell it. Thus he should sell it, or better yet, he should produce only things that satisfy his own wants and needs, a trusted therapy that MacCulloch, his personal doctor, has prescribed to help against the epidemic of overproduction. Our capitalist becomes defiant and defensive, rearing up on his hindquarters. He asks, Can a worker make commodities out of thin air simply by using his arms and legs? Didn’t he supply his worker with the material the worker needed to embody his labor and in which his labor is thus embodied? Given that penniless persons make up the vast majority of society, hasn’t our capitalist rendered an immeasurable service to society by providing the means of production—namely, the cotton and the spindle? Hasn’t he done the worker a great service, too, by giving him his means of subsistence? And shouldn’t he get something in return for this service? But hasn’t the worker in fact done our capitalist an equiva- lent service by turning the cotton and the spindle into yarn? Moreover, the notion of service is out of place here.16¹⁶ A service occurs when a use-value, whether a commodity or labor, exerts useful effects.17¹⁷ For the moment, how- ever, what matters is exchange-value. Our capitalist paid the worker value amounting to 3 shillings. The worker paid the capi tal ist back exactly the same quantity of value with the 3 shillings of value he added to the cotton: value for value. Our friend, who’d been cocky in the way of capital, suddenly takes on his worker’s modest demeanor. Hasn’t he worked, too? Hasn’t he performed the labor of overseeing, of managing, the spinner? Shouldn’t his work, too, generate value? The capitalist’s own “overlooker” and his man- ager shrug at this. In the meantime, he has begun to grin broadly: his old expression is already back. His whole speech was just a ploy. Such discus- sions don’t interest him at all. He will leave the lazy excuses and shallow arguments to the people who are paid to deliver them: professors of political economy. He is a practical man, and while he might not always know what he’s talking about elsewhere, when it comes to business, he knows what he’s doing. Let’s take a closer look at this. The labor-power’s daily value amounts to 3 shillings because half a day of labor is objectified in it—or, in other words, because it takes half a workday to produce that labor-power’s daily means of subsistence. But there’s a quantitative difference between the past labor embedded in the labor-power and the living labor that arises when the labor-power is used, between what it costs to maintain the labor-power daily and what its expenditure can generate daily. The first quantity deter- mines the labor-power’s exchange-value, while the second quantity con- stitutes its use-value. The fact that half a workday is required to maintain a worker for twenty-four hours hardly prevents someone from working a whole day. Thus labor-power’s value and its valorization during the labor process represent two different magnitudes. This difference in value doesn’t go unnoticed by our capitalist, who has his eye on it when he buys labor- power. Labor-power’s useful character, that it can make yarn or boots, is merely a conditio sine qua non, because only labor that is expended in a useful form creates value. The decisive factor, however, is labor-power’s spe- cial use-value: its ability to function as a source of value—of value greater than its own value. This is the specific service the capitalist expects it to perform, and here he is operating in accord with the eternal laws of com- modity exchange. The worker who sells his labor-power is merely doing what everyone who sells a commodity does: realizing the exchange-value of his commodity while disposing of its use-value. In order to have the one thing, he must part with the other. A person who has sold the use-value of his labor-power—that is, who has sold his labor—doesn’t own it any more than an oil merchant owns the use-value of oil he’s sold. The money owner pays what a day of labor-power is currently worth, and for a day the use of the labor-power belongs to him: he gets a day of labor. But it takes only a half a day of labor to maintain the labor-power for a day, whereas the labor-power can be activated throughout the entire workday, and the value created when the labor-power is consumed during the day is thus twice as large as the labor-power’s own daily value. This circumstance may be espe- cially fortunate for the person who buys the labor-power, yet it is hardly unfair to the person who sells it. Our cap i tal ist foresaw this casus, which makes him laugh.x Hence the worker finds the factory equipped with the means of production needed for a twelve-hour labor process, not one that lasts only six hours. If 10 pounds of cotton absorb six hours of labor and turn into 10 pounds of yarn, then 20 pounds of cotton will absorb twelve hours of labor and turn into 20 pounds of yarn. Let’s examine the product of this new, extended labor process. Five days of labor are now objectified in the 20 pounds of yarn: four days are objectified in the cotton and the part of the spindle that has to be consumed, and one day of labor is absorbed into the cotton as it is being spun. Expressed as a quantity of gold, five days of labor comes out to 30 shillings or £1 and 10s., which is also the price of the 20 pounds of yarn. A pound of yarn still costs 1s. 6d. But while the combined value of the commodities put into the labor process is 27 shillings, the yarn’s value is 30 shillings. The product’s value is now 1 /9 greater than the value that was advanced in order to produce it. In this way, 27 shillings have turned into 30, gaining a surplus-value of 3 shillings. The magic trick works at last. Money has been transformed into capital. Every aspect of the capi tal ist’s prob lem has been solved, and not a sin- gle law of commodity exchange has been violated. For equivalents have been exchanged. Acting as a buyer, the capitalist purchased the cotton, part of the spindle, and the labor-power, paying for each commodity at its full value. Next he did what everyone who buys commodities does: consume their use-value. The process in which the labor-power was con- sumed, which is also the commodity’s process of production, yielded 20 pounds of yarn—a product with a value of 30 shillings. Having bought commodities in the market, our capitalist now returns to the market to sell them. He sells one pound of yarn for 1s. 6d.—in other words, its exact value, not a penny more or less—yet the amount he takes out of circulation exceeds what he originally put into it by 3 shillings. This entire process—the trans- formation of his money into capital—takes place in the circulation sphere, yet also not in that sphere. In the circulation sphere, because when the capitalist buys labor-power in the commodity market, this is mediated by circulation. Not in the circulation sphere, because circulation merely initiates the process of valorization, which actually happens in the pro- duction sphere. And so “tout pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes pos si bles.” xi When the capitalist transforms money into the commodities that serve as the ingredients of a new product, or the components of the labor process, that is, when he incorporates living labor-power into their dead objecthood, he transforms value—past, objectified, dead labor— into capi- tal: self-valorizing value, a live monster that begins to “work” “as if its body were possessed by love.” xii To put this in terms of a comparison, the valorization process is noth- ing more than a process of creating value that has been extended past a certain point. If value is created only to the point where the value of the labor-power purchased by capital is replaced by a new equivalent, then what has occurred is simply the process of creating value. When the process runs past this point, it becomes the valorization process. Now let’s compare the process of creating value with the labor process. The latter is made up of actual labor that produces use-values. We view its movement qualitatively, focusing on how the specific labor that it involves is carried out—on its purpose and content. But the same labor process is represented differently in the context of the process of creating value, or only in quantitative terms. All that matters is how much time labor takes to perform its task, in other words, the length of the time during which labor-power is expended. Here, the various commodities that enter into the labor process don’t count for something as the functionally defined, mate- rial factors of labor-power that is activated for a particular purpose. They count for something only as definite quantities of objectified labor. Whether labor was already objectified in the means of production or has been freshly added by living labor-power, it counts for something only in terms of time. It amounts to x number of hours, days, and so on. Of course, labor counts for something here only insofar as the time spent producing a use-value is socially necessary. Several things follow from this. Labor-power must function under normal conditions. If the spinning machine has become a society’s dominant means of labor for spinning, one can’t hand a worker a spinning wheel. Nor can he be given material that constantly comes apart instead of standard-quality cotton. In both cases, he would need more than the socially necessary labor-time to produce a pound of yarn, and the extra time wouldn’t generate value or money. Yet whether the things needed for the labor process meet society’s standards depends on the capi tal ist, not the worker. Another requirement is the normal character of labor-power. Whatever area the owner of labor- power specializes in, he must display what is at the time the average level of skill, dexterity, and speed. Our capitalist does in fact buy labor-power of normal quality in the labor market. But this labor-power has to be expended with the usual degree of exertion, the socially average degree of intensity. Thus our capi tal ist monitors the worker’s effort anxiously, mak- ing sure that he doesn’t waste any time not working. The capitalist buys labor-power for a limited amount of time, and he insists on getting what is his. He won’t let anyone steal from him. Nor will he allow the raw mate- rial and means of labor he’s purchased to be consumed impractically—he has his own code pénal for such infractions, because squandered materials and means of labor represent quantities of objectified labor that have been expended without gain. They don’t count for something in— i.e., go into— the product of the value-creating process.18¹⁸ In analyzing the commodity, we distinguished between labor in its capacity as the producer of use-value and the same labor in its capacity as the producer of value. We see that this distinction returns here, only now it is represented as the difference between the two sides of the production process. As the unity of the labor process and the process of creating value, the production process is the process of producing commodities. As the unity of the labor process and the valorization process, it is the capitalist process of production—the cap i tal ist form of commodity production. As noted earlier, it doesn’t matter in the process of valorization whether the labor appropriated by the capitalist is simple, socially average labor or complex labor, which is highly specialized, weightier labor. Labor that counts as complex labor, as opposed to socially average labor, results from using labor-power whose training costs are higher. It takes more labor- time to produce such labor-power, which thus has more value than its simple counterpart. With its higher value, this labor-power is expressed as higher labor and, when active for the same amount of time, it will be objectified in a proportionally greater amount of value. But however dif- ferent the level of skill involved in spinning and, say, jewelry making, there is no qualitative difference between the labor with which the jeweler merely replaces the value of his own labor-power and the additional por- tion that creates surplus-value. Here as elsewhere, surplus-value is gener- ated only by producing a quantitative excess—i.e., extending the duration of the same labor process, yarn production in the one case and jewelry making in the other.19¹⁹ On the other hand, complex labor must be reduced to socially average labor in every process of creating value. For example, one day of complex labor must be reduced to x days of simple labor.20²⁰ The assumption we have been making, that the worker the capital employs is performing simple socially average labor, merely lets us avoid an unnecessary operation and simplifies our analy sis.