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INTRODUCTION TO MARXISM-LENINISMSECTION II: The Fundamentals of Marxist Economies“It is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society, i.e., capitalist, bourgeois society”, says Marx in the preface to Capital. Investigation into the relations of production in a given, historically defined society, in their inception, development and decline - such is the content of Marx’s economic doctrine. In capitalist society, production of commodities is predominant, and Marx’s analysis therefore begins with an analysis of the commodity. Lesson 1 – Surplus Value
TEXTS FOR DISCUSSION1. At a certain stage in development of commodity production money transforms into capital. The formula of commodity circulation was C-M-C (commodity – money - commodity) - i.e., the sale of one commodity for the purpose of buying another. The general formula of capital, on the contrary, is M-C-M - i.e., the purchase for the purpose of selling (at a profit). Marx calls the increase over the original value of the money put into circulation surplus value. … Indeed, it is this “growth” which transforms money into capital, as a special and historically determined social relation of production. Surplus value cannot arise out of commodity circulation, for the latter knows only the exchange of equivalents. Neither can it arise out of price increases, for the mutual losses and gains of buyers and sellers would equalize one another, whereas what we have here is not an individual phenomenon but a mass, average and social phenomenon. To obtain surplus value the money owner “must... find... in the market a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value” [Capital] - a commodity whose process of consumption is at the same time a process of the creation of value. Such a commodity exists - human labour power. Its consumption is labour, and labour creates value. The owner of money buys labour power at its value, which, like the value of every other commodity, is determined by the socially necessary labour time requisite for its production (i.e., cost of maintaining the worker and his family). Having bought enough labour power, the owner of money is entitled to use it, that is, to set it to work for a whole day - 12 hours, let us say. Yet, in the course of six hours (“necessary” labour time) the worker creates product sufficient to cover the cost of his own maintenance; in the course of the next six hours (“surplus” labour time), he creates “surplus” product, or surplus value, for which the capitalist does not pay.
2. There were two historical prerequisites for capital to arise: accumulation of certain sums of money in the hands of individuals under conditions of a relatively high level of development of community production in general; and existence of a worker who is “free” in a double sense: free of all constraint or restriction on the scale of his labour power, and free from the land and all means of production in general, a free and unattached labourer, a “proletarian”, who cannot subsist except by selling his labour power. There are two main ways of increasing surplus value: lengthening the working day (“absolute surplus value”) and reducing the necessary working day (“relative surplus value”)… Marx gives a most impressive picture of the struggle of the working class for a shorter working day and of interference by the state authority to lengthen the working day (from 14th to 17th century) and to reduce it (factory laws in the 19th century). … Analysing the production of relative surplus value, Marx investigates the three fundamental historical stages in capitalism’s increase of the productivity of labour: (1) simple co-operation; (2) the division of labour, and manufacture; (3) machinery and large-scale industry.
3. By speeding up the supplanting of workers by machinery and by creating wealth at one extreme and poverty at the other, the accumulation of capital also gives rise to … the “reserve army of labour”, a “relative surplus” of workers, or “capitalist overpopulation”, which assumes the most diverse forms and enables capital to expand production extremely rapidly. In conjunction with credit facilities and accumulation of capital in the form of means of production, this (also) is the key to understanding the crises of overproduction which occur periodically in capitalist countries … From the accumulation of capital under capitalism we should distinguish what is known as primitive accumulation: the forcible divorcement of the worker from the means of production, the driving of the peasant off the land, the stealing of communal lands … and the like.
4. Marx described the “historical tendency of capitalist accumulation” in the following celebrated words: “The expropriation of the immediate producers is accomplished with merciless vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property [of the peasant and handicraftsman], that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring-individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others.... That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market, and with this the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under, it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sound. The expropriators are expropriated.”
5. In agriculture, as in industry, capitalism transforms the process of production only at the price of the “martyrdom of the producer”. “The dispersion of rural labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance, while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil.... Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the labourer.”
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Further and Recommended ReadingValue (Marxist Internet Archive: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Terms) Surplus Value (Marxist Internet Archive: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Terms)
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