Recall, that in the previous chapters the “riddle” of how to make money out of money was solved through the purchase of labour-power: a commodity which has the quality of producing more labour than its reproduction requires.

The Labour Process

Transition

We have seen that capital must leave the sphere of circulation in order to valorise. We thus must study the laws of the sphere of production and if/how the capitalist must obey them and/or engages with them.

The use of labour-power is labour itself … The fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf does not alter the general character of that production. We shall therefore, in the first place, have to consider the labour process independently of any specific social formation.” (p. 283) “The labour process, …, is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-vales. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. (290)

The simple elements of the labour process are (1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the object on which that work is performed and (3) the instruments of that work. (284)

It will be handy later, to have these definitions written up plainly.

Object of labour:

the object on which that work is performed” (p.284) “All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connection with their environment are objects of labour spontaneously provided by nature. (284)

Raw materials:

If, on the other hand, the object of labour has, so to speak, been filtered through previous labour, we call it raw material … All raw material is an object of labour, but not all object of labour is a raw material. (284)

Instrument of labour:

An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the worker interposes between himself and the object of his labour and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity onto that object … In a wider sense we may include among the instruments of labour, …, all the objective conditions necessary for carrying on the labour process … include workshops, canals, roads, etc. (285)

[W]hether a use-value is to be regarded as a raw material as instrument of labour or as a product is determined entirely by its specific function in the labour process, by the position it occupies there: as its position changes, so do its determining characteristics. (289)

In the labour process therefore, man’s activity, via the instruments of labour, effects an alteration in the object of labour which was intended from the outset. The process is extinguished in the product. The product of the process is a use-value, a piece of natural material adapted to human needs by means of change in its form. Labour has become bound up in its object: labour has been objectified, the object has been worked on. What on the side of the worker appeared in the form of unrest now appears, on the side of the product, in the form of being, as a fixed, immobile characteristic. (287)

[I]t is by their imperfections that the means of production in any process bring to our attention their character as being the products of past labour … In a successful product, the role played by past labour in mediating its useful properties has been extinguished. (289)

Labour uses its material elements, its objects and its instruments. It consumes them, and is therefore a process of consumption. Such productive consumption is distinguished from individual consumption by this, that the latter uses up products as a means of subsistence for the living individual; the former, as a means of subsistence for labour, i.e. for the activity through which the living individual’s labour-power manifests itself. Thus, the product of individual consumption is the consumer itself; the result of productive consumption is a product distinct from the consumer.” (290)

Formal Subsumption

The general character of the labour process is evidently not changed by the fact that the worker works for the capitalist instead of for himself; moreover, the particular methods and operations employed in bootmaking and spinning are not immediately altered by the intervention of the capitalist. He must begin by taking the labour-power as he finds it in the market, and consequently he must be satisfied with the kind of labour which arose in a period when there were as yet no capitalists. The transformation of the mode of production itself which results from the subordination of labour to capital can only occur later on, and we shall therefore deal with it in a later chapter. (291)

The capitalist must obey the laws of the labour process, he must subordinate the accumulation of his capital on the rules that apply to production.

There are two specific characteristics of the labour process under these conditions:

1. the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs (291)

2. the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer.” (291) The separation of the means of production (instruments and objects of labour) and producers is condition and result of the labour process.

Ideologies

• Meaning of labour vs. alienation: critique of wage labour as being alienated, that it lost its meaning. But labour always has an objective outside of itself (the production of use-value). Radical version: labour is an end in itself.

• Work sucks: labour is a necessity and thus the critique that it sucks is not adequate. This critique also often confuses the conditions of wage labour with labour as such.

The Valorisation Process

Transition

His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not only just value, but also surplus-value. (293)

Formal subsumption is not all that is needed for the purpose for which labour-power is consumed to be realised. The labour process only becomes reality in capitalism as a means for the valorisation process.

Just as the commodity itself is a unity formed of use-value and value, so the process of production must be a unity, composed of the labour process and the process of creating value. (293)

Here, …, where we consider the labour of the spinner only in so far as it creates value, i.e. as a source of value, that labour differs in no respect from … the labour of the cotton-planter and the spindle-maker which is realized in the means of production of the yarn. It is solely by reason of this identity that cotton planting, spindle-making and spinning are capable of forming the component parts of one whole, namely the value of the yarn, differing only quantitatively from each other. Here we are no longer concerned with the quality, the character and the content of the labour, but merely with its quantity. (296)

We know that the value of each commodity is determined by the quantity of labour materialized in its use-value, by the labour-time socially necessary to produce it. This rule also holds good in the case of the product handed over to the capitalist as a result of the labour-process.” (293)

We should not let ourselves be misled by the circumstances that the cotton has changed its form and the worn-down portion of the spindle has entirely disappeared. … It is … a matter of indifference whether value appears in cotton, in a spindle or in yarn: its amount remains the same. The spindle and the cotton, instead of resting side by side, join together in the process, their forms are altered and they are turned in yarn; but their value is no more affected by this fact than it would be if they had been simply exchanged for their equivalent in yarn. The labour-time required for the production of the cotton, the raw material of the yarn, is part of the labour necessary to produce the yarn, and is therefore contained in the yarn … Hence in determining the value of the yarn, or the labour-time required for its production, all the special processes carried on at various times and in different places which were necessary, first to produce the cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle, and then with the cotton and the spindle to spin the yarn, may together be looked on as different and successive phases of the same labour process. All the labour contained in the yarn is past labourl and it is a matter of no importance that the labour expended to produce its constituent elements lies further back in the past than the labour expended on the final process, the spinning.” (294)

the raw material and the product now appear in quite a new light, very different from that in which we viewed them in the labour process pure and simple. Now the raw material merely serves to absorb a definite quantity of labour … They are now simply the material shape taken by a given number of hours or days of social labour. (296)

Implications for the means of production:

1. The cotton and the spindle must genuinely have served to produce the use-value …

2. the labour-time expended must not exceed what is necessary under the given social conditions of productions … If the capitalist has a foible for using golden spindles instead of steel ones, the only labour that counts for anything in the value of the yarn remains that which would be required to produce a steel spindle, because no more is necessary under the given social conditions. (295)

Implications for labour:

In the process we are now considering it is of extreme importance than no more time be consumed on the work of transforming the cotton into yarn than is necessary under the given social conditions. (296)

Labour Process and Value Productions as Valorisation Process

The whole point of this operation is that there is more money at the end than there was at the beginning.

The value of a day’s labour-power amounts to 3 shillings, because on our assumption half a day’s labour is objectified in that quantity of labour power, i.e. because the means of subsistence required every day for the production of labour-power costs half a day’s labour. But the past labour embodied in the labour-power and the living labour it can perform … are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter is its use-value … Therefore the value of labour-power and the value which that labour-power valorises in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference is what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power. (300)

If we now compare the process of creating value with the process of valorization, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point. (302)

The production process, considered as the unity of the labour process and the process of creating value, is the process of production of commodities; considered as the unity of the labour process and the process of valorization, it is the capitalist process of production, or the capitalist form of the production process. (304)