Karl Marx – from The Grundrisse (pp.
690-712)
The labor process. - Fixed capital.
Means of labor. Machine. - Fixed capital. Transposition of powers of labor into
powers of capital both in fixed and in circulating capital. - To what extent
fixed capital (machine) creates value. - Lauderdale. Machine presupposes a mass
of workers.
Capital which consumes itself in the
production process, or fixed capital, is the means of production in the strict sense. In a broader sense
the entire production process and each of its moments, such as circulation - as
regards its material side - is only a means of production for capital, for
which value alone is the end in itself. Regarded as a physical substance, the
raw material itself is a means of production for the product etc.
But the determination that the use
value of fixed capital is that which eats itself up in the production process
is identical to the proposition that it is used in this process only as a
means, and itself exists merely as an agency for the transformation of the raw
material into the product. As such a means of production, its use value can be that
it is merely the technological condition for the occurrence of the process (the
site where the production process proceeds), as with buildings etc., or that it
is a direct condition of the action of the means of production proper, like all
matières instrumentales. Both are in turn only the material presuppositions
for the production process generally, or for the employment and maintenance of
the means of labor. The latter, however, in the proper sense, serves only
within production and for production, and has no other use value.
Originally, when we examined the
development of value into capital, the labor process was simply included within
capital, and, as regards its physical conditions, its material presence,
capital appeared as the totality of the conditions of this process, and
correspondingly sorted itself out into certain qualitatively different parts, material of labor (this, not raw material, is the correct
expression of the concept), means
of labor and living labor. On
one side, capital was divided into these three elements in accordance with its
material composition; on the other, the labor
process (or the merging of these elements into
each other within the process) was their moving unity, the product their static
unity. In this form, the material elements - material of labor, means of labor
and living labor – appeared merely as the essential moments of the labor process
itself, which capital appropriates. But this material side - or, its character
as use value and as real process - did not at all coincide with its formal side.
In the latter,
(1)
the three elements in which it appears before the exchange with labor capacity,
before the real process, appeared merely as quantitatively different portions
of itself, as quantities of value of which it, itself, as sum, forms the unity.
The physical form, the use value, in which these different portions existed did
not in any way alter their formal identity from this side. As far as their
formal side was concerned, they appeared only as quantitative subdivisions of
capital;
(2) within the process itself, as
regards the form, the elements of labor and the two others were distinct only
in so far as the latter were specified as constant values, and the former as
value-positing. But as far as their distinctness as use values, their material
side was concerned, this fell entirely outside the capital's specific character
as form. Now, however, with the distinction between circulating capital (raw
material and product) and fixed
capital (means of labor), the distinctness of
the elements as use values is posited simultaneously as a distinction within
capital as capital, on its formal side. The relation between the factors, which
had been merely quantitative, now appears as a qualitative division within
capital itself, and as a determinant of its total movement (turnover).
Likewise, the material of labor and the product of labor, this neutral
precipitate of the labor process, are already, as raw material and product, materially
specified no longer as material and product of labor, but rather as the use
value of capital itself in different phases.
As long as the means of labor remains a
means of labor in the proper sense of the term, such as it is directly,
historically, adopted by capital and included in its realization process, it
undergoes a merely formal modification, by appearing now as a means of labor
not only in regard to its material side, but also at the same time as a
particular mode of the presence of capital, determined by its total process as fixed capital. But, once adopted into the production
process of capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses,
whose culmination is the machine,
or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most
adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by
an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of
numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are
cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery
as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means
of labor, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to
capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production
process of capital, the direct means of labor, is superseded by a form posited
by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as
the individual worker's means of labor. Its distinguishing characteristic is
not in the least, as with the means of labor, to transmit the worker's activity
to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely
transmits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the raw material -
supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument,
which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength,
and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the
machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself
the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it;
and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières
instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to
keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere
abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the
movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the
inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as
an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts
upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine
itself. The appropriation of living labor by objectified labor - of the power
or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself – which lies in
the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the
character of the production process itself, including its material elements and
its material motion. The production process has ceased to be a labor process in
the sense of a process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor
appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual
living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the
total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system,
whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active)
machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism.
In machinery, objectified labor confronts living labor within the labor process
itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of
living labor, is the form of capital.
The transformation of the means of labor
into machinery, and of living labor into a mere living accessory of this
machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labor
process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process
of capital. The increase of the productive force of labor and the greatest
possible negation of necessary labor is the necessary tendency of capital, as
we have seen. The transformation of the means of labor into machinery is the realization
of this tendency. In machinery, objectified labor materially confronts living labor
as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not
only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; the
relation of capital as value which appropriates valuecreating activity is, in
fixed capital existing as machinery, posited at the same time as the relation
of the use value of capital to the use value of labor capacity; further, the
value objectified in machinery appears as a presupposition against which the
value-creating power of the individual labor capacity is an infinitesimal,
vanishing magnitude; the production in enormous mass quantities which is
posited with machinery destroys every connection of the product with the direct
need of the producer, and hence with direct use value; it is already posited in
the form of the product's production and in the relations in which it is
produced that it is produced only as a conveyor of value, and its use value
only as condition to that end. In machinery, objectified labor itself appears
not only in the form of product or of the product employed as means of labor,
but in the form of the force of production itself. The development of the means
of labor into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the
historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labor into a form
adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general
productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as
opposed to labor, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically
of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the
production process as a means of production proper. Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate
form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, in so far as
capital's relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of
capital as such. In another respect, however,
in so far as fixed capital is condemned to an existence within the confines of a
specific use value, it does not correspond to the concept of capital, which, as
value, is indifferent to every specific form of use value, and can adopt or
shed any of them as equivalent incarnations. In this respect, as regards
capital's external relations, it is circulating
capital which appears as the adequate form of
capital, and not fixed capital.
Further, in so far as machinery
develops with the accumulation of society's science, of productive force generally,
general social labor presents itself not in labor but in capital. The
productive force of society is measured in fixed capital, exists
there in its objective form; and, inversely, the productive force of capital
grows with this general progress, which capital appropriates free of charge.
This is not the place to go into the development of machinery in detail; rather
only in its general aspect; in so far as the means of labor, as
a physical thing, loses its direct form, becomes fixed capital, and confronts the worker physically as capital. In machinery, knowledge appears as
alien, external to him; and living labor [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified
labor. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not
determined by [capital's] requirements.
NOTEBOOK VII
End of February, March. End
of May - Beginning of June 1858
The Chapter on Capital
(continuation)
The full development of capital,
therefore, takes place - or capital has posited the mode of production corresponding
to it - only when the means of labor has not only taken the economic form of fixed capital, but has also been suspended in its
immediate form, and when fixed
capital appears as a machine within the
production process, opposite labor; and the entire production process appears
as not subsumed under the direct skillfulness of the worker, but rather as the
technological application of science. [It is,] hence, the tendency of capital
to give production a scientific character; direct labor [is] reduced to a mere
moment of this process. As with the transformation of value into capital, so
does it appear in the further development of capital, that it presupposes a
certain given historical development of the productive forces on one side -
science too [is] among these productive forces - and, on the other, drives and
forces them further onwards.
Thus the quantitative extent and the
effectiveness (intensity) to which capital is developed as fixed capital
indicate the general degree to which capital is developed as capital, as power
over living labor, and to which it has conquered the production process as such.
Also, in the sense that it expresses the accumulation of objectified productive
forces, and likewise of objectified labor. However, while capital gives itself
its adequate form as use value within the production process only in the form
of machinery and other material manifestations of fixed capital, such as
railways etc. (to which we shall return later), this in no way means
that this use value - machinery as such - is capital, or that its existence as
machinery is identical with its existence as capital; any more than gold would
cease to have use value as gold if it were no longer money. Machinery does not lose its use value
as soon as it ceases to be capital. While machinery is the most appropriate
form of the use value of fixed capital, it does not at all follow that
therefore subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most
appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of
machinery.
To the degree that labor time - the
mere quantity of labor - is posited by capital as the sole determinant element,
to that degree does direct labor and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle
of production - of the creation of use values - and is reduced both
quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course,
indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labor,
technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive
force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side
– a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labor (although it
is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the
form dominating production.
While, then, in one respect the
transformation of the production process from the simple labor process into a
scientific process, which subjugates the forces of nature and compels them to
work in the service of human needs, appears as a quality of fixed capital in contrast to living labor; while
individual labor as such has ceased altogether to appear as productive, is
productive, rather, only in these common labours which subordinate the forces
of nature to themselves, and while this elevation of direct labor into social labor
appears as a reduction of individual labor to the level of helplessness in face
of the communality [Gemeinsamkeit] represented by and concentrated in
capital; so does it now appear, in another respect, as a quality of circulating capital, to maintain labor in one branch of production
by means of coexisting labor in another. In small-scale circulation,
capital advances the worker the wages which the latter exchanges for products
necessary for his consumption. The money he obtains has this power only because
others are working alongside him at the same time; and capital can give him
claims on alien labor, in the form of money, only because it has appropriated
his own labor. This exchange of one's own labor with alien labor appears here
not as mediated and determined by the simultaneous existence of the labor of
others, but rather by the advance which capital makes. The worker's ability to
engage in the exchange of substances necessary for his consumption during
production appears as due to an attribute of the part of circulating capital which is paid to the worker, and of
circulating capital generally. It appears not as an exchange of substances
between the simultaneous labor powers, but as the metabolism [Stoffwechsel] of capital; as the existence of
circulating capital. Thus all powers of labor are transposed into powers of
capital; the productive power of labor into fixed capital (posited as external
to labor and as existing independently of it (as object [sachlich]); and, in circulating capital, the
fact that the worker himself has created the conditions for the repetition of
his labor, and that the exchange of this, his labor, is mediated by the
co-existing labor of others, appears in such a way that capital gives him an
advance and posits the simultaneity of the
branches of labor. (These last two aspects actually belong to accumulation.)
Capital in the form of circulating capital posits itself as mediator between
the different workers.
Fixed capital, in its character as means of
production, whose most adequate form [is] machinery, produces value, i.e.
increases the value of the product, in only two respects: (1) in so far as it has value; i.e. is itself the product of labor,
a certain quantity of labor in objectified form; (2) in so far as it increases
the relation of surplus labor to necessary labor, by enabling labor, through an
increase of its productive power, to create a greater mass of the products
required for the maintenance of living labor capacity in a shorter time. It is
therefore a highly absurd bourgeois assertion that the worker shares with the
capitalist, because the latter, with fixed capital (which is, as far as that
goes, itself a product of labor, and of alien
labor merely appropriated by capital) makes labor
easier for him (rather, he robs it of all independence and attractive
character, by means of the machine), or makes his labor shorter. Capital
employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker to
work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time
as time which does not belong to him, to work longer for another. Through this
process, the amount of labor necessary for the production of a given object is
indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labor in
the maximum number of such objects. The first aspect is important, because
capital here - quite unintentionally - reduces human labor, expenditure of
energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labor,
and is the condition of its emancipation. From what has been said, it is clear
how absurd Lauderdale is when he wants to make fixed capital into an
independent source of value, independent of labor time. It is such a source
only in so far as it is itself objectified labor time, and in so far as it posits
surplus labor time.
The employment of machinery itself
historically presupposes - see above, Ravenstone – superfluous hands. Machinery
inserts itself to replace labor only where there is an overflow of labor
powers. Only in the imagination of economists does it leap to the aid of the
individual worker. It can be effective only with masses of workers, whose
concentration relative to capital is one of its historic presuppositions, as we
have seen. It enters not in order to replace labor power where this is lacking,
but rather in order to reduce massively available labor power to its necessary
measure. Machinery enters only where labor capacity is on hand in masses.
(Return to this.)
Lauderdale believes himself to have
made the great discovery that machinery does not increase the productive power
of labor, because it rather replaces the latter, or does what labor cannot do
with its own power. It belongs to the concept of capital that the increased
productive force of labor is posited rather as the increase of a force [Kraft] outside itself, and as labor's own
debilitation [Entkräftung].
The hand tool makes the worker
independent - posits him as proprietor. Machinery - as fixed capital - - posits
him as dependent, posits him as appropriated. This effect of machinery holds
only in so far as it is cast into the role of fixed capital, and this it is
only because the worker relates to it as wage-worker, and the active individual
generally, as mere worker.
Fixed capital and
circulating capital as two particular kinds of capital. Fixed capital and continuity of the
production process. – Machinery and living labor. (Business of inventing)
While, up to now, fixed capital and
circulating capital appeared merely as different passing aspects of capital,
they have now hardened into two particular modes of its existence, and fixed
capital appears separately alongside circulating capital. They are now two
particular kinds of capital. In so far as a capital is examined in a particular
branch of production, it appears as divided into these two portions, or splits
into these two kinds of capital in certain p[rop]ortions.
The division within the production
process, originally between means of labor and material of labor, and finally
product of labor, now appears as circulating capital (the last two) and fixed
capital [the first] 1. The split within capital
as regards its merely physical aspect has now entered into its form itself, and
appears as differentiating it.
From a viewpoint such as Lauderdale’s
etc., who would like to have capital as such, separately from labor, create value and hence also surplus value (or profit), fixed capital – namely
that whose physical
(1 The manuscript has: '... now appears as
circulating capital (the first two) and fixed capital').
presence
or use value is machinery – is the form which gives their superficial fallacies
still the greatest semblance of validity. The answer to them, e.g. in Labor Defended, [is] that the road-builder may share
[profits] with the road-user, but the ‘road’ itself cannot do so.’2
Circulating capital – presupposing that
it really passes through its different phases – brings about the decrease or
increase, the brevity or length of circulation time, the easier or more
troublesome completion of the different stages of circulation, a decrease of
the surplus value which could be created in a given period of time without
these interruptions – either because
the number of reproductions grows smaller, or
because the quantity of capital
continuously engaged in the production process is reduced. In both cases this is not a
reduction of the initial value, but rather a reduction of the rate of its growth.
From the moment, however, when fixed capital has developed to a certain extent
– and this extent, as we indicated, is the measure of the development of large
industry generally – hence fixed capital increases in proportion to the
development of large industry’s productive forces – it is itself the objectification
of these productive forces, as presupposed product – from this instant on,
every interruption of the production process acts as a direct reduction of
capital itself, of its initial value. The value of fixed capital is reproduced
only in so far as it is used up in the production process. Through disuse it
loses its use value without its value passing on to the product. Hence, the
greater the scale on which fixed capital develops, in the sense in which we
regard it here, the more does the continuity
of the production process or the
constant flow of reproduction become an externally compelling condition for the
mode of production founded on capital.
In machinery, the appropriation of
living labor by capital achieves a direct reality in this respect as well: It
is, firstly, the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws,
arising directly out of science, which enables the machine to perform the same labor
as that previously performed by the worker. However, the development of
machinery along this path occurs only when large industry has already reached a
higher stage, and all the sciences have been pressed into the service of
capital; and when, secondly, the available machinery itself already provides great
capabilities. Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science
to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits
it. But this is not the road along which machinery, by and large, arose, and
even less the road on which it progresses in detail. This road is, rather,
dissection [Analyse] – through the division of labor,
which gradually transforms the workers’ operations into more and more
mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their
places. (See under economy of power.) Thus, the specific mode of working here
appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form
of the machine, and his own labor capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers’
struggle against machinery. What was the living worker’s activity becomes the
activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labor by capital confronts
the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labor into itself – ‘as
though its body were by love possessed’.3
Contradiction between
the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines
etc.
The exchange of living labor for
objectified labor – i.e. the positing of social labor in the form of the
contradiction of capital and wage labor – is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its
presupposition is – and remains – the mass of direct labor time, the quantity
of labor employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But
to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes
to depend less on labor time and on the amount of labor employed than on the
power of the agencies set in motion during labor time, whose ‘powerful
effectiveness’ is
2 Hodgskin, Labor Defended, p. 16.
3 'als hätt es Lieb
im Leibe', Goethe, Faust, Pt I, Act 5, Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig.
itself in turn out of all proportion to
the direct labor time spent on their production, but depends rather on the
general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application
of this science to production. (The development of this science, especially
natural science, and all others with the latter, is itself in turn related to the
development of material production.) Agriculture, e.g., becomes merely the
application of the science of material metabolism, its regulation for the
greatest advantage of the entire body of society. Real wealth manifests itself,
rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion
between the labor time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance
between labor, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production
process it superintends. Labor no longer appears so much to be included within
the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as
watchman and regulator to the production process itself.
(What holds for machinery holds
likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human
intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the
process of nature, transformed into an industrial process,
as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it.
He steps to the side of the production
process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither
the direct human labor he himself performs, nor the time during which he works,
but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his
understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a
social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which
appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labor time, on
which the present wealth is based, appears
a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry
itself. As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great
well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and
hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the
development of general wealth, just as the non-labor of the few, for the development of the general
powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks
down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury
and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the
reduction of necessary labor time so as to posit surplus labor, but rather the
general reduction of the necessary labor of society to a minimum, which then
corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in
the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself
is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labor time to a
minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and
source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labor time in the necessary form so as to
increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure
as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary. On the one
side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of
social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of
wealth independent (relatively) of the labor time employed on it. On the other side,
it wants to use labor time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces
thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the
already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations – two
different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital
as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited
foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this
foundation sky-high. ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather
than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labor time’
(real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable
time outside that needed in direct
production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.) Nature builds no
machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc.
These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs
of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain,
created by the human hand; the
power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to
what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the
conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of
the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what
degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form
of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life
process.
Significance of the
development of fixed capital (for the development of capital generally). Relation
between the creation of fixed capital and circulating capital. Disposable time.
To create it, chief role of capital. Contradictory form of the same in capital.
– Productivity of labor and production of fixed capital. (The Source and
Remedy.) – Use and consume:
Economist. Durability of fixed capital
The development of fixed capital
indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally,
or of capital. The aim of production oriented directly
towards use value, as well as of that directly oriented towards exchange value,
is the product itself, destined for consumption. The part of production which
is oriented towards the production of fixed capital does not produce direct
objects of individual gratification, nor direct exchange values; at least not
directly realizable exchange values. Hence, only when a certain
degree of productivity has already been reached – so that a part of production
time is sufficient for immediate production – can an increasingly large part be
applied to the production of the means of production. This requires that society be able to
wait; that a large part of the wealth already created can be withdrawn both
from immediate consumption and from production for immediate consumption, in
order to employ this part for labor which is not immediately productive (within the material production process
itself). This requires a certain level of productivity and of relative
overabundance, and, more specifically, a level directly related to the
transformation of circulating capital into fixed capital. As the magnitude of relative surplus labor
depends on the productivity of necessary labor, so does the magnitude of labor
time – living as well as objectified – employed on the production of
fixed capital depend on the productivity of the labor time spent in the direct
production of products. Surplus population (from
this standpoint), as well as surplus
production, is a condition for this. That is; the
output of the time employed in direct production must be larger, relatively,
than is directly required for the reproduction of the capital employed in these
branches of industry. The smaller
the direct fruits borne by fixed capital, the less it intervenes in the direct production process, the greater must be this relative surplus population and surplus
production; thus, more to build railways, canals,
aqueducts, telegraphs etc. than to build the machinery directly active in the
direct production process. Hence – a subject to which we will return later – in
the constant under- and overproduction of modern industry – constant
fluctuations and convulsions arise from the disproportion, when sometimes too
little, then again too much circulating capital is transformed into fixed
capital.
<The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labor time for
society generally and each of its members (i.e.
room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence
those of society also), this creation of not-labor time appears in the stage of
capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labor time, free time, for a few. What
capital adds is that it increases the surplus labor time of the mass by all the
means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation
of surplus labor time; since value
directly its purpose, not
use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of
social disposable time, in order to reduce labor time for the whole society to
a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always,
on the one side, to create disposable time, on
the other, to convert it into surplus labor. If
it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and
then necessary labor is interrupted, because no surplus labor can be realized by capital. The more this contradiction develops,
the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can
no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labor, but that the mass
of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labor. Once they have
done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side,
necessary labor time will be measured by the needs of the social individual,
and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow
so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of
all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is
the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is
then not any longer, in any way, labor time, but rather disposable time. Labor time as the measure of
value posits wealth itself as founded on
poverty, and disposable time as existing in
and because of the antithesis to surplus labor time; or, the positing of an individual’s
entire time as labor time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker,
subsumption under labor. The
most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage
does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.>
‘If the entire labor of a country were
sufficient only to raise the support of the whole population, there would be no
surplus labor, consequently nothing that could be
allowed to accumulate as capital. If in one year the people raises enough for
the support of two years, one year’s consumption must perish, or for one year
men must cease from productive labor. But the possessors of [the] surplus produce or capital... employ people upon something not directly and
immediately productive, e.g.
in the erection of machinery. So it goes on.’ (The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, p. 4.)
<As the basis on which large
industry rests, the appropriation of alien labor time, ceases, with its development,
to make up or to create wealth, so does direct
labor as such cease to be the basis of production,
since, in one respect, it is transformed more into a supervisory and regulatory
activity; but then also because the product ceases to be the product of
isolated direct labor, and the combination
of social activity appears, rather, as
the producer. ‘As soon as the division of labor is developed, almost every
piece of work done by a single individual is a part of a whole, having no value or utility of itself.
There is nothing on which the
laborer can seize: this is my produce, this I will keep to myself.’
(Labor Defended, p. 25, 1, 2, XI.) In direct exchange,
individual direct labor appears as realized in a particular product or part of
the product, and its communal, social character – its character as objectification
of general labor and satisfaction of the general need – as posited through
exchange alone. In the production process of large-scale industry, by contrast,
just as the conquest of the forces of nature by the social intellect is the
precondition of the productive power of the means of labor as developed into
the automatic process, on one side, so, on the other, is the labor of the individual in
its direct presence posited as
suspended individual, i.e. as social, labor. Thus the other basis of this mode of
production falls away.>
The labor time employed in the
production of fixed capital relates to that employed in the production of
circulating capital, within the production process of capital itself, as does surplus labor time to necessary labor time. To the degree that
production aimed at the satisfaction of immediate need becomes more productive,
a greater part of production can be directed towards the need of production
itself, or the production of means of production. In so far as the production
of fixed capital, even in its physical aspect, is
directed immediately not towards the production of direct use values, or
towards the production of values required for the direct reproduction of
capital – i.e. those which themselves in turn represent use value in the
value-creation process – but rather towards the production of the means of
value creation, that is, not towards value as an immediate object, but rather
towards value creation, towards the means of realization, as an immediate
object of production – the production of value posited physically in the object
of production itself, as the aim of production, the objectification of
productive force, the value-producing power of capital – to that extent, it is
in the production of fixed capital that capital
posits itself us end-in-itself and
appears active as capital, to
a higher power than it does in the production of circulating capital. Hence, in this respect as well, the dimension
already possessed by fixed capital, which its production occupies within total
production, is the measuring rod of
the development of wealth founded on the mode of
production of capital.
‘The number of workers depends as much
on circulating capital as it depends on the quantity of products of co-existing labor,
which labourers are allowed to
consume.’ (Labor Defended, p. 20.)
In all the excerpts cited above from
various economists fixed capital is regarded as the part of capital which is
locked into the production process. ‘Floating capital is consumed; fixed
capital is merely used in the great process of production.’ (Economist, VI, 1.)4
This wrong, and holds only for the part of circulating capital which is itself
consumed by the fixed capital, the matières
instrumentales. The only thing consumed ‘in the great
process of production’, if this means the immediate production process, is fixed capital. Consumption within the production
process is, however, in fact use,
wearing-out.
Furthermore, the greater durability of fixed
capital must not be conceived as a purely
physical quality.
The iron and the wood which make up the
bed I sleep in, or the stones making up the house I live in, or the marble
statue which decorates a palace, are just as durable as iron and wood etc. used
for machinery. But durability is a condition for the instrument, the
means of production, not only on the technical ground that metals etc. are the
chief material of all machinery, but rather because the instrument is destined
to play the same role constantly in repeated processes of production. Its
durability as means of production is a required quality of its use value. The more
often it must be replaced, the costlier it is; the larger the part of capital
which would have to be spent on it uselessly. Its durability is its existence
as means of production. Its duration is an increase of its productive force.
With circulating capital, by contrast, in so far as it is not transformed into
fixed capital, durability is in no way connected with the act of production
itself and is therefore not a conceptually posited moment. The fact that among
the articles thrown into the consumption fund there are some which are in turn
characterized as fixed capital because they are consumed slowly, and
can be consumed by many individuals in series, is connected with further
determinations (renting rather than buying, interest etc.) with which we are
not yet here concerned.
‘Since the general introduction of
soulless mechanism in British manufactures, people have with rare exceptions
been treated as a secondary and subordinate machine, and far more attention has
been given to the perfection of the raw materials of wood and metals than to
those of body and spirit.’ (p. 31.
Robert Owen: Essays on the Formation of the
Human Character, 1840, London.)
Real saving – economy –
= saving of labor time = development of productive force. Suspension of the
contradiction between free time and labor time. – True conception of the
process of social production
<Real
economy – saving – consists of the saving of labor time (minimum (and
minimization) of production costs); but this saving identical with development
of the productive force. Hence in no way abstinence
from consumption, but rather the development of power, of
capabilities of production, and hence both of the capabilities as well as the
means of consumption. The capability to consume is a condition of consumption,
hence its primary means, and this capability is the development of an individual
potential, a force of production. The saving of labor time [is] equal to an
increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual,
which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labor as itself the
greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process
it can be regarded as the production of fixed
capital, this fixed capital being man himself.
It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labor time itself cannot remain
in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the
perspective of bourgeois economy. Labor cannot become play, as Fourier would
like,5 although it remains his great contribution
to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of
production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time – which
is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its
possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production
process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as
regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time,
practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially
creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become,
in whose
4 See p.688, n.77. [n.77 reads: The Economist, Vol. V, No. 219, 6 November 1847, p. 1271].
5 Fourier, Le Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire, Vol. VI, pp. 242-52.
head exists the accumulated knowledge
of society. For both, in so far as labor requires practical use of the hands
and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time exercise.
As the system of bourgeois economy has
developed for us only by degrees, so too its negation, which is its ultimate
result. We are still concerned now with the direct production process. When we
consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final
result of the process of social production always appears as the society
itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations.
Everything that has a fixed form, such
as the product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this
movement. The direct production process itself here appears only as a moment.
The conditions and objectifications of the process are themselves equally
moments of it, and its only subjects are the individuals, but individuals in
mutual relationships, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The
constant process of their own movement, in which they renew themselves even as
they renew the world of wealth they create.>
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