Obstacles to blogging continue. For now, briefly, thoughts on a passage from chapter 6 of v1 of Capital
By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description.
But in order that our owner of money may be able to find labour-power offered for sale as a commodity, various conditions must first be fulfilled. The exchange of commodities of itself implies no other relations of dependence than those which, result from its own nature. On this assumption, labour-power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity. In order that he may be able to do this, he must have it at his disposal, must be the untrammelled owner of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his person. He and the owner of money meet in the market, and deal with each other as on the basis of equal rights, with this difference alone, that one is buyer, the other seller; both, therefore, equal in the eyes of the law. The continuance of this relation demands that the owner of the labour-power should sell it only for a definite period, for if he were to sell it rump and stump, once for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. He must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and this he can only do by placing it at the disposal of the buyer temporarily, for a definite period of time. By this means alone can he avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it.
What catches my attention is what I take to be a claim about the conditions of sale of labor power under capitalism, that the sale occurs in conditions of formal freedom (the buyer and seller are legally equal, contracting parties; Marx will later state what he thinks of this sort of equality quite clearly with the quip “between equal right force decides,” the formal freedom/equality masks or is blind to substantive inequality and unfreedom and the transactions occuring in terms of formal freedom rest on relations of force in the present and acts of violence both in the past and recurring). There’s a few ways to read the point here.
1) Part of a definition of capitalism (sale of labor power must be formally free or it’s not capitalism)
2) Part of a definition of Marx’s object (_Capital 1_ takes as its primary object of criticism the formally free sale of labor power)
3) Part of a textual or rhetorical decision on Marx’s part (I’m thinking here of the point that I take NP to be making about Marx’s voice in her extended and excellent series of posts on the beginning of _Capital 1_ )
I know I’ve seen 1) argued in reference to Marx. This point is wrong. In Marx’s exposition the point is not established but asserted. Up til now Marx has defined capitalism as money begetting money: M-C-M’; spending money to buy commodities which are sold for more money (the dashes indicate exchanges: purchase/sale). Marx eventually reveals this to be a more extended series: M-C(lp)+C(mp)…P…C’-M’; money spent to buy 2 sorts of commodities, labor power (lp) and means of production (mp), which are combined when the worker’s labor power is set to work in production (P) to produce a new commodity (C’) which is sold for more than the total value advanced initially. That sum of money M’ is then re-invested, kicking off the circuit again. There is no need for the sale of labor power to be formally free for this circuit to work. Selling the bodies of laborers, as in the case of slaves, fits just as well into these series. None of this is an argument for viewing slavery as an always non- or pre-capitalist institution rather than as one mode of command over labor which can exist as part of capitalism.
If it’s point 2) then I have no objections other than that I think the point is clumsily made such that it provides a point of purchase for the mistaken argument above.
If it’s point 3), likewise.
I’m less patient w/ Marx’s textual strategy than NP. I like the book more as it goes on. I find the first 3 chapters annoying and confusing. It seems to me that Marx moves between registers without marking the shifts clearly and sometimes makes claims which are or can be read as being in more than one register at the same time. Temporal registers - what can be read as very long term historical claims and what can be read as more recent historical claims - as well as other conceptual registers - orders of time like I just mentioned, extra-temporal/transhistorical claims, claims which some people read as involving a philosophy of history, logical claims (”for any X if X is capitalism…”) and epistemological/perspectival claims (”viewed from the perspective of simple circulation …; viewed from the perspective of the circulation of money as capital….”). I find these claims are much more easily distinguished as the book goes on and I find certain sorts of claims seem to fall out or occur less often.
I thought he was drawing on the historical distinction between the labor, primarily serf, of feudalism, legally bound to land and master, and the dispossessed wage laborer.
Comment by Chuckie K — February 7, 2008 @ 2:09 pm
Hey Nate - I suspect we may be equally impatient with Marx’s textual strategy - there’s a very real sense in which my entire dissertation is a vast exercise in overcompensation against my deep impatience with this strategy
(One of my friends saw me yesterday in an argument with someone who was irritating me profoundly. Afterwards they said, essentially, “I could tell you were really pissed off, because you got very, very patient” ;-P) But hopefully others can benefit from my tendency to become “very very patient” with things that irritate me immensely… ;-P
I’m extremely tired today, so I can’t respond the way I’d like, but I wanted just quickly to toss out a fourth option, which is that Marx takes wage labour to be a sort of historical precondition. There’s a sense in which this links in with saying that wage labour is definitional - but maybe a subtle difference that might make Marx’s argument more palatable. It’s fairly clear from the text that Marx knows that forms of non-wage labour persist (and his various gestural comments on slavery talk about how this alters its character in a capitalist context), but the issue, I think, is that capitalism doesn’t exist - and, specifically, that the generalised form of the product doesn’t become the commodity form - until wage labour happens on the scene. This makes a certain logical sense, given the understanding of wage labour as “free” from the conditions of production - and, so, dependent on the availability of the conditions of production as commodities.
In addition, I think Marx also wants to argue that there are dimensions or “potentials” of capitalism that can’t be fully realised except through wage labour - and so there’s a sort of inbuilt temptation, within capitalism, to criticise other forms (like slavery) against the standpoint of wage labour. This doesn’t mean that wage labour is the only thing happening. There are a number of arguments that run through Capital, about forms that most “adequately” express potentials of capitalism, where these forms clearly co-exist with “less adequate” forms: Marx actually uses this co-existence to explain why certain phenomena that are equally historically “modern”, often come to be “ranked” or compared to one another as though some are historically prior to others - he argues, basically, that there’s an inbuilt risk of confusing the “adequacy” of a phenomenon, or how well a phenomenon expresses some particular tendency of capitalist accumulation, with some sort of historical progression. Interestingly, Marx often argues that the “less adequate” categories (when thought of from the standpoint of some specific kind of potential immanent to capitalism), are nevertheless *always going to be there* - because they are side effects of some other dimension of capitalist social relations. So he doesn’t necessarily use these notions of “adequacy” to talk about the inevitable phasing out of certain categories, in some linear sense, in favour of the more “adequate” categories. He’s more concerned, I think, with explaining certain stereotypical forms of perception, critique, protest, etc.
But Marx does treat the introduction of wage labour as a historical watershed. Certain things start happening, in practice, with the advent of wage labour, that don’t happen with simple commodity production in a precapitalist context - at least according to Marx. These things are ambivalent in character - both forms of domination, and also potentials for transformation. If I were less exhausted, I’d try to outline some of this argument
But what I don’t think is going on, is an argument that, at an immediate empirical level within the overarching capitalist context, that, say, goods produced by slave labour somehow fall “outside” capitalism: Marx makes explicit comments about the mobilisation of slave production, domestic family production, etc., for commodity production. I think the significance of wage labour is more at the level of the social “totality” - that the historical emergence of this institution is what generates the sort of self-expanding dynamics of this social form, which remain much more bounded when wage labour is not a primary means through which a significant proportion of the population obtains their means of subsistence. Marx also takes wage labour as something that capitalism tends to produce - and, in this sense, he takes it as the target of his critique. Again, though, I think this critique relates back more to how he understands the dynamic character of capitalism - to the weird contradiction by which increases in productivity don’t manage to make the whole system less dependent on the investment of human labour power - a result you might expect, if social wealth were tied to use values, rather than to “value”.
In terms of your point that #1 is never established in Marx: you might need to make a different - more elabourate - sort of critique, to cash out that claim. Marx’s argument (and this is one of these irritating things where the argument is only clear if the tacit Hegelian structure of the text is brought to the surface) is that the standpoint of simple commodity production and exchange is actually inadequate to explain M-C-M’, based on the categories and assumptions immanent to that standpoint. In the structure of the text, Marx brings out this impasse: surplus value (when understood as the expansion of the entire system, rather than as one capitalist screwing over another) is inexplicable from the standpoint of circulation. This impasse, in a nice Hegelian way, demonstrates how circulation must therefore presuppose something not posited within circulation. Marx uses this to introduce the category of capital - and that category is then bound together with wage labour as its historical precondition.
Surplus, of course, can be produced through slavery - Marx wouldn’t contest that. But the cutesy sort of immanent argument he’s making in the opening chapters begins from the presumptions of simple commodity production and exchange - presumptions that include the notion that equivalents are exchanged - in order to set up the puzzle of how equivalents could be exchanged, and yet somehow surplus come out the other side. His argument here is that somehow it has become historically plausible for this perception of circulation to arise - and so he begins there, unfolding from that perception evidence that something more must be happening even in circumstances where all conditions of this perception are met: so, even in circumstances in which commodity owners meet and exchange goods freely and at their full values, surplus is still able to happen.
In a sense, it’s not a “mystery” how surplus should happen under conditions of direct personal domination. The mystery is how this happens even in the “best case scenario” where we accept the assumption that we live in the best of all Benthamite worlds… The “payoff” of this line of argument is that it allows Marx to unfold a number of other presupposed categories that will open up very tacit historical dynamics that no one is setting out to produce - like the collective behaviours that result in the diminishing of the costs of reproduction of labour power over time, and therefore decrease the “necessary” labour in the working day. There are *simpler* explanations for surplus but, Marx would argue, those explanations won’t cast light on some of these more overarching long-term tendencies of the whole process. And it’s those overarching long-term tendencies that, for Marx, render the commodity the general form of the product…
Sorry this is so incoherent. I can’t express how tired I am at the moment…
Hopefully this isn’t a complete mess.
Comment by N Pepperell — February 8, 2008 @ 12:16 am
hi NP, Chuckie,
Thanks for the comments. Chuckie, the question for me is what Marx says distinguishes the two forms of labor. If the distinction is “one is more capitalist” or something like that, then I think Marx has failed to actually establish that distinction. Slaves are legally bound to their owners, waged laborers are not. Marx can be read as if he’s saying that waged labor is connected with capitalism and slave labor is connected with pre-capitalism (where “connected” means something like “is most appropriate to”), and yet he recognizes clearly that in some actually existing instances there is waged labor which is pre-capitalist and slave labor which is capitalist. This is part of the many things which confuse me when I read Marx on all this.
NP, I’m not sure about the claim that the commodity form is generalized only with waged labor. If that’s a historical claim (the two happened in tandem, the one facilitated the other, etc) then fine, but that (maybe) tells about actually existing capitalism, not capitalism as such or ideal-typical capitalism along the lines of what Marx is looking at - a sort of abstracted and perfect capitalism the flaws of which will be present in any actual capitalism. (It also seems to me that the slave like the waged laborer is also “free” from ownership of the means of production, so the logical point doesn’t convince me.)
I have the same response on waged labor being something capitalism tends to produce, as to whether that’s a historical claim or a claim about the social logic of the capitalist mode of production. If the latter then it’s not apparent to me that the claim is true, and if it is true I think it’s arguable that the tendency is complicated by other tendencies toward less formally free forms of labor as well.
I poked around more in v1 about this. Turns out almost all the references to Rome which occur in the index have to do with slavery. (I was looking for a half-remembered passage about historical change in Rome in comparison with more resent historical changes.) I stumbled across two interesting references (p183 and 400) to human beings serving as a form of currency, which I’ll have to remember to come back to later. I think part of Marx’s point may be in chapter 10, p345. He writes that when use value “predominates, surplus labor will be restricted by a more or less confined set of needs, and that now boundless thirst for surplus labour will arise from the character of production itself.” As I’ve blogged before, I’m not convinced that the use value vs exchange value makes sense in the terms Marx lays it out, so this passage strikes me as clumsy. I think the spirit of his point is right, though, as is the spirit of the use vs exchange distinction. Anyway, Marx goes on to say that because of the boundedness of the thirst for surplus labour “in antiquity over-work becomes frightful only when the aim is to obtain exchange-value in its independent monetary shape (…) The recognized form of over-work here is forced labour until death.” It seems to me that Marx is here describing precisely a case of forced labor being compatible with something like capitalism, though he might protest that it wasn’t all that like capitalism.
A few lines down Marx makes the distinction between ancient slavery and more recent slavery which becomes “drawn into a work market dominated by the capitalist mode of production” which means, as with the case of slavery in the U.S., the example Marx cites, slave labor comes to be about producing surplus value. As throughout, I’m not sure if the claim is a historical and empirical claim - “it happened this way” - or if it’s a “logic of the mode of production” kind of claim. Marx also distinguishes, I think falsely, between earlier U.S. slavery which for a time “preserved a moderately patriarchal character” in which “production was chiefly dedicated to the satisfaction of immediate local requirements.” I don’t know the historiography on slavery well enough to back this up with much evidence, but I would bet that the conditions of specifically _chattel_ slavery in the south meant that there was something like M-C-M’ happening (or at least M-C-C’ where the C’ serves something like money because its acquisition is not driven by needs in the way Marx things of production based on use values being need-driven) in that the initial expenditure of money to purchase slaves eventually led to greater wealth than the wealth advanced in the expenditure.
In case I’ve not been clear, I’m not trying to question the differences between what I think are obviously different modes of production and labor. Rather, what I’m becoming confused about is the degree to which Marx’s categories establish/describe/account for those differences. I think at least for many Marxists there’s a sort of intuitive sense of the difference which stands in for - and gives the false impression that they have - a solid and articulable distinction to make between the two. All of this makes me further annoyed that I had to return Williams’ _Capitalism and Slavery_ to the library before I read it - someone recalled it on me.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 9, 2008 @ 10:41 pm
Hey Nate - Yeah, I think these are all fair questions. I wasn’t sure, I think, when I wrote the first response whether you were asking whether the category of wage labour occupied that particular space in Marx’s analysis, if this makes sense? In other words, I think it’s clear enough that he sees this category as (he phrases it something like) “comprising a world’s history”, but I agree with you that it’s extremely slippery, in the text, what the… ontological status? of the category is: are we just talking about the historical situation that kickstarted this whole thing, are we talking about an intrinsic structural dimension without which capitalism can’t exist, etc. These issues are unclear, both on the “what the hell was Marx trying to say” level, and on the (more important) what would we agree with in a contemporary theory level.
On one hand, he clearly knows - and talks about - capitalism in some places actually leading to the reestablishment of feudal or slave-based or domestic forms of production that don’t meet the wage labour model. At the very least, there’s an argument operating in the exposition of the text, in which very abstract forms of compulsion - precisely because they are so abstract - are amenable to all sorts of local responses, and those local responses don’t always include wage labour. On the other hand, it probably can be defended historically across a macro scale that capitalism has tended to “produce” wage labour - but is this what Marx is really after, when he mentions the tendency to produce labour? etc.
I share your dissatisfaction with the way Marx tries to pick out the differences between capitalism and other organisations of production - the attempt to talk about production driven by use values, the specific way he tries to distinguish slavery and wage labour, distinctions between commodity production “at the fringes of communities” vs. throughout society, arguments about “quantity” becoming “quality”: to be honest, I’m not very happy with any of these approaches, and I can’t help but wonder whether Marx gets caught up in them because of a sort of residual “naive materialism” at times. These particular distinctions, as well, get taken up, in a far more one-sided and hypostatised way than Marx deploys them, in, say, a lot of Frankfurt School theory - and there, I think, their theoretical implications are worked out to the various undesirable conclusions… So I suspect I share an unease with you on this, and a sense that many of these formulations are clumsy and that something better might be possible. In a sense this is why I’ve tended, when speaking in my own voice, rather than ventrioloquising Marx, to talk about capitalism in terms of the enactment of a particular pattern of historical transformation: pattern exists; capitalism exists - the concrete mediations of capitalism can then change over time, but we can still know when we’re talking about the same object. Marx often gestures in this direction, but also gets caught up, I think, in the issue of historical forms that seem sort of capitalist (this has, of course, also been a research interest of mine, so I understand his preoccupation). In any event, I think I share similar concerns.
My current attempt to make generous sense of the category of wage labour is to say that, on one level, we are talking about a historical precondition - about the way this happened empirically. On another level, however, we aren’t only talking about this, but about a category adequate to enable certain immanent potentials of capitalism to be expressed. There are a number of categories that function this way in Capital - money as universal equivalent, for example, expresses certain tendencies more “perfectly” than other categories. Those other categories, however, continue to exist - empirically, but also in the “ideal” account in Capital - because the “imperfect” categories often continue to be implied in the operation of the “perfect” ones. (Marx doesn’t use this vocabulary - I’m trying, somewhat clumsily, to work out how to express this…) The argument, as I understand it, is that there are structural tendencies that drive toward the discovery and then the realisation of the more “adequate” categories, the categories that enable a more complete or adequate expression of certain structural potentials. So the “ideal” presentation of capitalism argues that the realisation of such categories is socially plausible (Marx might say “necessary”, but I like to gloss this in terms that make more explicit my probabilistic concept of how all this operates… ;-P). The “ideal” presentation of capitalism, however, is a non-linear one: tendencies find expression in one dimension of capitalism, run into impasses, and then, in flowing around those impasses, those same tendencies can drive the introduction or reintroduction of forms that don’t express those tendencies as “perfectly” as they might have been expressed even in the immediate past - and the non-linear cycle begins again.
I think when Marx goes more empirical - when he analyses actual events - it seems reasonably clear that this sort of concept is operating in the background. I don’t think he sees the process as linear, or that less “adequate” categories are understood to be superceded. What he doesn’t think we can shake, globally and in the long run, is the logical “ranking” of the categories - and therefore the intuitiveness with which something like “wage labour” is perceived as more “advanced” than something like “slavery” - even though the form of slavery we’re examining may be every bit as “modern” in its origins as the form of wage labour to which we’re comparing it. So I think there’s a tacit metatheory here about why we perceive certain practices and institutions as historical throwbacks, when they are nothing of the sort: we’re engaging in a form of socially plausible misrecognition, which confuses an internal logic of capitalism, which makes it possible to “rank” categories based on how well they express certain tendencies immanent to capitalism, with a historical development. This misrecognition then makes it more difficult for us to process the ways in which capitalism is itself generative of these forms that we mistakenly perceive as historical holdovers from earlier times.
At least, this is my generous read.
(I’ll have to apologise for this and my previous comment: I’m replying, because I’m very interested in the topic, but I’ve been a bit ill, and also distracted with really irritating things going on locally, and so I don’t think I’m replying in the best way, if this makes sense… Hopefully there’s something useful, and I’m not just sort of spreading my own distraction and incoherence around the net… ;-P It’s okay to tell me to go home and get over my cold, so that I can participate more rationally… ;-P)
Comment by N Pepperell — February 10, 2008 @ 12:45 am
Granting that you can have surplus value in slavery/feudalism (otherwise no castles or manor houses), and that slavery can exist in capitalized economies, waged labor does seem a far superior instrument (and I realize that it’s disgusting to deal so analytically with such phenomena) for the extraction of surplus value. I’d be willing at a later date to admit that I’m wrong here, but it seems that the the dialectic between ‘free’ labor and capital by way of the ‘industrial reserve army’ accomplishes in a much more efficient manner the reproduction of the working-class for which slavery requires overt violence. (I am, it should be said, all for acknowledging the degree to which such violence is ongoing and constitutive–that is, primitive accumulation as a continuous process, legal and political repression as a necessary part of capitalism–under the conditions of waged labor). So, I’m not sure that slavery on its own could support a large–that is, hegemonic–bourgeoisie, and hence allow for the shifts in political institutions during transition. Nor am I sure that the surpluses would be large enough to revolutionize the means of production.
Comment by Jasper — February 10, 2008 @ 10:06 pm
hi NP, Jasper,
Thanks to both of you. My obstacles continue so I’m going to have to be brief - I’m pretty sure (and very hopeful!) that this is going to be an ongoing conversation. I hope if I give you short shrift here that that doesn’t discourage that longer conversation from happening.
In short -
NP, I think we’re on the same page. I’m not as familiar with the Frankfurts as you are but it’s definitely other Marxists’ remarks on slavery that I have in mind here, driving my concerns. (I ran across a claim in an anthology of essays - a good anthology - called The Chattel Principle, I forget who the author was and all that but there was an aside in the middle of a smart and sophisticated historical essay about how such-and-such example was not a case of capitalism because it had slaves and not free waged laborers.)
Jasper, I probably agree with you. If you grant the first two points in the first line of your comment and your second parenthetical remark then that’s the bulk of what I’m concerned over and the rest is details and/or gravy (or frosting? take your pick
).
This may be a tangent, but maybe it’s another way to put the point - it seems to me that Marx’s methodological appeals to social averages is relevant here, in that he appeals to systemic tendencies and the like. I’m fine to say there’s a systemic tendency in the logic of the capitalist form of social relations, so to speak… that capitalism on average has a tendency to produce waged labor. I’d even be okay with saying there’s a tendency to encourage free waged labor and to discourage unfree labor. Those are at least in part empirical claims and I’m not qualified to make or to dispute them. Where my objection is to anything that is a serious (ie, not just rhetorical) claim that slavery is a historical throwback - in a sort of evolutionary sense, that we can leave it to the forward progress of history or the logical of capital to eliminate it - or to any claim against the first two points in your comment.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 10, 2008 @ 10:29 pm