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If, thus far, Marx seemed like something of an angry accountant, meticulously adding up all the ways in which capitalism extracts value from workers, in Chapter 10, “The Working Day,” he succumbs almost entirely to his romantic, metaphorical and highly moral side. This was one of the most readable and enjoyable chapters of Capital so far.
We start with the assertion that that the value of labour power is based on the amount of labour-time necessary to produce it. How much does a worker need to live? $30 for room and board and a six pack of beer at the end of the day? Well, then, that is the minimum value of his labour power. Of course, the value of labour power is socially constructed. If we consider a telephone, or even the Internet, to be among the minimum requirements of survival for a normal worker – then his labour time must be sufficiently remunerated to procure those things.
In the working day, then, a given amount of time will be taken up by the worker creating the value of his own labour – earning his own keep, one could say. Everything above that is surplus labour, which is dedicated, of course, to creating surplus value… i.e. creating profit for The Man!
The central question at this juncture is how long should the working day extend beyond those hours required for generating the worker’s livelihood? If the worker can earn his keep in six hours, should then his working day be extended to 10 hours, 12 hours, or 15 hours so he can engage in surplus labour?
Marx employs a fitting metaphor to describe the capitalist’s disposition toward such questions:
Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. (p342)
Capital sucks labour like Dracula sucks blood from his victims
Ergo, the simple answer is that the capitalist would like the working day to be as long as possible. If your life source is “living labour” – in the same way that Dracula’s life source was blood – surely you’d depend on devouring as much of it as possible?
But the worker, selling his labour like any other commodity on the market, demands the full value of his sweat and toil, and knows that to consent to an 18-hour working day, ad infinitum, is to sign up for a premature death, which has the result of cheapening the one and only thing he has for sale. If a “normal worker” has 30 years of productive life, but the capitalist uses up that productive life in 10 years by over-working him, then this is a rotten deal for the worker.
David Harvey’s enlightening series of lectures again summarizes things nicely here. The NYU prof evokes these duelling “rights” – the right of the worker to extract maximum value for the labour that he is selling versus the right of the capitalist to extract maximum value out of the labour that he is buying. This is, in part, the essence of class struggle. Marx depicts this as an historical battle:
There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class. (p344)
And yet, still in historical mode, Marx reminds us that “capital did not invent surplus labour” (p344). Indeed, the ruling class had been claiming a good part of lowly workers’ labour time for centuries – even millennia. And let’s not forget the outright theft of labour power from workers that occurred under slavery. Rulers were exploiting workers before capitalism was even a glimmer in Adam Smith’s eye.
What differentiates the extraction of surplus labour under capitalism is that it’s potentially limitless, because the proceeds of surplus labour go toward the accumulation of money. (And money, is itself, open to nearly infinite accumulation.) Back when serfs were merely toiling for a day or two a week on the lord’s land, that toil was tied to creating use-values, and unlike money, use-values reach limits. How much corn, after all, could the lord ever eat or give to his family or trade? Only so much. But as is apparent every day in our globalized world, company profits know no bounds. Exxon routinely makes profits in the tens of billions of dollars. I don’t know if it’s even possible to contemplate exactly what the heck that kind of money can buy.
One thing is for sure – it can buy a whole lot of social power, which is, of course, as Marx points out frequently, one of money’s main advantages!
Another historical differentiation worth noting is that under capitalism, unlike in previous epochs, the capitalists’ ultimate goal is the extraction of surplus-value, which is not exactly the same as surplus labour. Unlike a lord surveying his serfs and figuring how many productive hours he can get out of them, a factory owner surveys his workers and his ultimate aim is figuring out how to get surplus-value out of them. Surplus labour is simply a means to that end.
Chapter 10 proceeds to relate many historical events in the pitched battle over the working day between factory owners and workers. These are clear, well-documented and factual accounts, drawn in many cases straight from the reports of factory inspectors in the employ of the British government, who were charged with investigating conditions of the labouring classes. What stands out, time and time again, is the ingenuity of the capitalist class for the “petty pilfering of minutes” or the “nibbling and cribbling at meal times.” So if the capitalist can get away with insisting on a worker taking his lunch while still working, he will do it. If the capitalist can argue that an hour mealtime occur before and/or after a 10-hour work day, rather than actually grant a break during the working day, he will do that too.
What also stands out in this historical account is the vital and ongoing role played by child labour. Whenever anyone points to a supposed Golden Era of capitalism, when markets were supposedly properly regulated and benefits trickled more equitably to all, that person had better try to explain why it was, in order for so much wealth to be generated by capitalism, that children as young as nine and ten had to be press-ganged into ten or twelve-hour work days in front of dangerous, noisy machines. There is ample evidence to suggest that many industries would have hardly flourished the way they did without child labour.
Bertrand Russell wrote that:
The industrial revolution caused unspeakable misery both in England and in America. … In the Lancashire cotton mills … children worked from 12 to 16 hours a day; they often began working at the age of six or seven. Children had to be beaten to keep them from falling asleep while at work; in spite of this, many failed to keep awake and were mutilated or killed. Parents had to submit to the infliction of these atrocities upon their children, because they themselves were in a desperate plight. Craftsmen had been thrown out of work by the machines; rural labourers were compelled to migrate to the towns by the Enclosure Acts, which used Parliament to make landowners richer by making peasants destitute; trade unions were illegal until 1824; the government employed agents provocateurs to try to get revolutionary sentiments out of wage-earners, who were then deported or hanged. Such was the first effect of machinery in England.
Happily, with the exception of the abomination of slavery – which actually provided the ruling class with an incentive to work people to death, safe in the knowledge that there was always a fresh crop of human victims to take the place of the slaves that had died – the working day has, for various reasons, found at least some sort of limits… usually. Those limits have in many cases been stipulated out of mere self-interest on behalf of the capitalists. It can be counterproductive to drive all your workers to work themselves to death. Also, the prospect of sun-starved and sleep-deprived children (and maybe also their parents) knowing nothing much of life except the sweat and grinding roar of the factory floor – well, that offends some people’s notions of a civilized society.
Governments, also, have stepped in to curb the excessive appetite of capital for labour because workers are generally on the frontlines of any warring that needs to be done. A famished, exhausted, half-dead labour force is generally easy prey on the battlefield. The Germans owed their victory over the French in 1870, in large part, to a better-rested, better-fed army.
Which leads nicely to this Salon article from just this year, which speculates thusly: if the American elite, in particular, no longer really needs the working class for, well, working (since most labour is outsourced to Asia), nor do they much need the working class for fighting (since the military is increasingly privatized and waged by foreign mercenaries) – well, why would the American elite have any need of ordinary Americans at all? Have capitalists in America achieved the ultimate victory: rendering their domestic working class obsolete?
Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.
Of course, the author exaggerates for satirical effect, but if current trends continue, it pays to speculate whether — at least in the west — the struggle over the working day will ultimately be concluded in a rather strange fashion: there will be no working day at all. Indeed, this is the plight already of far too many Americans. Or perhaps we’ll just continue to suffer the effects of excess population (Marx’s term) in proportion to the jobs available… Maybe we’ll return to the disgusting spectacle — immortalized in the film On the Waterfront — in which the capitalists throw tokens into a hungry horde of workers, each token being redeemable for a day’s labour, and workers will actually fight each other for the privilege of a day of backbreaking, exploitative employment.
Hey, it could happen! Under capitalism, be prepared to countenance any indignity against the the human soul.
On the road to Mount Mansfield, Vermont
After the kind of week that I would hope not to repeat any time soon, I needed some time to myself. So I hit the road yesterday and went back for a solo hike up Mount Mansfield, Vermont, the same peak that Matt and I conquered last week. The morning border crossing was easy as 1-2-3, as Michael Jackson would have said — if he’d braved the countryside in preference to his oxygen tent, that is — and then it was onwards into verdant and lovely Vermont. I reached the Underhill State Park by 10 a.m. and was on my hike shortly thereafter.
Old codgers slowly making their ascent. "Toot toot, old codgers," I said. "I'm coming through!"
With this climb, the fitness level of North Americans appeared to have bifurcated into two very different streams since just last week: the superfits and the supersloths. I even saw one group of men puffing on cigarettes while they moseyed along amiably. Then there was the woman of approximately forty years of age who was literally running along the trail; her walking poles striking the stony ground with the hectic rhythm of a speed addict on a snare drum.
Reaching the very pinnacle of Mount Mansfield (and realizing that Matt and I had been about 10 minutes short of it last weekend), I found a multitude of daytime amblers relaxing and picnicking, and, in many cases, loud-talking in Quebecois. I wanted to yell “Get off of my mountain!” because like every selfish, hippie nature-lover, I wanted that view to myself.
Oh well, I sighed, let’s see what that long ridge over there is all about. So I progressed along the ridge and discovered that it was primarily the preserve of cheats and sloths who had taken the gondola up to the mountain’s other flank. Here were entire families, grumbling ankle-biters included, who wanted all the glory — but none of the gruellingness — of conquering a mountain. My cynical side enjoyed watching a young girl berating her father. “You promised you’d bring food on our next hike… but you didn’t!” She was prostrate on her side, clutching her torso, as if she were about to die.
Yeah, I took a picture of my smug face at the top of a mountain that took only 90 minutes to climb. Gotta problem with that?
On the descent, there was one moment — one blissful moment — when the trail entirely cleared up, and I stopped, realizing that I could not hear a single word of conversation, nor even a squeak of a hiking boot or the click of a walking pole. In front of me, New England was laid out like a map. There was a profound and total silence. Aahh, that’s more like it. That’s worth its weight in gold. That is, in fact, priceless.
New England landscape, in all her green and rocky and pristine loveliness.
Keepin' it real in Villeray
I’ve never been any place that can rival Montreal for the sheer delight people take in simply being themselves, and Villeray is about the pinnacle of Montreal’s achievement in this regard. At first glance, it’s street after street of brick duplexes and triplexes with the standard winding staircases and rows of maple and Siberian elm and ash trees; very comfortable and completely unpretentious.
You notice just how at home people feel in their streets. They act as if the streets belong to everyone; as if everyone is equally welcome to them. With apparent effortlessness, they enjoy the streets but don’t impede others’ enjoyment.
I still get a kick out of the rough-looking skinny guy who walks up the street with the most exquisite classical music waltzing out from the radio that is either held in his hand or – when he’s not alone – mounted on the back of the wheelchair in which his wife sits, getting pushed along.
I’m a fan of our neighbourhood homeless guy who is always holding the door open for customers at Jean Coutu pharmacy. I think he’s been making money this way for years and years. He has a dodgy leg, a walking stick, a nicotine-stained beard and always a smile on his face.
Today as I walked home from the gym, a boisterous black kid came running down the sidewalk with his arms held out like he was an airplane. He ran a few metres and then turned around and passed me again. He announced this proudly. “I overtook you!” Then his significantly older brother came out of his duplex and walked to his car. “Au revoir, Vincent,” said the little boy to him. “Au revoir, mon petit frère,” said the brother.
On several of the lightposts on the same street, a mysterious message has been taped up – crafted, I think, by a child. It reads (spelling mistakes and all):
Le gorille
Les gorilles ons été menaser en 2008
Une famille d’humain ons adopté une gorille
Lui apprendre à conduire une voiture et autres choses
Les gorilles sont un des plus intelligent des animaux
The Gorilla
The gorillas were under threat in 2008
A human family adopted a gorilla
Taught him to drive a car and other things
Gorillas are among the most intelligent of animals
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Villeray
I enjoy the crazy guy who sits outside his apartment on Drolet and conducts all sides of a conversation, replete with peals of laughter, at high volume. Passersby just smile at him. He smiles right back.
Then there’s the guy who sits two blocks down on Berri, always on his porch, drinking beer, wine, or pastis for hours on end – any time of day except for the very earliest hours of the morning. He seems to know a lot of people. One time somebody passed by and said, “Not drinking yet?” To which the guy replied, “No – it’s still too early.” You can see him there Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and he doesn’t even take weekends off.
I marvel at the old women working in the patisserie on Jarry, two blocks west of St. Denis, who will take five minutes to wrap a three-dollar slice of cake, tying on a ribbon and bow unless you explicitly ask them not to. What a company policy – present every slice of cake like a present!
James' cat catches up with some well-deserved shut-eye.
I love the cat who looks like a bigger version of Banchi, sans tail. The cat doesn’t seem perturbed to have no tail. I also really get a kick out of the cats belonging to my neighbours Marie-Ève and James, all three of whom are fat. The white and grey one likes to climb up the stairs to my balcony and stare at Banchi. He used to slip through my open window and take a nap on my couch or on my bed, but I put a stop to that. Now I leave the window open just a sliver; a waif like Banchi can get through but old fatty can’t! I think that made him cross for a while but now he just accepts it. Just a few minutes ago he was asleep on the balcony with Banchi a few feet away keeping watch over the Villeray alleyway. There’s always something interesting going on there, whether it’s just the breeze rustling the grass, or bumble bees like Zeppelins coming into land, or the neighbours across the way coming out to sun themselves, or children hurtling past on bike or on foot, yelling and laughing.
A pack of bloodhounds and fox hunters head off in search of prey
Fox hunting was banned in England after furious debate in 2004. This wikipedia entry gives a pretty good overview of what fox hunting is all about. It’s a particularly British phenomenon and one that millions of young Brits have probably been sensitized to because of the novel, Tarka the Otter. In a nutshell, fox hunting consists of a lot of aristocrats and aspiring aristocrats, many of whom dress up in finery for the occasion, jumping on their trusty steeds and going off to hunt a fox, usually accompanied by bloodhounds, who are renowned for being able to track a scent for days.
The great debate over fox hunting still fresh in English minds, London rapper, Dizzee Rascal, used the imagery of fox hunting to great effect in his video for “Sirens.” The dogs in the video are not bloodhounds. What are they? Notwithstanding, it’s a pretty damn good video and a sign that rap is not entirely about bitches and ho’s and the never-ending pursuit of money and bling-bling accessories, etc. (Although Dizzee has sadly gone more in this direction of late, alas, a sign that fame corrupts absolutely?)
Dizzee Rascal – Sirens, posted with vodpod
Cyberspace can now claim a sizeable number of "hits"
So many great reading materials have been shared through Facebook and other online venues and even in person over the last year or two – a big shout-out to Andrew, Matt, Cyrus, especially – and I’ll bashfully admit to having found a few gems myself, I thought I’d try and find some of the ones I enjoyed the most and assemble them together here in this spiffy new section of my site, the Reading Room!
Here’s what I added today (and much more to come soon):
The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism, Henry Giroux. Truthout. July 12, 2010. Universities now mostly turn out compliant, indoctrinated workers to do the bidding of our neo-liberal overlords. What’s wrong with this picture?
Are the American People Obsolete? Michael Lind, Salon. July 27, 1010. The corporate elite in America are outsourcing jobs and even military responsibilities, leading this writer to ask the obvious question – are Americans obsolete? And should they all just emigrate in search of opportunities overseas?
The Quiet Coup, Simon Johnson. The Atlantic Magazine. May 2009. I cannot recommend this one highly enough. I see it cited all over the place and it’s not hard to see why. No less an authority than the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund – no radical leftist organization here! – writes in detail about how the United States is now an oligarchy.
A Marxist explanation for the current capitalist economic crisis. An interview with Robert Brenner. January 22, 2009. (Originally published in Hankyroh, my link is to the English translation at the International Journal of Socialist Renewal).
The Un-usable Past, Walter Benn Michaels. Baffler Magazine. December 16, 2009. A critique of the last few decades of American literature, which the writer argues has produced novels that fit the neo-liberal paradigm perfectly. Society is just individuals and families – really? Jonathan Franzen et al have the blinders on. A provocative piece to be sure!
Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable, Clay Shirky. December 2009. Just a regular ol’ blog post, but one that online chatterers interested in the future of news circulate frequently. It’s not so much that Shirky knows what will happen to news; it’s that he argues pretty persuasively that we’re undergoing an enormous paradigm shift equivalent in scope to the invention of the printing press.
First Do No Harm: Life and Death in the ICU, Andrew Ellner. n+1. May 16, 2006. There is so, so much worthwhile reading in n+1, quite possibly the best magazine ever made, so why single out this one? Because it sheds light on a subject that really doesn’t get much attention, at least not among early-to-mid thirties types like me: what happens when you die? This harrowing tale from a doctor discusses how technology conspires to prolong life as long as possible, even if the “treatment” sometimes feels like torture. An unsettling read.
The Problem With Music, Steve Albini. early 1990s sometime. An alternate title could be, “How record industry moguls screw over the artist at every step of the process, milking millions out of them and sharing mere pennies.”
What You’ve Done to my World, Mark Grief. n+1. June 22, 2009. Explains, among other things, why my favourite band, Fugazi, is essentially one of the most important musical acts of all time!
If you’d like to be generous enough to share an article with me that belongs in my reading room, email me at laurencemiall@gmail.com, or indeed, since you’re probably already my friend on Facebook, just keep the great links coming.
Happy reading!
These two exciting chapters in the Capital saga are called “Constant Capital and Variable Capital,” and “The Rate of Surplus-Value.” Marx isn’t one to pussy-foot around with flowery, fancy titles. But I certainly have pussy-footed around with my Marxist blogging project. A couple of weekends ago I buggered off to the Adirondacks, and then the weekend after that I buggered off to various places in Ontario and western New York State, and I stopped writing about Marx for a while. I wish I could say my mind now feels refreshed but it doesn’t. It feels like a hankie that somebody just blew their fat, snot-filled nostrils into.
Nevertheless, I’m going to try and understand the essence of these chapters. As is becoming increasingly apparent with Capital, Marx’s terms, most of which appear to be unique to him, or indeed, pioneered by him, are among the most important things the reader must grapple with. Thank Heavens then for David Harvey, bearded brilliance incarnate, whose lectures have helped me get this far.
Constant capital
In this section of Capital, Marx has plunged us right into the noisy, grimy epicentre of capitalism – the production process. Here we encounter two inputs, if you will, that are required for commodity production – constant capital and variable capital. Constant capital is composed of those inputs that transfer their value to the commodity without undergoing a change in value.
That part of capital… which is turned into means of production, i.e. the raw material, the auxiliary materials and the instruments of labour, does not undergo any quantitative alteration of value in the process of production. For this reason, I call it the constant part of capital… (p317)
But Marx has taken a very long and circuitous path to get to this definition and so we have to back up a bit and take some of those steps with him, I suppose, as arduous as it is. Since constant capital includes things such as raw materials and instruments of labour, under discussion here are inert objects. Since they are inert, unlike in some magical fantasy world, they cannot conspire to produce, say, a broomstick. No sir. They need a helping hand. Where does that helping hand come from?
Without us, a machine is just an inert thingamabob without any purpose. Sorry to hurt your feelings, machine!
From labour, that’s where.
As Marx has noted in previous chapters, labour comes in its general form – that is to say, abstract labour – and by this he means labour that creates value, and labour also comes in a rather specific form, that is to say, concrete labour, which goes toward producing a specific use-value. So if I toil away for a day whittling myself an elaborate spear with which to go hunting for wild boar, I have been engaged in concrete labour, because I now have an object with a use-value at the end of it. But if I dedicate the same day to sweating my face off in a capitalist’s factory, I don’t have a use-value for myself at the end of it. Nope! In this scenario I’ve joined that amorphous mass of abstract labour that is creating value. And that value, of course, is going to largely end up benefiting… the Man!
But labour gets a further bifurcation in Marx’s analysis. Not only does labour come in abstract and concrete varieties, furthermore, in its actualization, it achieves two things. It both preserves and creates value. When labourers come across the instruments of production – I’m going to imagine a printing press – they find inert objects that without their assistance won’t do much of anything except sit there in a dark room, forlorn and feeling all left out of the excitement of capitalism. Not much of value happening here! Particularly annoying to the capitalist is the knowledge that, because the printing press is itself the result of past labour and past constant capital inputs, he most likely had to pay good money for it, and so if no one uses that damn printing press, its value is being squandered.
What kind of weird machine is this?
So when labourers use instruments of labour, or indeed, raw materials, and “auxiliary materials,” (whatever the hell those are) these helpful folks are preserving the value of heretofore inert objects. The printing press hums into life, the plates are prepared, the ink readied – lo and behold, it churns out one million copies of The Secret for all the gullible shitmunchers of the world. Success! A marketable commodity…
Thank you, labour!
As noted already above, according to Marx, with constant capital, the value of various inputs (instruments of labour, raw material, etc.) are transferred to a new commodity without increasing their value. This is a bit of a headscratcher of an assertion, but now that I’ve scratched my scalp with confusion for a few weeks over it, I think I kind of get it. Let’s consider a modest heap of flour. We want to make bread. So the flour is added to water and eggs and yeast and whatever the hell else goes into bread (I’m not a baker, alas) and hey presto, bread comes out at the end of it. Now is the flour worth more after the production of bread than before? Did it increase its own value? Marx says it jolly well did not, and any capitalist that says otherwise is a damn liar. Similarly, did the oven increase its value in the baking of bread? Again, Marx says no. Indeed. As has been stated in previous chapters, a big machine like an oven imparts a portion of its overall value to the finished commodity (the bread, in this case) every time it has been pressed into use. If our oven bakes one million loaves of bread in its life and thereupon expires and goes to rest for all eternity on a scrap heap, we could say that for each loaf of bread, the oven has transferred one millionth of its total value. But at no time did the oven increase its value.
The transfer of value from constant capital to the commodity is…. constant! There is no alchemy at work here.
Variable capital
Unlike with constant capital, variable capital does indeed increase its value in the production process. Variable capital is, in a word, labour. Only labourers can reproduce more than the sum of their own value. Unlike a raw material such as flour, which, once it has gone to make up a loaf of bread is finished, its raison d’être expended, labour keeps on ticking, like the Energizer Bunny. Labour produces enough value to preserve itself (which is to say that sufficient shelter, food, drink are generated for the labourer’s sustenance) but labour then also creates an additional value – a surplus value – that goes to benefit someone else. A capitalist!
Not even machines – the instruments of labour – can do this. Hmmm. But we are constantly told that technology is so glorious and productive, right? Surely revolutions in the means of production can produce enormous increases of value in and of themselves? Didn’t we contemplate, decades ago, that in the future, it would be machines doing the work while we liberated workers could go write books, fornicate for much of the day, and eat Twinkies?
In so far as I follow Marx, technological revolutions achieve one thing: they increase the productivity of labour, and hence the amount of value that labour can create in a given time. He uses his perennial favourite example of spinning.
Let us assume that some invention enables the spinner to spin as much cotton in 6 hours as he was previously able to spin in 36 hours. His labour is now six times as productive as it was before. The product of 6 hours’ labour has increased six-fold, from 6 lb to 36 lb. (p309)
It also follows, as Marx points out, that each pound of cotton in the production process contains only one sixth of the value of labour that it possessed before the technological advancement. But does this mean that labour is losing its value? Not at all. On the contrary.
Let’s say 6lb of cotton sells for six bucks, then, of course, it follows then that 36 lbs sells for 36 bucks. Now let’s assume a Dickensian sort of world in which it only takes six bucks for the labourer to sustain himself for one day. This is the value he must produce in order to reproduce his own labour.
What’s the story before and after the revolutionary new spinning machine thingamabob? The capitalist heretofore invested $6 in the labourer for a day of work. He recouped that in six hours, by which time, the labourer had produced 6lb of cotton, which sold for $6. So in this scenario, the labourer only started to produce a surplus value for the capitalist in the last six hours of the work day (I’m leaving out the costs of raw materials and instruments of labour here because Marx, for important reasons, doesn’t factor them in either). And so the capitalist is left with a surplus-value of just… yep a measly $6! But after the new spinning wheel thingy, the labourer is six times more productive, so he can produce 6 lb of cotton in one hour. Whoa, what do you know – the labourer has just reproduced his own value (and the wages paid to him) in just the first hour of the day, and so for the remaining 11 hours of the day, he can create surplus value!
It goes without saying that this oversimplification has set aside the fact that inventing and manufacturing and paying for a more efficient spinning wheel incurs costs that must be factored into the above calculations. Nevertheless, you don’t have to be particularly cynical to acknowledge that investments in technological advances are always intended to benefit the capitalist, as illustrated – otherwise, why the heck would capitalists make these investments, huh?
They do it all the time!
Are you exploited?
Moving along to Chapter 9, we encounter some formulas and numbers that are rather dizzying. The point of all this mathematical wizardry is to calculate something that your average University of Chicago Econ 101 student is unlikely to ever contemplate: the rate of exploitation of the labourer. Effectively, this is what the rate of surplus-value is all about.
So as far as mathematical equations go, this is rather an exciting one!
He may look serene and peaceful now, but even this caveman had much of his day taken up with necessary labour time.
Marx says that the portion of the day that the labourer spends reproducing his own value (earning his room and board, so to speak) is necessary labour time. You can’t really escape from necessary labour time. Even if you were not in an office or a factory or what have you, a certain amount of toil would be necessary to your survival. Even cavemen had to exert themselves running after woolly mammoths.
In addition to the necessary-labour-time portion of the work day, of course, is the time dedicated to creating surplus value. Marx calls this part surplus labour time. It turns out that the rate of surplus value – a.k.a. the rate of exploitation – is simply a ratio of necessary labour time to surplus labour time. It can be expressed as surplus labour time over necessary labour time. If the labourer spends half his day working to reproduce his own value and the other half working to create surplus value, we have a fraction that is basically something like six hours over six hours. Which is 100%. So the rate of surplus value is 100%.
Marx takes pains to point out that the capital advanced in the form of raw materials and instruments of labour is to be totally ignored here. Such calculations only enter into the minds of those who are looking to calculate profit. So while the rate of surplus value might be 100%, the actual profit might well be something like 18% or 10% or what have you.
This is an important consideration, and one that Harvey lingers over as well. For the labourer, while he is gainfully employed, profit really doesn’t much matter. What does he care if he spends his whole day working his fingers to the bone to create a product that makes 1% profit or 20% profit? A worker can be exploited exorbitantly but the capitalist still doesn’t necessarily end up making a big profit; and opposite conditions can apply just as well – you can have a relatively cushy job and not be exploited all that much and the rate of profit can nevertheless be very high… We can see real life examples of this a-plenty; many low-profit products actually require an enormous amount of exploitation in order to exist at all. The meat industry is a prime example.
The meat industry
The Canadian Encycopedia’s excellent history of the meat processing industry in Canada notes this very fact:
Like other food and beverage sectors, the livestock processors have very low profit margins, usually between 1 and 2 percent of sales. From the first industrial plants of the late nineteenth century, their profitability has always depended on high throughput, large-scale production, and salvaging the full value of animal by-products to attain the sales volume required to earn an acceptable rate of return.
A 2005 landmark report on working conditions in this industry – Blood, Sweat and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants – gives ample evidence of what kind of working conditions this leads to.
Nearly every worker interviewed for this report bore physical signs of a serious injury suffered from working in a meat or poultry plant. Their accounts of life in the factories graphically explain those injuries. Automated lines carrying dead animals and their parts for disassembly move too fast for worker safety. Repeating thousands of cutting motions during each work shift puts enormous traumatic stress on workers’ hands, wrists, arms, shoulders and backs. They often work in close quarters creating additional dangers for themselves and coworkers. They often receive little training and are not always given the safety equipment they need. They are often forced to work long overtime hours under pain of dismissal if they refuse.
Meat and poultry industry employers set up the workplaces and practices that create these dangers, but they treat the resulting mayhem as a normal, natural part of the production process, not as what it is-repeated violations of international human rights standards.
Forgive me if this seems like a very long digression from Marx, but I think that it pays to contemplate this scenario for a while through a Marxist perspective. I am no expert on the meat industry, but I did live in Alberta not so long ago – and indeed, I worked in politics during the mad cow crisis – and at that time, meat packers were the folk heroes of the land, if you listened to Conservative politicians, that is. They were heroes who’d been devastated by the awful scourge of BSE (mad cow) and Albertans were told they had to rally around and support them by bailing out their industry with tax money and by eating all the damn beef they could. Of course, this was an easy line to sell in Alberta, where the cowboy culture has mythologized cattle ranchers and made them pop icons. And of course, real ranchers – many of them only small scale capitalists – did genuinely suffer because of the mad cow crisis. But the issue got very murky indeed when meat processors (not at all the same as ranchers), including companies such as Cargill and Lakeside (among the most nefarious companies on the planet) asked for the same taxpayer support and sympathy as the iconic cowboy hero. Upon further inspection, it turned out that these companies weren’t exactly heroes. Some, like Lakeside, were exploiting the hell out of Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Somali labourers in their Brooks packing plant.
According to yet another landmark report, Meatpacking, Refugees and the Transformation of Brooks, Alberta, “Meat processing workers in Alberta have the highest probability of a disabling injury or disease among all manufacturing employees in the province, with a rate more than double manufacturing’s.”
Meat is a capital-intensive business. You’ve got to set aside many acres of land to raise animals, not to mention many thousands more acres to grow feed for those animals, and you’ve got to ship them to plants, slaughter them, clean them, butcher them – all of which requires extensive and costly machinery – and at the end of the day, most North Americans still think a hamburger should be priced at under ten bucks – even under five bucks. So the battle for surplus value must be waged on two fronts. First, if profits are going to be low, you’re going to have to sell as much of this product as possible. This is why burger commercials are one of the most prevalent sights on television. Secondly, to make up for the high constant capital costs that go into meat processing, something in the production process will have to be squeezed for as much value as possible.
Labour is what ends up being squeezed. For the sake of 1 to 2 percent profit for the capitalist.
So what?
Exhausted, I wonder if I’ve obscured the point of these chapters entirely. Well, if nothing else, I think the point of all this is that the profit-motive merits a serious head scratch. Profit is itself an obscure and elusive notion – and it is, in fact, the capitalists who do most of the obscuring. Marx (and Harvey) implore us to not get bogged down by the capitalists’ arguments about profitability when it comes to considering the rate of exploitation. So Lakeside Packers probably only makes 1 or 2 percent profit out of their meat processing plants? So what? Cry me a river, that’s what Marx would say. We don’t feel sorry for you. Why should we feel sorry for an abstraction like a low profit margin? What matters is the wellbeing of all the workers in the plants and the lives they’re trying to build through their labour. Because it is such an excruciating and difficult job for them to create surplus value, their lives are more hellish than those of almost any workers in Canada. This industry probably shouldn’t exist at all – not in this form. People become obese and sluggish through the consumption of vastly excessive quantities of meat, their hearts get choked up, and they die prematurely. And another Somali loses a hand, or worse. Not to mention that animals suffer enormously throughout almost every stage of the production process.
Nassau W. Senior. From his pinched and cruel face, you can tell he's just the kind of bastard to side with the factory owners against the workers.
Marx exposes the red herring of profit in the argument that prevailed in his day – that is, the ludicrous argument, disseminated by the scholar Nassau W. Senior. This guy visited some English factories, got sold a faulty line of reasoning by factory owners, and came away with the idea that factory workers were only producing profit in the last hour of their working day – that is to say, the twelfth hour.
How the hell did the capitalists figure that? Well, as it turned out, the factory owners had argued that because of all the capital costs they’d invested in (machines, wages, transport, and doubtlessly also the grim factory buildings themselves) workers only started generating profit after they had paid back all of those initial investments. According to the factory owners, this only started to happen in the last hour of the day. They used this argument in their fight against any reduction in the length of the working day.
Of course, it was a totally spurious argument. The fact is, for the entirety of their workday, the labourers were transferring the value of all those constant capital investments to commodities that would be sold. Why should they have to work to recoup the cost of a bearing, a rivet, a lump of coal? Those values ended up in the finished goods which customers were prepared to pay for.
The factory owners were full of shit! It turned out that you could indeed reduce the working day from twelve hours. It could even be eight hours. And some people nowadays wonder if it should jolly well be reduced some more.
Exploitation and profit, therefore, are not directly correlated. Nevertheless, wherever there is a capitalist mode of production, there is a rate of exploitation, and Marx says it can be measured. And these calculations are likely to be a lot simpler than the capitalists let on, which is why you can’t really trust them with the math. The incentive to obscure the math is all on their side.
At the end of day, labourers just have to ask themselves, how much did I work for myself today versus how long did I work for the capitalist? At H&M, a T-shirt retails for $10. It is made in Bangladesh. How much does the average garment worker earn in Bangladesh? 25 cents an hour. If she works for ten hours a day, she’s earned $2.50.
Even if a Bangladeshi were to manufacture only one lousy stinkin’ T-shirt in an entire day, the rate of exploitation would still be exorbitant; given that she manufactures a great deal more than that per day, the rate is surely off the charts.
Now that’s Marxist math. And it’s truth-telling math, not the obscurantist math of crypto-fascist, neo-liberal economists.
