3 Value and capital
3.1 Division of labour, exploitation and value
The concept of value cannot be grasped immediately.3 In order to explain value and its significance under capitalism, Marx departs from human labour in general. Labour is the process of transformation of given natural and social conditions in order to achieve predetermined outcomes, the goods and services necessary for social reproduction, that Marx calls use values:4
Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a con- dition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society;
it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.5
In every society the social labour power (the capacity to work of all indi- viduals, including their knowledge, ability and experience)6is a community Interpretations of Marx’s value theory 35
resource employed according to cultural, natural and technological con- straints.7 Labour is everywhere divided according to gender, age, lineage or class, and the product of social labour must be similarly divided. In addition to this, in most societies, groups or classes of non-producers live off transfers due to the exploitation of the producers.8
Class relations of exploitation are determined by the form of extraction of surplus labour from the direct producers (see section 3.2 and chapter 4).9 These relations include the structures and processes that compel the pro- ducers to produce more than they consume or control, and the mechanisms of appropriation of the surplus by the exploiters. Even when narrowly defined in purely economic terms exploitation is a totality, including several aspects of social life, among them the property relations, the distribution of labour, control over the production process, and the distribution of the output.
The defining characteristic of capitalism is the exploitation of the wage workers by the capitalists through the extraction of surplus value (see below).10In order to explain this mode of exploitation, Marx starts from its most abstract feature, the value relation. For Marx, the value relation and its grounding upon the social division of labour do not need to be demonstrated; they are indisputablefacts:
even if there were no chapter on “value” at all in my book, the analysis I give of the real relations would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation. The chatter about the need to prove the concept of value arises only from complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science. Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour . . . And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products.11 The value relation can be analysed at distinct levels. At a relatively abstract level, or in non-capitalist societies where commodity production and exchange are marginal, value is significant only as exchange value, a mental generalisation that expresses the rate of exchange of one commodity for another. In this case,
The “value-form”, whose final shape is the money-form, is completely without content. The category of exchange-value leads an “antediluvian existence”. One can find exchange-values in ancient Rome, in the Middle Ages and in capitalism; but different contents are hidden behind each of 36 Value and capital
these forms of exchange-value. Marx stresses that “exchange-value”
detached from the concrete relations under which it has arisen is an unreal abstraction, as exchange-value “can never exist except as an abstract, one-sided relation to an already given concrete and living whole”12
At this level of analysis, abstract labour is also a mental generalisation because, first, production aims primarily at the creation of specific use values, rather than the valorisation of capital.13Second, the labour markets are thin, highly fragmented and often absent.14Third, the division of labour across society and within the workplace remains relatively undeveloped.15 Fourth, the exchange values are highly dependent upon non-market relations, rather than being determined primarily by the forces of production and competition.16In this case, the labour process has few social determinations, products take the commodity form only if they find their way into exchange, and the abstraction of labour is contingent upon sale.
In contrast, in capitalist societies wage labour is the form of social labour, and the products, other assets and social relations generally have the commodity form. In these societies labour is essentially abstract, and exchange value is the form of expression of the value relation:
For Marx the value of a commodity expresses the particular historical form that the social character of labour has under capitalism . . . This suggests first, that the generalisation of the commodity form of human labour is quite specific to capitalism and that value as a concept of analysis is similarly so specific. Secondly, it suggests that value is not just a concept with a mental existence; it has a real existence, value relations being the particular form taken by capitalist social relations.17
The abstraction of labour and the commodification of the social product can be analysed at two levels. First, in production, wage workers are typically hired on the labour market and compelled to work in order to produce goods and services primarily for profit (surplus value) rather than need (use value), using commercially available inputs. Consequently, the products are commodities since their inception, and abstract labour predominates logically over concrete labour (see sections 1.1 and 2.2.1 and chapter 5).18 Second, the exchangeability of the products demonstrates, in the sphere of exchange, the substantive identity of all types of labour. Marx contrasts the determinations of labour in simple commodity exchange and in capitalism as follows:
what is it that forms the bond between the independent labours of the cattle-breeder, the tanner and the shoemaker? It is the fact that their respective products are commodities. What, on the other hand, characterizes the division of labour in manufacture? The fact that the Value and capital 37
specialized worker produces no commodities. It is only the common product of all the specialized workers that becomes a commodity . . . The division of labour within manufacture presupposes a concentration of the means of production in the hands of one capitalist; the division of labour within society presupposes a dispersion of those means among many independent producers of commodities . . . Division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, who are merely the members of a total mechanism which belongs to him. The division of labour within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition.19