understanding the capitalist production process according to Marx
some thoughts on marx's Capital
The Capitalist Production Process
According to Marx, the capitalist production process comprises two main processes: the labour process and the valorisation process. In fact, the unity of the labour and valorisation process is merely a mirror form of the one found in commodities themselves:
Just as the commodity itself is a unity formed of use-value and value, so the process of production must be a unity, composed of the labour process and the process of creating value.1
Labour Process + Valorisation Process = Capitalist Production Process
The labour process comprises the interaction between humans and nature in which humans mediate, regulate and control the metabolism between themselves and nature. Humans interact with the formally external world, using their bodies, including their brains, hands, legs, arms all in order to appropriate nature and adapt it to their own needs.2 At the end of each labour process3, humans are left with a product of their labour, a use-value, be it a useful object or service provided.
The labour process is a transhistorical feature of all human societies, regardless of their stage of development.4 It is the “everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence”, the “universal condition for metabolic interaction between man and nature” and thus common to all societies.5 It is thus an ontological premise of existence that human subjects must organize their metabolism socially through among other things, labour processes.
The ‘elements’ of the labour process according to Marx as as follows:6
Purposeful activity (work itself)
The object on which work is performed (objects of labour)
The instruments of work (means of production)
Its easy then to imagine the figure of a worker or group of workers engaging in the various different labour processes that are needed to realize the lives we are current living. The one point I want to delve deeper into is the question of purposeful activity.
During the labour process, the worker's labour constantly under goes a transformation, from the form of unrest [Unruhe] into that of being [Sein], from the form of motion [Bewegung] into that of objectivity [Gegenstiindlichkeit].7
What distinguishes human labour from the labour of other animals and robots is that humans are constantly bringing to life their own conceptions of how to transform the material world. Humans are always coming up with new way to produce things and new things to produce. A result emerges from the process of laboring which was conceived by humans prior to it, even if not exactly in the form of the final product.8
There is much more detail to delve into, such as how the labour process itself, despite being abstractly transhistorical, is subject to the development of past-societies and benefits from it in its current organization. However, I’ll leave that discussion for another time.
While the labor process is crucial, we all know the capitalist isn’t in the business of making useful products. They are not looking to merely produce value, but surplus-value, what is more concretely refered to as profit. As workers produce use-values, they also objectify their social labor in products, which gives them the quality of possesing value. It’s this general quality that gives their labor the capacity to be represented as part of the general labor of society as a whole:
Here, on the contrary, [to the labor process in general] where we consider the labour of the spinner only in so far as it creates value, i.e. is a source of value, that labour differs in no respect from the labour of the man who bores cannon, or (what concerns us more closely here) from the labour of the cotton-planter and the spindle-maker which is realized in the means of production of the yarn… we are no longer concerned with the quality, the character and the content of the labour, but merely with its quantity. (Marx, 1981, p. 296)
Thus, workers transmit value into products through not the labor process but the valorization process. All valorization processes are labor processes, but not all labor processes are valorization processes. Marx seperates the dynamics of the labor process and valorization process to differentiate between what dynamics are a result of capitalist versus the transhistorical conditions of human existance.
For example, the wasting of older technology which is caused by the incessant push of business to only employ the cheapest techniques even if the older machinery is still good is a result of value relations as a mode of social organization.
Similar to that, we can understand that measures of productivity are related to how the labor process effects the valorization process, and not purely how materially ‘productive’ workers are (an issue i’ve discussed before).
There are various ways of seeing how Marx’s parsing out of the transhistorical and historically contigent social relations makes his analytical approach a powerful tool. It has implications for understanding capitalist that far surpass merely economic conclusions, but gives us political insights of what is and is not possible within private property relations.
Bibliography
Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach. V. 1: Penguin Classics. London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981.
293
Marx 283
Marx is clear that there are labour processes which do not end in a product, as there is a difference between it and the productive process as a whole. A farmer may only take a few weeks to plant all his seeds, but it takes many more months for the fruits of his labour to come to be. He discusses this more extensively in Volume 2 when looking at turnover time.
The term ‘development’ can be quite contentious in its modern usage. The problem stems from the association of 'economic’ development with moral and political development. ‘Economic development’ refers to the capacity of a society to regulate its metabolism with nature. Further development of this category is needed, but the control over nature can dictate a level of development. However, I must clarify that a society can be more economically developed, that is, have greater control of the natural world, but be morally and politically underdeveloped. No one has to look further than many modern Western nations to see this reality.
Neither is it possible to separate completely political and economy development. Rather, the elastic relationship between political and economic development, i.e., the relationship between formal relations of power and production, means that there are various different forms societies with the same relative capacity of metabolic control can take.
Marx 290
Marx, 283
284
284
That „purposeful activity” criteria is so annoying and unnecessary, not to say philosophically and anthropologically weak. In the very first chapter he points out that Aristotle couldn't discover abstract labor because he was living in a slave society, so the society couldn't recognize the results of the work of a category of human as reducible in some way to the work of any other category of human. The purposeful activity is not imposed by the brain of the concrete human, but by the social subjectivity that dominates the workers. That's why some kind of work is active in the process of valorization (I think Rubin's formulations is the most appropriate, even if a mouthful), while other kinds of work aren't and appear unproductive: they are un productive according to the dominating social subjectivity, that of the capital.