Part 4: The Production of Relative Surplus Value 

Chap 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value 
The portion of a worker’s workday that produces his subsistence has been treated as a constant. Marx has formulated a workday as A——-B—C, where A-B is the necessary labor, and B-C is the surplus-labor where the capitalist makes his money. Since there are limits to how long the work-day can be, how can surplus labor be prolonged without actually prolonging the work day itself? The answer is to reduce the necessary labor time, so that in, for example, a 10 hour work day, only 5 hours are needed rather than 7. That way, the capitalist can get 5 hours of surplus labor, rather than only 3.  

The conditions of production must be changed so that the worker can effectively increase his productivity. Marx calls the surplus value produced by lengthening the work-day: absolute surplus value; and the surplus value that is produced by curtailing the necessary labor time: relative surplus value. 

Each capitalist will be driven to maximalize profits by extracting as much value as possible, so he will naturally look for ways to decrease necessary labor time, but as soon as any new, more productive measure becomes generally known and employed, then the bar resets and competitors are likewise reducing their necessary labor time as well, resulting in no advantage over the others. 

Chap 13: Cooperation 
Capitalist production only begins when a comparatively large number of workers are employed on an extensive scale. The handicraft trades and manufacture don’t differ tremendously in the mode of production, but mostly in the scale. This means at first, the difference is quantitative. 

But a modification does take place. Labor objectified is a social quality; kind of an average. Each individual worker will vary to some degree from the ‘average’, but the capitalist will pay workers according to the average. Inequalities cancel out with larger numbers. But there is a further evolution as a large number of workers are employed in the labor process together. Marx gives the example: 20 weavers in a large room, will cost the owner less on one large building, than 20 weavers working 2 apiece in 10 small buildings. So when the means of production are used in common, they give up a smaller portion of their value to each single product. The effect is the same as if the means of production had cost the capitalist less. 

But there is a further benefit of bringing together large amounts of labor to work together according to a plan: cooperation. This effectively creates a new productive power, an intrinsically collective power. 

It creates a bit of rivalry that heightens the efficiency of each individual. This power is derived from cooperation itself, and when individuals work this way, ‘he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops capabilities of his species’. 

Cooperation of course, brings labor together, which means the capitalist must have the means to employ a large number of workers. While the subjection of labor to capital is partly a result of the fact that the worker works for the capitalist, the cooperation, and then command of, large numbers of laborers develops into a real requirement for production. 

Naturally, bringing together large groups of individuals requires leadership at various levels, but it also naturally evolves into the workers themselves uniting to resist any exploitation. Marx says this produces an inevitable antagonism between the exploiters and the exploited. 

Interestingly enough, the cooperation of laborers is brought about exclusively by the capital that employs them. Their unity is outside them, and outside their competence. Workers are independent of each other in a way; they are employed by the owner, and they enter into a relation with him, but not with each other. 

But there is a socially productive power of labor when workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital which places them under these conditions. It therefore appears as a productive power inherent in capital itself. 

Marx notes historic examples of mass labor cooperation, such as the building of the pyramids. In such examples, the kings had to have the surplus of food or subsistence in order to employ masses of men.  

He notes more primitive examples of cooperation, such as indian communal efforts, but they differ in the fact that means of production were owned in common, and man was not considered as individual in such societies. 

Chap 14: The Division of Labor and Manufacture 
1. The Dual Origin of Manufacture 
2. The Specialized Worker and His Tools 
3. The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture- Heterogenous and Organic 
4. The Division of Labor in Manufacture and the Division of Labor in Society 
5. The Capitalist Character of Manufacture 

Cooperation based on division of labor finds its classic form in manufacturing. Manufacture originates in two ways: the first is assembling workers belonging to a trade under one capitalist, who then has each tradesman perform a specific task in building the commodity. While this results in producing more of the commodity, it also means the individual workmen lose their proficiency in the areas of that work they aren’t employed in. The second way is to assemble large numbers of workers who all do the same work. So manufacture arises out of combining independent trades so that they lose their independence, but it also arises from the cooperation of craftsmen in their particular handicraft. 

A specialized worker who performs the same activity, rather than various tasks, will take less time doing his individual task. Continued repetition teaches him how to do the thing in the quickest way possible with minimal effort. Cooperation of workers in the same task will also generate the quickest ways to do things as each can learn from the others. Further, workers engaged in doing various operations need to switch gears, but workers engaged in the same operation can do their one task without having to slow down. Tools also become more specialized and therefore, effective. 

Manufacture has two fundamental forms, which play different roles in the process of becoming large-scale industry. Marx uses the example of watch production. Even dividing up the labor process in watches, it works better to have the artisans perform their tasks at home, then things are assembled in a factory. This is still different than the independent craftsman, who works for his own customers. 

But another type of manufacture brings everything together in connected phases of development. In this type of manufacture, productive power is gained through cooperation. 

Each stage of the production is divided up. The result of one, is the start of the next. Which means that at each stage, the laborer must finish his work in the given time, for the next to begin his. The mutual interdependence of the workers compels each one to spend only the necessary time on his stage. The repetitive nature of these stages will eventually produce a socially acceptable timing. 

Marx then notes that the collective worker becomes an item of machinery in manufacture. The various operations performed in the production of a commodity make demands of various kinds. Workers will be divided, classified, and grouped according to their qualities and abilities. The natural endowments of each are the foundation on which the division of labor is built. The collective worker now possesses all the qualities necessary for production in an equal degree of excellence, and can expend them in the most economical way according to his individualized strengths. Even the deficiencies of the specialized worker become perfections when he is part of the collective. 

This division of skill will also develop a hierarchy of labor, which will develop a scale of wages. 

On the down-side, this also creates a class of unskilled laborers, which would be excluded by the nature of the handicraft industry, where ability in the whole process would be required. Where manufacture can develop specialty abilities, it can also make a specialty of the absence of all development- the unskilled laborer. 

The division of labor in manufacture requires a relatively developed division of labor in society in general. What this means is that society will have already developed a robust industry of various handicrafts, from which capital can pull trained workers. It will require a complete set of all the various industries necessary for the maintenance of society. It will also require a leader class, who will have enough money to be able to exert financial and leadership control. 

Marx says that an increased number of workers under the control of one capitalist is the natural starting point of both cooperation in general and manufacture in particular. And that the advantages of further division can only be obtained by adding numbers of workers. But the demand for more will be inevitable and it becomes a law that capital must continue to increase. 

The knowledge, judgment and will of formerly individual craftsmen will only be required for the workshop as a whole, and what is lost by those individuals is then concentrated in the capital which confronts them. The process of separation starts in cooperation, but in manufacture, begins to mutilate the individual into a fraction of himself. Manufacture does best when the mind is least consulted. The entire effect is to increase the productive power of labor for the benefit of the capitalist, at the expense of labor; and it does so by crippling the individual worker. 

Chap 15: Machinery and Large Scale Industry 
1. The Development of Machinery 
2. The Value Transferred by the Machinery to the Product 
3. The Most Immediate Effects of Machine Production on the Worker 
   (a) Appropriation of Supplementary labor Power by Capital 
   (b) The Prolongation of the Working Day 
   © Intensification of Labor 
4. The Factory 
5. The Struggle between Worker and Machine 
6. The Compensation Theory, with Regard to Workers Displaced by Machinery 
7. Repulsion and Attraction of Workers through the Development of Machine Production 
8. The Revolutionary Impact of Large-Scale Industry on Manufacture, Handicraft, and Division of Labor 
   (a) Overthrow of Cooperation Based on Handicrafts and the Division of Labor 
   (b) The Impact of the Factory System on Manufacture and Domestic Industries 
   © Modern Manufacture 
   (d) Modern Domestic Industry 
   (e) Transition from Modern Manufacture to Domestic Industry to Large-Scale Industry 
9. The Health and Education Clauses of the Factory Acts 
10. Large Scale Industry and Agriculture 

Machinery, says Marx, is intended to cheapen commodities, which has the consequence of shortening the part of the working day that the worker works for himself, and lengthening the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus value. The machine is just a more complex tool, like what would be employed in handicrafts. Fully developed machinery consists of three parts: the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and the tool, or working machine. The working machine serves as the place where the industrial revolution took place. In large scale machinery, the tool isn’t the implement of man, but man becomes a part of the machine. Large scale industry required advancements in everything around it too, because it was able to deliver goods on previously unknown scales. 

Marx says machinery is a part of constant capital, so it doesn’t create any new value, but yields its own value to the product it serves to make. The less labor used in mechanical production, the less value it contributes to the product. In fact, the use of machinery exclusively to cheapen a product, is limited by the requirement that less labor must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the machinery. If wages were to fall below the value of the machinery, the machinery would be of little value to the capitalist. 

Since machinery doesn’t typically require much muscle to run, the capitalist would prefer to use women or children to run the machines, which displaces the men. This has the effect of dragging the entire family into the factory and depreciates the value of the worker’s labor.  

Where previously, the worker entered into a contract with the capitalist, now he sells his entire family to the capitalist and becomes a slave-dealer in the process. 

While machinery is powerful in shortening the time needed to produce a commodity, it also lengthens the working day beyond all natural limits, particularly since the physical demands aren’t as great, and more docile women and children can be utilized. The fact that machines hardly need to stop, alongside the rapid production, means that each minute a machine isn’t being utilized, is considered by the capitalist to be a loss. 

Marx discusses the factory in modern large-scale industry. Having removed the tools from the hands of the worker, the technical foundation on which the division of labor is eroded. Minding the various machines that produce the various steps is reduced to identical levels of work. 

The struggle between the capitalist and worker is really the relation of capital itself. In prior times, workers would occasionally rise up and smash machines that eliminated their jobs. But time and experience is teaching the worker to transfer their attacks from the means of production to the form of society that produces those instruments. 

Some bourgeois economists have argued that displaced workers from one industry are free to pursue other avenues because there is now more capital to invest in other areas. Marx argues 1) the amounts aren’t equal; capital may invest in some new areas, but not enough to restore all the lost jobs, and 2) the displaced workers are now out of their trained proficiencies, so their labor, as a commodity, is now unskilled in new areas and therefore worth less. 

The transition from handicraft to factory work displaces workers in the handicraft, but can employ more workers in the expansion of factories. The problem Marx notes in this is that it results in periods of boom and bust, with devastating consequences to the labor force. The voracious appetite for raw materials has also had the effect of large industrial nations looking for raw materials in unprecedented scale in colonies, and consequently having deleterious effects in those countries as well. 

In the next section on the impact of machinery, Marx reiterates that machinery eliminates the cooperation of the workers when it was still handicrafts, and then the fact that scaling up production in the commodities requires a scaling up in surrounding industries as well. Then he illustrates his point with examples. Marx pays particular attention to the displacement of a large portion of the work-force, the drastic conditions under which the rest remain, and the moral and emotional and intellectual degradation they are forced into. He also highlights the pressures put on by the capitalists themselves, and the government to continually keep the workers in bondage. 

Marx next covers the inadequate regulatory attempts made to curb the abuses of capital and what he calls the fanatical responses of capital to avoid any responsibility. One example of a social cost is young boys recruited to mind the machines. They are dismissed at around 17, but because they have been turned into savages, and left uneducated, they are easily drawn into lives of crime. They are the consequence of the capitalist mode of production. Marx sees the various changes that result from the capitalist mode of production as all linked back to the root cause- capitalism itself. Marx ends the section warning that the ruin of handicraft by manufacture, and the progression to large-scale industry is inevitable and hastens on the eventual accrual of antagonism to a point of revolution. 

Marx finally looks forward to the future where large-scale industry takes over agriculture too. While he notes the fact that working outdoors will not have the same effects as workers trapped in unhealthy factories, the displacement of workers will likewise be felt in agriculture.