Part Three — The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value Chapters 7–11. The labour process and valorization, constant and variable capital, the rate of surplus-value, the working day, and the rate and mass of surplus-value.

Part Two ended at the threshold of the hidden abode with a promise: the secret of profit-making would be laid bare. Part Three keeps it. Chapter 7 crosses into production and shows exactly how surplus-value is produced — not by cheating in exchange but by the gap between what labour-power costs and what it can do. Chapters 8 and 9 build the accounting apparatus that measures this: the distinction between constant and variable capital, and the rate of surplus-value as the true index of exploitation. Chapter 10, the longest chapter in the volume, turns from the concept to the history and shows absolute surplus-value being produced in fact, through the century-long struggle over the length of the working day. Chapter 11 closes the Part with the laws relating the rate and the mass of surplus-value.

The through-line is the production of absolute surplus-value — surplus-value produced by lengthening the working day beyond the point at which the worker has reproduced the value of his own labour-power. Chapter 7 supplies the mechanism, Chapters 8 and 9 the measure, Chapter 10 the historical reality and the class struggle it provokes, Chapter 11 the quantitative laws. The working-day material in Chapter 10 is caught here in full.

1 · The Labour Process

Before analysing capitalist production, Marx analyses the labour process in general — production considered independently of any social form, "the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence." The point of the trans-historical detour is to isolate what capital adds to it. Labour is first defined as the metabolic exchange between humanity and nature, in which the worker changes external nature and his own nature at once.

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.

Marx, Capital I, page 283.

What makes this labour specifically human is that its result is present ideally, as a purpose, before it is realized materially. This is the passage — architect and bee — that separates purposive human labour from instinctive animal activity, and it carries a corollary about attention and enjoyment that matters wherever work is unfree.

But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.

Marx, Capital I, page 284.

The less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be.

Marx, Capital I, page 284.

The labour process has three simple elements — purposeful activity, the object of labour, and the instruments of labour — and Marx makes the instruments the diagnostic of historical epochs. The whole general analysis then folds back into its trans-historical result: the labour process is common to every human society, independent of any particular social form.

It is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work.

Marx, Capital I, page 286.

The labour process, as we have just presented it in its simple and abstract elements, is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live.

Marx, Capital I, page 290.

Under capital, two features are added that do not touch the general character of the process but determine its social form: the worker labours under the capitalist's control, and the product belongs to the capitalist, not the worker who made it.

By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living agent of fermentation, into the lifeless constituents of the product, which also belong to him. From his point of view, the labour process is nothing more than the consumption of the commodity purchased, i.e. of labour-power; but he can consume this labour-power only by adding the means of production to it. … Thus the product of this process belongs to him just as much as the wine which is the product of the process of fermentation going on in his cellar.

Marx, Capital I, page 292. The ellipsis drops the sentence restating that the labour process is a process between things the capitalist has bought.

2 · The Valorization Process

The capitalist does not want use-values for their own sake; he wants value, and specifically more value than he laid out. The production process is therefore a unity of the labour process and the process of creating value, and the aim is a threefold ascent.

His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-value.

Marx, Capital I, page 293.

Marx works the famous yarn example. If the spinner works only long enough to reproduce the value of his own labour-power — six hours — the value of the product exactly equals the value of the capital advanced. No surplus, because value is only conserved and transferred, not created from nothing.

The swollen value of the yarn is of no avail, for it is merely the sum of the values formerly existing in the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power: out of such a simple addition of existing values, no surplus-value can possibly arise.

Marx, Capital I, page 298.

The resolution turns on a single distinction, the one the whole of Part Two was reaching for: what the capitalist pays for labour-power (its value, the labour needed to reproduce it) and what labour-power does (the labour it performs while being used) are two different magnitudes. The first is the exchange-value of labour-power; the second is its use-value. Half a day's labour maintains the worker; nothing stops him from working a full day.

But the past labour embodied in the labour-power and the living labour it can perform, and the daily cost of maintaining labour-power and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter is its use-value. The fact that half a day's labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes [verwertet] in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power.

Marx, Capital I, page 300.

What was really decisive for him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. … On the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day's labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller.

Marx, Capital I, page 301. The ellipsis drops the sentence naming this the specific service the capitalist expects, in accordance with the laws of commodity exchange.

Extend the working day to twelve hours and the surplus appears: 27 shillings of advanced value become 30, and no law of exchange has been broken, because every commodity — cotton, spindle, labour-power — was bought and sold at its value. This is the exact resolution of Chapter 5's double result.

This whole course of events, the transformation of money into capital, both takes place and does not take place in the sphere of circulation. It takes place through the mediation of circulation because it is conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; it does not take place in circulation because what happens there is only an introduction to the valorization process, which is entirely confined to the sphere of production.

Marx, Capital I, page 302.

Finally Marx defines valorization precisely, as the extension of value-creation past the break-even point — the point where the worker has replaced the value of his own labour-power.

If we now compare the process of creating value with the process of valorization, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point. If the process is not carried beyond the point where the value paid by the capitalist for the labour-power is replaced by an exact equivalent, it is simply a process of creating value; but if it is continued beyond that point, it becomes a process of valorization.

Marx, Capital I, page 302.

Chapter 8 draws the accounting distinction on which the measurement of surplus-value depends. It rests on the twofold character of labour established back in Chapter 1: the same labour, by its abstract side, adds new value, and by its concrete useful side, preserves and transfers the old value of the means of production it works up. The two results happen together but are essentially different, and the difference lets Marx separate the two parts of capital by how they behave in production.

Means of production can never yield more value than they already contain; they transfer their value as they lose their use-value, and where they have no value (nature's free gifts), they transfer none. The preservation of old value by living labour is, from the capitalist's side, a windfall.

The property therefore which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of nature which costs the worker nothing, but is very advantageous to the capitalist since it preserves the existing value of his capital. As long as trade is good, the capitalist is too absorbed in making profits to take notice of this gratuitous gift of labour.

Marx, Capital I, page 315.

From this behaviour Marx defines the two parts of capital — the distinction that the rest of the theory of surplus-value is stated in. Means of production are constant capital because their value merely reappears unchanged in the product; labour-power is variable capital because it reproduces its own value and produces a surplus over it.

That part of capital, therefore, which is turned into means of production, i.e. the raw material, the auxiliary material 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, or more briefly, constant capital. On the other hand, that part of capital which is turned into labour-power does undergo an alteration of value in the process of production. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value and produces an excess, a surplus-value, which may itself vary, and be more or less according to circumstances. This part of capital is continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude. I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or more briefly, variable capital.

Marx, Capital I, page 317.

Surplus-value is then defined precisely in these terms — the excess of the total product's value over the sum of the constant and variable capital consumed. Marx is careful to add that this constancy is functional, not a claim that the value of the means of production can never change: a change in the price of cotton changes what it transfers, but that change originates in cotton's own production, outside the process where it serves as constant capital, and a shift in the proportion of constant to variable capital leaves the essential difference between them untouched.

The activity of labour-power, therefore, not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above this. This surplus-value is the difference between the value of the product and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of the product, in other words the means of production and the labour-power.

Marx, Capital I, pages 316–317.

1 · The Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power

With constant and variable capital defined, Marx builds the measure of surplus-value. The method is to set constant capital (c) at zero — legitimate because it only reappears in the product and creates no value — leaving the value actually produced as v + s. The surplus is then measured against the variable capital that produced it, not against the total capital advanced.

He first partitions the working day. The part in which the worker reproduces the value of his own labour-power is necessary labour; the part beyond it, in which he produces surplus-value, is surplus labour. These are the categories the whole theory of exploitation is stated in.

I call the portion of the working day during which this reproduction takes place necessary labour-time, and the labour expended during that time necessary labour; necessary for the worker, because independent of the particular social form of his labour; necessary for capital and the capitalist world, because the continued existence of the worker is the basis of that world. During the second period of the labour process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the worker does indeed expend labour-power, he does work, but his labour is no longer necessary labour, and he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing. This part of the working day I call surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time I give the name of surplus labour.

Marx, Capital I, page 325.

Surplus labour is what all class societies extract; only the form of extraction differs. This is the sentence that situates capitalism among the modes of production as one method of pumping surplus labour out of the producer.

What distinguishes the various economic formations of society – the distinction between for example a society based on slave-labour and a society based on wage-labour – is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker.

Marx, Capital I, page 325.

The rate of surplus-value, s/v, equals the ratio of surplus labour to necessary labour, and Marx names what it measures. He is emphatic that this ratio — not the rate of profit s/C, with which it is habitually confused — is the true index, and that confusing the two makes exploitation look far smaller than it is (in his example, an apparent 18 per cent that is really 100 per cent).

The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist.

Marx, Capital I, page 326.

2 · The Representation of Value in Proportional Parts of the Product

Marx then shows the same result physically: the total product can be divided so that one portion embodies only the transferred value of the means of production, another only the necessary labour (variable capital), and a last only the surplus labour. In the yarn example, the surplus is condensed in the final pounds of yarn — "as if the spinner had spun 4 lb. of yarn out of air" — a demonstration that the accounting distinction has a concrete counterpart in the product itself.

3 · Senior's "Last Hour"

The chapter's polemical set-piece dismantles Nassau Senior, who was summoned to Manchester in 1836 and produced the argument that a mill's entire net profit came from the very last hour of the working day — so that shortening the day would abolish profit and, with a half-hour more, even gross profit would be lost. The claim was a weapon against the Ten Hours' agitation. Marx shows it rests on Senior's failure to distinguish the value merely transferred from the means of production from the value newly created: the worker produces value in equal amounts throughout the day, so profit is spread across the whole day, not lodged in its last hour. The "last hour" is a fallacy built on the very confusion Chapters 8 and 9 exist to dispel.

4 · The Surplus Product

The portion of the total product corresponding to surplus-value is the surplus product, and its relative magnitude — measured against the part embodying necessary labour, not against the whole — is the true index of capitalist wealth. The chapter closes by defining the working day as the sum of necessary and surplus labour, which sets up Chapter 10.

The sum of the necessary labour and the surplus labour, i.e. the sum of the periods of time during which the worker respectively replaces the value of his labour-power and produces the surplus-value, constitutes the absolute extent of his labour-time, i.e. the working day.

Marx, Capital I, page 339.

1 · The Limits of the Working Day

The longest chapter in the volume turns from the concept of surplus-value to its production in fact. Absolute surplus-value is produced by extending the working day past necessary labour, so the whole struggle of capitalist production concentrates on the length of that day. Marx establishes first that the working day is a variable magnitude: necessary labour fixes its lower part, but its total length is "determinable but in and for itself indeterminate," bounded only by the physical limits of labour-power and the elastic moral limits of civilization.

Into that indeterminacy capital drives with a single imperative, and Marx gives it the image the chapter is remembered by.

But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.

Marx, Capital I, page 342.

Against the capitalist's claim to the full use of what he has bought, Marx stages the worker's answer — the counter-claim that the sale of labour-power at its value entails a limit to its daily consumption. The speech is written in the worker's voice and belongs in full, because it is the argument that grounds the demand for a normal working day in the law of exchange itself rather than in sentiment.

Suddenly, however, there arises the voice of the worker, which had previously been stifled in the sound and fury of the production process: ‘The commodity I have sold you differs from the ordinary crowd of commodities in that its use creates value, a greater value than it costs. That is why you bought it. What appears on your side as the valorization of capital is on my side an excess expenditure of labour-power.’

Marx, in the worker's voice, Capital I, page 342.

By an unlimited extension of the working day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour, I lose in the substance of labour. Using my labour and despoiling it are quite different things. … I therefore demand a working day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. … I demand a normal working day because, like every other seller, I demand the value of my commodity.

Marx, in the worker's voice, Capital I, page 343. Ellipses drop the worked numerical illustration (a thirty-year working life consumed in ten) and the aside on the capitalist's private virtues.

Both parties are within their rights under the law of commodity exchange — the buyer to use his purchase fully, the seller to preserve the value of what he sells. The clash of two equally valid rights cannot be settled by right, and this is the pivot on which the entire chapter, and much of the politics of the book, turns.

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.

Marx, Capital I, page 344.

2 · The Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour. Manufacturer and Boyar

Marx grants that capital did not invent surplus labour — every society with a monopoly of the means of production extracts it. What is specific to capital is the boundlessness of the drive, set loose once production is for exchange-value rather than a fixed circle of needs. He develops this through a comparison of the English manufacturer's working day with the Wallachian boyar's corvée codified in the Règlement organique, showing the same hunger operating under a legal form, and reads the English Factory Acts as its curbed counterpart: where the boyar's surplus labour is written openly into law, the manufacturer's is hidden in the "small thefts" of minutes from meal-times, the "nibbling and cribbling" the factory inspectors document. "Moments are the elements of profit."

3 · Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation

The empirical core of the chapter surveys the trades still unregulated or newly regulated — lace, potteries, matches, wallpaper, bakeries, the railways, dressmaking — through the Blue Books, the factory inspectors' reports, and the Children's Employment Commission. It is here that the chapter's most harrowing documentation sits: the death of the milliner Mary Anne Walkley from twenty-six-and-a-half hours of unbroken work, children dragged from bed at two in the morning, the potteries' generational physical degeneration. Marx names the drive behind it with his second beast-image.

So far, we have observed the drive towards the extension of the working day, and the werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour, in an area where capital's monstrous outrages, unsurpassed, according to an English bourgeois economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins, caused it at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations.

Marx, Capital I, page 353.

4 · Day Work and Night Work. The Shift System

To keep the constant capital — the expensive machinery — in continuous motion, capital works the labour-force in relays around the clock. Marx documents the shift ("relay") system through the iron and metal trades, showing children and young persons worked through the night, and draws from it the general statement of capital's indifference to the human bearer of labour-power. This is the passage that states, as a law, what the empirical sections show as fact.

Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.

Marx, Capital I, page 376.

5 · The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Compulsory Laws for the Extension of the Working Day (14th–17th Centuries)

Marx turns the history around. The same state power that in the nineteenth century legislated to shorten the working day had, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth, legislated to lengthen it — the Statute of Labourers and its successors compelling longer hours when labour was scarce. The reversal is the historical proof that the "normal" working day has no natural measure: what the law extends in one epoch, it must be forced to restrict in another, once "the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour" has been given machinery to work with.

6 · The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. English Factory Legislation, 1833–1864

The central historical narrative reconstructs the factory legislation from the 1833 Act through the Ten Hours' Act of 1847 and the compromises and evasions that followed — the relay dodge, the manufacturers' revolt, the 1850 settlement. Marx reads the sequence not as the gift of a benevolent state but as the codified record of class struggle, the collective worker at last compelling in law the limit the isolated worker could never secure.

7 · Impact of the English Factory Legislation on Other Countries

The chapter closes by generalizing. The English factory worker was the vanguard of the modern working class; France won by revolution what England won piecemeal; the American eight-hours movement sprang from the end of slavery. Here Marx states the solidarity thesis that has traveled furthest.

In the United States of America, every independent workers' movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours' agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of the locomotive.

Marx, Capital I, page 414.

And the whole chapter resolves the irony set up at the end of Part Two. The worker who entered the market as a free seller of himself leaves production having discovered he is no free agent; the answer is not an appeal to right but the collective compulsion of law, which replaces the grand abstractions of the rights of man with one concrete, hard-won limit.

It must be acknowledged that our worker emerges from the process of production looking different from when he entered it. In the market, as owner of the commodity ‘labour-power’, he stood face to face with other owners of commodities, one owner against another owner. The contract by which he sold his labour-power to the capitalist proved in black and white, so to speak, that he was free to dispose of himself. But when the transaction was concluded, it was discovered that he was no ‘free agent’, that the period of time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the period of time for which he is forced to sell it.

Marx, Capital I, page 415.

For ‘protection’ against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital. In the place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear ‘when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins’.

Marx, Capital I, page 416.

The closing chapter of Part Three states the quantitative laws relating the rate of surplus-value to its mass, holding the value of labour-power constant. The first law fixes the mass as the product of the two things already defined — how many workers are exploited and how intensely each is exploited.

The mass of surplus-value produced is equal to the amount of the variable capital advanced multiplied by the rate of surplus-value; in other words: the mass of surplus-value is determined by the product of the number of labour-powers simultaneously exploited by the same capitalist and the degree of exploitation of each individual labour-power.

Marx, Capital I, page 418.

From this Marx derives two further laws. A shortfall in one factor can be offset by the other — fewer workers by a longer day, a lower rate by more workers — so that "within certain limits the supply of labour exploitable by capital is independent of the supply of workers." But the offset has an absolute ceiling: since the working day can never reach twenty-four hours, no rise in the rate of exploitation can indefinitely compensate for a fall in the number of workers. The third law, that the mass of surplus-value varies directly with the variable capital, "clearly contradicts all experience based on immediate appearances" — capitals of unequal composition yield equal profits — and Marx flags this as the problem the Ricardian school foundered on, to be resolved only in Volume 3.

The chapter then makes two conceptual moves that reach beyond the arithmetic. First, the transformation of money into capital requires a minimum magnitude of value, below which a money-owner remains a "small master" who must work alongside his men; only past that threshold is he freed to function purely as capital personified. Marx marks this as an instance of a dialectical law.

Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel, in his Logic, that at a certain point merely quantitative differences pass over by a dialectical inversion into qualitative distinctions.

Marx, Capital I, page 423.

Second, and this is the note Part Three ends on, Marx states the inversion that the whole analysis of the valorization process has been driving toward. In the labour process the worker uses the means of production; in the valorization process the relation is turned upside down, and the dead labour of the past comes to dominate the living labour of the present.

But it is different as soon as we view the production process as a process of valorization. The means of production are at once changed into means for the absorption of the labour of others. It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value.

Marx, Capital I, page 425.