The use of labour-power is labour itself. The buyer of labour-power consumes it by setting its seller to work. Through this, the seller becomes actively working labour-power, a worker in fact, whereas before he was only one in potential.
For his labour to appear in commodities, he must first put it into use-values — things that satisfy needs of some kind. So the capitalist has the worker make a particular use-value, a definite article. Producing use-values, or goods, does not change its general nature just because it is done for the capitalist and under his control. So the labour-process must first be considered apart from every definite social form.
Labour is first of all a process between human beings and nature. In it, the human being mediates, regulates, and controls his material metabolism with nature through his own action. He faces natural material as a natural force himself. He sets the natural forces of his own body — arms and legs, head and hand — in motion so that he can take hold of natural material in a form useful for his own life. By acting on nature outside him and changing it, he also changes his own nature. He develops powers sleeping within it and brings their play under his own command.
We are not dealing here with the first animal-like, instinctive forms of labour. The condition in which the worker appears on the market as seller of his own labour-power is separated by a vast primitive background from the condition in which human labour had not yet thrown off its first instinct-like form. We assume labour in a form that belongs exclusively to human beings.
A spider carries out operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts many a human builder to shame with its wax cells. But what sets the worst builder apart from the best bee from the start is that he has built the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the end of the labour-process there is a result that was already present in the worker's idea at the beginning. He does not only change the form of natural material. At the same time, he realizes his own purpose in that material; he knows that purpose, it gives law to the way he acts, and he has to subordinate his will to it. This subordination is not a single passing act. The worker also has to keep willing the task. That will shows itself as attention, and it has to last as long as the work lasts. The less the work itself draws him in, and the less he enjoys doing it, the more effort that attention takes.
The simple moments of the labour-process are purposive activity, or labour itself; the subject it works on; and the instrument it uses.
The earth — economically speaking, water included — originally equips human beings with provisions, with finished means of subsistence, without any action of their own. In that form it stands there as the general subject of human labour. All the things that labour merely separates from their immediate connection with the earth as a whole are subjects of labour found ready in nature: fish caught and taken from their element, water; timber felled in the virgin forest; ore broken loose from its vein.
If, on the other hand, the subject of labour has already been filtered, so to speak, through earlier labour, we call it raw material: for example, ore already broken loose and now being washed. Every raw material is a subject of labour, but not every subject of labour is raw material. A subject of labour is raw material only once it has already undergone a change mediated by labour.
An instrument of labour is a thing, or a set of things, that the worker places between himself and the subject of labour and that serves as the conductor of his activity upon that subject. He uses the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of things as powers acting on other things, according to his purpose. Apart from taking hold of finished means of subsistence, such as fruit, where his own bodily organs alone serve as instruments, the first thing the worker takes possession of is not the subject of labour but the instrument. So nature itself becomes an organ of his activity, an organ he adds to his own bodily organs, lengthening his natural body despite the Bible.
Just as the earth is his original storehouse of provisions, it is also his original arsenal of instruments. It gives him, for example, the stone with which he throws, rubs, presses, cuts, and so on. The earth itself is an instrument of labour, but using it that way in agriculture already requires a whole series of other instruments and a relatively high development of labour-power. Once the labour-process is even slightly developed, it already needs worked-up instruments. In the oldest human caves we find stone tools and stone weapons. Alongside worked stone, wood, bone, and shells, the tamed animal — itself already changed by labour and breeding — plays the main role as an instrument of labour at the beginning of human history.
The use and making of instruments of labour, although present in germ among some animal species, characterize the specifically human labour-process. Franklin therefore defines the human being as "a toolmaking animal." Relics of instruments of labour have the same importance for judging extinct economic social formations that bone relics have for knowing the organization of extinct animal species. It is not what is made, but how it is made, and with what instruments, that distinguishes economic epochs. Instruments of labour are not only measures of the development of human labour-power; they are also indicators of the social relations in which work is done. Among instruments themselves, the mechanical instruments — the bone and muscle system of production — give much more decisive marks of a social epoch of production than instruments that serve only as containers for the subject of labour, such as pipes, barrels, baskets, jars, and the like, which can be called the vascular system of production. Only in chemical manufacture do these become especially important.
In a wider sense, the labour-process counts among its instruments not only the things that mediate the effect of labour on its subject and so serve in one way or another as conductors of activity. It also includes all objective conditions required for the process to take place at all. These do not enter directly into the process, but without them it either cannot happen or can happen only incompletely. The general instrument of this kind is again the earth itself, because it gives the worker a place to stand and gives his process its field of action. Instruments of this kind that have already been mediated by labour include work buildings, canals, roads, and so on.
In the labour-process, then, human activity uses the instrument of labour to bring about an intended change in the subject of labour. The process goes out in the product. Its product is a use-value: natural material made fit for human needs through a change of form. Labour has joined itself with its subject. The labour is objectified, and the subject is worked up. What appeared on the worker's side as unrest now appears on the product's side as a resting property, as a form of being. He has spun, and the product is yarn.
If we start from the finished product, the subject worked on and the instrument both look like means of production, and the work itself looks like productive labour.
When a use-value comes out of the labour-process as a product, other use-values, products of earlier labour-processes, enter it as means of production. The same use-value that is the product of one labour-process forms the means of production for another. Products are therefore not only results of the labour-process, but also its conditions.
Except for extractive industry, which finds its subject of labour directly in nature — mining, hunting, fishing, and agriculture insofar as it first breaks up virgin soil — every branch of industry works on a subject that is raw material: a subject of labour already filtered through labour, already a product of labour. Seed in agriculture is one example. Animals and plants that we tend to view as products of nature are, in their present forms, not only products perhaps of last year's labour, but products of a transformation continued through many generations under human control and by means of human labour. As for instruments of labour in particular, the great majority show the trace of past labour at the most superficial glance.
Raw material can form the main substance of a product, or it can enter into the product's formation only as an accessory material. An accessory material may be consumed by the instrument of labour, as coal is consumed by the steam-engine, oil by the wheel, or hay by the draught horse. It may be added to the raw material to bring about a material change, as chlorine is added to unbleached linen, coal to iron, or dye to wool. Or it may support the carrying out of the work itself, as with materials used for lighting and heating the workplace. The difference between main substance and accessory material becomes blurred in true chemical manufacture, because none of the raw materials used reappears as the substance of the product.
Since every thing has many properties and can therefore be put to different uses, the same product can form the raw material of very different labour-processes. Corn, for example, is raw material for the miller, the starch maker, the distiller, the cattle breeder, and so on. It becomes raw material for its own production as seed. In the same way, coal comes out of mining as a product and goes back into mining as a means of production.
The same product may serve in the same labour-process as both instrument of labour and raw material. In cattle fattening, for example, the cattle are the raw material being worked on and at the same time the instrument for producing manure.
A product that exists in a form ready for consumption can become raw material again for another product, as grapes become the raw material of wine. Or labour can release its product in forms that are useful only as raw material again. Raw material in this condition is called a semi-finished product, though it would be better called a stage-product: cotton, thread, yarn, and so on. Although it is already a product, the original raw material may have to pass through a whole ladder of different processes. In each process, in a changed shape each time, it functions again as raw material until the final labour-process casts it off as a finished means of subsistence or a finished instrument of labour.
We can see, then, that whether a use-value appears as raw material, instrument of labour, or product depends entirely on its definite function in the labour-process, on the place it takes in that process. When that place changes, those determinations change with it.
When products enter new labour-processes as means of production, they lose the character of products. They function only as objective factors of living labour. The spinner treats the spindle only as the means he spins with, and the flax only as the subject he spins. Of course one cannot spin without spinning material and a spindle. So the existence of these products is presupposed at the start of spinning.
In the process itself, however, it is just as indifferent that flax and spindle are products of past labour as it is, in the act of eating, that bread is the product of the past labours of farmer, miller, baker, and so on. Conversely, means of production assert their character as products of past labour in the labour-process through their defects. A knife that does not cut, yarn that keeps snapping, and the like vividly remind us of cutler A and yarn-finisher E. In the successful product, the mediation of its useful properties by past labour is erased.
A machine that does not serve in the labour-process is useless. Besides that, it falls prey to the destructive power of natural metabolism. Iron rusts; wood rots. Yarn that is not woven or knitted is spoiled cotton. Living labour must seize these things, wake them from the dead, and turn them from merely possible use-values into real and effective use-values. Licked by the fire of labour, appropriated as bodies of labour, animated for the functions they are meant to perform in the process, they are also consumed — but consumed purposefully, as formative elements of new use-values, new products that can enter individual consumption as means of subsistence or enter a new labour-process as means of production.
Existing products are not only results of the labour-process but also conditions of its existence. At the same time, throwing them into the labour-process — bringing them into contact with living labour — is the only way to preserve and realize these products of past labour as use-values.
Labour uses up its material elements, its subject and its instrument; it eats them, and is therefore a process of consumption. This productive consumption differs from individual consumption in this: individual consumption consumes products as means of life for the living person, while productive consumption consumes them as means of life for labour, for labour-power in action. The product of individual consumption is therefore the consumer himself; the result of productive consumption is a product distinct from the consumer.
Insofar as its instrument and its subject are themselves already products, labour consumes products in order to create products, or uses products as means of production for products. But just as the labour-process originally takes place only between human beings and the earth present without their action, so even now means of production still serve in it that exist by nature and do not represent any union of natural material and human labour.
The labour-process, as we have presented it in its simple and abstract moments, is purposive activity for making use-values. It is the appropriation of natural material for human needs, the general condition of the material metabolism between human beings and nature, the eternal natural condition of human life. For that reason it is independent of every form of that life, or rather common to all its social forms.
We therefore did not have to present the worker in relation to other workers. The human being and his labour on one side, nature and its materials on the other, were enough. Just as one cannot taste in wheat who grew it, one cannot see in this process itself the conditions under which it takes place: whether under the brutal whip of the slave overseer or under the anxious eye of the capitalist; whether Cincinnatus performs it in cultivating his few acres or a savage does it by killing a beast with a stone.
Let us return to our would-be capitalist. We left him after he had bought, on the commodity-market, all the factors needed for a labour-process: the objective factors, or means of production, and the personal factor, labour-power. With the sharp eye of a connoisseur, he chose the means of production and the kinds of labour-power suited to his particular business, such as spinning, bootmaking, and so on.
Our capitalist now sets about consuming the commodity he bought, labour-power. That is, he has the bearer of labour-power, the worker, consume the means of production through his labour. The general nature of the labour-process is of course not changed because the worker carries it out for the capitalist instead of for himself. Nor can the definite way of making boots or spinning yarn be changed at first merely by the capitalist's stepping in. He must first take labour-power as he finds it on the market, and therefore also take its labour as it arose in a period when there were not yet any capitalists. The transformation of the mode of production itself through the subordination of labour to capital can happen only later, and therefore has to be considered only later.
The labour-process, as it proceeds as the capitalist's process of consuming labour-power, now shows two peculiar phenomena.
First, the worker works under the control of the capitalist, to whom his labour belongs. The capitalist watches to make sure the work is carried out properly and the means of production are used in a purposive way: that raw material is not wasted, and that the instrument of labour is spared, meaning destroyed only as far as its use in the work requires.
Second, the product is the property of the capitalist, not of the immediate producer, the worker. The capitalist pays, for example, the day's value of labour-power. Its use, like the use of any other commodity — a horse rented for a day, for instance — belongs to him for that day. The buyer of the commodity owns the use of the commodity, and the possessor of labour-power in fact gives only the use-value he has sold when he gives his labour.
From the moment the worker entered the capitalist's workshop, the use-value of his labour-power, and therefore its use, labour, belonged to the capitalist. By buying labour-power, the capitalist has incorporated labour itself, as a living ferment, into the dead formative elements of the product that also belong to him. From his standpoint, the labour-process is only the consumption of the commodity he has bought, labour-power; but he can consume it only by adding means of production to it. The labour-process is a process between things the capitalist has bought, between things belonging to him. The product of this process therefore belongs to him just as much as the product of fermentation in his wine cellar.
The product, which belongs to the capitalist, is a use-value: yarn, boots, and so on. But even if boots are, in a certain sense, the basis of social progress, and even if our capitalist is a decided man of progress, he does not make boots for their own sake. In commodity production, use-value is not the thing one loves for itself. Use-values are produced here only because, and only insofar as, they are the material body that carries exchange-value.
Our capitalist is after two things. First, he wants to produce a use-value that has exchange-value: an article meant for sale, a commodity. Second, he wants to produce a commodity worth more than the sum of the values of the goods needed to make it - the means of production and labour-power for which he advanced his good money on the market. He wants to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not only value, but surplus-value.
Since we are dealing here with commodity production, we have plainly looked at only one side of the process so far. Just as the commodity itself is a unity of use-value and value, its production process must be a unity of the labour-process and the value-forming process.
Let us now look at the production process also as a value-forming process.
We know that the value of every commodity is fixed by the quantity of labour materialized in its use-value: by the socially necessary labour-time needed to produce it. This also holds for the product our capitalist got as the result of the labour-process. So the first thing is to calculate the labour objectified in that product.
Take yarn, for example.
To make the yarn, raw material was needed first: say 10 lbs. of cotton. The value of the cotton does not have to be investigated now, because the capitalist bought it on the market at its value, say 10 sh. In the price of the cotton, the labour needed to produce it is already expressed as general social labour. Let us also assume that the mass of spindle used up in working the cotton - standing here for all the other instruments of labour used - has a value of 2 sh. If a mass of gold worth 12 sh. is the product of 24 hours of labour, or two working days, then, to begin with, two days of labour are objectified in the yarn.
Do not be thrown off by the fact that the cotton has changed form and the used-up spindle has disappeared. By the general law of value, 10 lbs. of yarn are an equivalent for 10 lbs. of cotton and one-quarter of a spindle if the value of 40 lbs. of yarn equals the value of 40 lbs. of cotton plus the value of a whole spindle - that is, if the same labour-time is required to produce both sides of the equation.
In that case, the same labour-time appears once in the use-value yarn and once in the use-values cotton and spindle. Value is indifferent to whether it appears in yarn, spindle, or cotton. The fact that spindle and cotton do not lie quietly side by side, but enter the spinning process together, change their use-forms, and turn into yarn, affects their value no more than if they had simply been exchanged for an equivalent amount of yarn.
The labour-time needed to produce the cotton is part of the labour-time needed to produce the yarn, since cotton is the yarn's raw material; so that labour-time is contained in the yarn. The same is true of the labour-time needed to produce the mass of spindle, since the cotton could not be spun without the spindle being worn down or consumed.
So, when the value of the yarn is at issue - the labour-time needed to make it - the different particular labour-processes, separated in time and place, can be treated as successive phases of one and the same labour-process: producing the cotton, producing the used-up spindle, and finally making yarn out of cotton and spindle.
All the labour contained in the yarn is past labour. It makes no difference that the labour-time needed for its elements lies further back, while the final spinning is closer to the present. If 30 working days are needed to build a house, the total labour-time worked into the house is not changed by the fact that the thirtieth day entered production 29 days after the first. In the same way, the labour-time contained in the material and instruments of labour can be treated as if it had been spent in an earlier stage of the spinning process, before the labour finally added in the form of spinning.
The values of the means of production, the cotton and the spindle, expressed in the price of 12 sh., therefore form parts of the yarn's value, or of the value of the product.
Only two conditions have to be met. First, cotton and spindle must really have served to produce a use-value. In our case, they must have become yarn. Value is indifferent to which use-value carries it, but some use-value must carry it.
Second, only the labour-time necessary under the given social conditions of production is assumed to have been used. If only 1 lb. of cotton is needed to spin 1 lb. of yarn, then only 1 lb. of cotton may be consumed in forming 1 lb. of yarn. The same holds for the spindle. If the capitalist gets the fancy to use golden spindles instead of iron ones, then the value of the yarn still counts only the socially necessary labour - that is, the labour-time needed to produce iron spindles.
We now know which part of the yarn's value comes from the means of production, cotton and spindle. It equals 12 sh., the material form of two working days. The question now is the part of the value that the spinner's own labour adds to the cotton.
We now have to consider this labour from a very different standpoint than in the labour-process. There it was a purposeful activity, turning cotton into yarn. The more suited the labour was to that end, assuming everything else stayed the same, the better the yarn. The spinner's labour was specifically different from other productive labours: different in its aim, in its method, in the nature of its means of production, and in the use-value of its product. Cotton and spindle are means of life for spinning labour, but you cannot make rifled cannon with them.
But insofar as the spinner's labour forms value, and so is a source of value, it is no different from the labour of the cannon-borer, or, closer to our case, from the labour of the cotton grower and the spindle maker already realized in the yarn's means of production. Only because of this sameness can cotton growing, spindle making, and spinning form merely quantitative parts of one total value, the value of the yarn. Here the quality, character, and content of the labour no longer matter; only its quantity does. That quantity simply has to be counted. We assume that spinning is simple labour, society's average labour. Later we will see that the opposite assumption changes nothing.
During the labour-process, labour is constantly changing from unrest into being, from motion into objectivity. At the end of one hour, the spinning motion is represented in a certain quantity of yarn; in other words, a definite quantity of labour, one labour-hour, is objectified in the cotton. We say labour-hour - the spinner's expenditure of life-force for an hour - because spinning labour counts here only insofar as it is expenditure of labour-power, not insofar as it is the specific labour of spinning.
It is now decisively important that, for the whole duration of the process - the transformation of cotton into yarn - only socially necessary labour-time is consumed. If, under normal, average social conditions of production, a lbs. of cotton must be turned into b lbs. of yarn in one labour-hour, then a working day counts as a 12-hour working day only if 12 x a lbs. of cotton have been turned into 12 x b lbs. of yarn. Only socially necessary labour-time counts as value-forming.
Like labour itself, raw material and product appear here in a quite different light than from the standpoint of the actual labour-process. The raw material counts only as the absorber of a definite quantity of labour. By this absorption it really does turn into yarn, because labour-power has been spent and added to it in the form of spinning. But the product, the yarn, is now only the gauge of the labour absorbed by the cotton.
If 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton are spun, or turned into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn, in one hour, then 10 lbs. of yarn indicate 6 absorbed labour-hours. Definite quantities of product, fixed by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of congealed labour-time. They are only the material form of one hour, two hours, a day of social labour.
That the labour is specifically spinning labour, that its material is cotton, and that its product is yarn, is now just as indifferent as the fact that the object of labour is itself already a product, and so raw material. If the worker were employed in a coal mine instead of a spinning mill, the object of labour, coal, would be present by nature. All the same, a definite quantity of coal broken from the bed, say a hundredweight, would represent a definite quantity of absorbed labour.
When labour-power was sold, we assumed that its daily value was 3 sh., and that 6 hours of labour were embodied in that value; this quantity of labour is therefore needed to produce the average sum of the worker's daily means of subsistence. Now if our spinner turns 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn in one hour, then in 6 hours he turns 10 lbs. of cotton into 10 lbs. of yarn. During the spinning process, then, the cotton absorbs 6 labour-hours. The same labour-time is represented in a quantity of gold worth 3 sh. So spinning itself adds a value of 3 sh. to the cotton.
Now look at the total value of the product, the 10 lbs. of yarn. In them, 2 1/2 working days are objectified: 2 days contained in cotton and spindle mass, and 1/2 day of labour absorbed during the spinning process. The same labour-time is represented in a mass of gold worth 15 sh. So the price adequate to the value of the 10 lbs. of yarn is 15 sh., and the price of one pound of yarn is 1 sh. 6 d.
Our capitalist is startled. The value of the product equals the value of the capital advanced. The value advanced has not become more value, has created no surplus-value, and so money has not been transformed into capital. The price of the 10 lbs. of yarn is 15 sh., and 15 sh. were spent on the market for the elements that formed the product - or, what is the same thing, for the factors of the labour-process: 10 sh. for cotton, 2 sh. for the used-up spindle mass, and 3 sh. for labour-power.
The swollen value of the yarn helps nothing, because its value is only the sum of the values earlier distributed among cotton, spindle, and labour-power; out of such a mere addition of existing values, surplus-value can never arise. These values are now all concentrated in one thing, but they were already concentrated in the money sum of 15 sh. before that sum was split up through three purchases.
In itself, this result is not surprising. The value of 1 lb. of yarn is 1 sh. 6 d., so our capitalist would have to pay 15 sh. on the market for 10 lbs. of yarn. Whether he buys his private house finished on the market or has it built himself, neither operation will increase the money laid out to acquire the house.
The capitalist, who knows his way around vulgar economics, may say that he advanced his money with the intention of making more money out of it. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and he could just as well have intended to make money without producing. He threatens: he will not be caught again; next time he will buy the commodity ready-made on the market instead of producing it himself. But if all his brother capitalists do the same, where will he find commodities on the market? And he cannot eat money.
He preaches. Think of his abstinence, he says. He could have squandered his 15 sh.; instead, he consumed it productively and made yarn. But for that he now has yarn instead of a bad conscience. He must not fall back into the role of the hoarder, who already showed us what comes of asceticism. Besides, where nothing exists, even the emperor loses his right. Whatever the merit of his renunciation, there is nothing there to pay it with, since the value of the product that comes out of the process is only equal to the sum of the commodity values thrown into it. Let him comfort himself, then, that virtue is its own reward. Instead, he becomes pushy. The yarn is useless to him; he produced it for sale. Then let him sell it - or, still more simply, let him produce in future only things for his own needs, a cure his house doctor MacCulloch has already prescribed against the epidemic of overproduction.
He plants himself defiantly. Could the worker create products of labour, produce commodities, with his own limbs in the blue air? Did the capitalist not give him the material in and through which alone his labour could take body? Since most of society consists of such have-nots, has he not performed an immeasurable service to society with his means of production, his cotton and spindle - and to the worker too, whom he also supplied with means of subsistence? And should he not charge for the service? But did the worker not render him the counter-service of turning cotton and spindle into yarn? Besides, this is not about services. A service is nothing but the useful effect of a use-value, whether of a commodity or of labour. Here, however, exchange-value is at stake. He paid the worker the value of 3 sh. The worker gave him back an exact equivalent in the value of 3 sh. added to the cotton: value for value.
Our friend, just now so capital-proud, suddenly takes on the modest bearing of his own worker. Did he not work himself? Did he not perform the labour of watching over and superintending the spinner? Does his labour not also form value? His own overlooker and manager shrug their shoulders. Meanwhile, with a cheerful smile, he has already taken on his old face again. He fooled us with the whole litany. He does not care a whit about it. He leaves this and similar lazy excuses and hollow phrases to the professors of political economy who are paid for them. He himself is a practical man: he may not always think about what he says outside business, but in business he always knows what he is doing.
Let us look more closely. The daily value of labour-power was 3 sh. because half a working day is objectified in it - that is, because the means of subsistence needed each day to produce labour-power cost half a working day. But the past labour contained in labour-power and the living labour it can perform, its daily maintenance costs and its daily expenditure, are two quite different amounts. The first determines its exchange-value; the second forms its use-value. That half a working day is needed to keep the worker alive for 24 hours does not prevent him from working a whole day.
The value of labour-power and the value made by using it in the labour-process are therefore two different amounts. This difference in value was what the capitalist had in view when he bought labour-power. Its useful property of making yarn or boots was only a necessary condition, because labour must be spent in a useful form in order to form value. What decided the matter was the specific use-value of this commodity: to be a source of value, and of more value than it has itself. This is the specific service the capitalist expects from it.
And in this he proceeds according to the eternal laws of commodity exchange. In fact, the seller of labour-power, like the seller of any other commodity, realizes its exchange-value and gives up its use-value. He cannot keep one without giving away the other. The use-value of labour-power, labour itself, belongs as little to its seller as the use-value of sold oil belongs to the oil-dealer. The money-owner has paid the daily value of labour-power; therefore its use for the day, a day's labour, belongs to him. The fact that the daily maintenance of labour-power costs only half a working day, while labour-power can act, can work, for a whole day - so that the value its use creates during a day is twice as great as its own daily value - is special good luck for the buyer, but no wrong at all against the seller.
Our capitalist foresaw the case that makes him laugh. The worker therefore finds in the workshop the means of production needed not only for a six-hour labour-process but for a twelve-hour one. If 10 lbs. of cotton absorbed 6 labour-hours and turned into 10 lbs. of yarn, then 20 lbs. of cotton will absorb 12 labour-hours and turn into 20 lbs. of yarn.
Look at the product of the prolonged labour-process. In the 20 lbs. of yarn, 5 working days are now objectified: 4 in the consumed cotton and spindle mass, and 1 absorbed by the cotton during the spinning process. The gold expression of 5 working days is 30 sh., or 1 pound sterling and 10 sh. This, then, is the price of the 20 lbs. of yarn. The pound of yarn still costs 1 sh. 6 d. But the sum of values of the commodities thrown into the process was 27 sh. The value of the yarn is 30 sh. The value of the product has grown by 1/9 over the value advanced for its production. So 27 sh. have become 30 sh. They have created a surplus-value of 3 sh. The trick has finally succeeded. Money has been transformed into capital.
All the conditions of the problem have been solved, and the laws of commodity exchange have not been violated in any way. Equivalent was exchanged for equivalent. As buyer, the capitalist paid each commodity at its value: cotton, spindle mass, labour-power. He then did what every other buyer of commodities does. He consumed their use-value. The consumption process of labour-power, which is also the production process of the commodity, yielded a product of 20 lbs. of yarn with a value of 30 sh.
The capitalist now returns to the market and sells a commodity after having bought commodities. He sells the pound of yarn for 1 sh. 6 d., exactly at its value. And yet he draws 3 sh. more out of circulation than he originally threw into it. This whole course, the transformation of his money into capital, takes place in the sphere of circulation and does not take place in it. Through the mediation of circulation, because it depends on buying labour-power on the commodity market. Not in circulation, because circulation only opens the valorization process, which takes place in the sphere of production. And so everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
By turning money into commodities that serve as material formers of a new product, or as factors of the labour-process, and by incorporating living labour-power into their dead objectivity, the capitalist turns value - past, objectified, dead labour - into capital, into self-valorizing value: an animated monster that begins to "work," as if it had love in its body.
If we now compare the value-forming process and the valorization process, the valorization process is nothing but the value-forming process prolonged beyond a certain point. If the value-forming process lasts only until the point where the value of labour-power paid by capital has been replaced by a new equivalent, it is a simple value-forming process. If the value-forming process lasts beyond this point, it becomes a valorization process.
If we further compare the value-forming process with the labour-process, the labour-process consists in useful labour that produces use-values. The movement is considered qualitatively here, in its particular way, by aim and content. The same labour-process presents itself in the value-forming process only from its quantitative side. The only issue is the time the labour takes for its operation, or the duration for which labour-power is usefully spent.
Here the commodities that enter the labour-process no longer count as particular materials with particular jobs in useful work. They count only as definite amounts of past labour. It no longer matters whether that labour is already in the means of production or is newly added by labour-power. From this side, labour counts only by time: so many hours, days, and so on.
But labour counts only insofar as the time consumed in producing the use-value is socially necessary. This includes several things. Labour-power must function under normal conditions. If the spinning machine is the socially dominant instrument of labour in spinning, the worker must not be handed a spinning wheel. Instead of cotton of normal quality, he must not be given trash that tears every moment. In both cases, he would spend more than the socially necessary labour-time producing a pound of yarn, but this surplus time would form neither value nor money. The normal character of the objective factors of labour depends not on the worker, however, but on the capitalist.
A further condition is the normal character of labour-power itself. In the trade where it is used, it must possess the prevailing average measure of skill, dexterity, and quickness. But our capitalist bought labour-power of normal quality on the labour market. This power must be spent with the usual average degree of effort, with the socially usual level of intensity. The capitalist watches over this just as anxiously as he watches that no time is wasted without work. He bought labour-power for a definite period. He insists on having what is his. He does not want to be robbed.
Finally - and for this our same gentleman has his own penal code - no purposeless consumption of raw material and instruments of labour may take place, because wasted material or instruments of labour represent quantities of objectified labour spent in excess, and therefore do not count and do not enter the product of value-formation.
We see that the distinction earlier won from the analysis of the commodity - the distinction between labour insofar as it produces use-value and the same labour insofar as it creates value - has now presented itself as the distinction between different sides of the production process.
As a unity of labour-process and value-forming process, the production process is a process of producing commodities. As a unity of labour-process and valorization process, it is the capitalist production process, the capitalist form of commodity production.
Earlier we noted that, for valorization, it makes no difference whether the labour capital takes over is simple average labour or more complex labour. More complex labour means labour-power that cost more to train and produce. Because that labour-power has a higher value, its labour counts as more simple labour in the same amount of time.
Yet whatever the degree of difference between spinning labour and jeweller's labour, the part of labour by which the jeweller merely replaces the value of his own labour-power is in no way qualitatively different from the additional part of labour by which he creates surplus-value. As before, surplus-value comes out only through a quantitative excess of labour, through the prolonged duration of the same labour-process - in one case the process of yarn production, in the other the process of jewel production.
On the other hand, in every value-forming process, higher labour must always be reduced to average social labour - for example, one day of higher labour to x days of simple labour. We therefore spare ourselves a superfluous operation and simplify the analysis by assuming that the worker employed by capital performs simple average social labour.
The use of labour-power is labour itself. The buyer of labour-power consumes it by setting its seller to work. Through this, the seller becomes actively working labour-power, a worker in fact, whereas before he was only one in potential.
For his labour to appear in commodities, he must first put it into use-values — things that satisfy needs of some kind. So the capitalist has the worker make a particular use-value, a definite article. Producing use-values, or goods, does not change its general nature just because it is done for the capitalist and under his control. So the labour-process must first be considered apart from every definite social form.
Labour is first of all a process between human beings and nature. In it, the human being mediates, regulates, and controls his material metabolism with nature through his own action. He faces natural material as a natural force himself. He sets the natural forces of his own body — arms and legs, head and hand — in motion so that he can take hold of natural material in a form useful for his own life. By acting on nature outside him and changing it, he also changes his own nature. He develops powers sleeping within it and brings their play under his own command.
We are not dealing here with the first animal-like, instinctive forms of labour. The condition in which the worker appears on the market as seller of his own labour-power is separated by a vast primitive background from the condition in which human labour had not yet thrown off its first instinct-like form. We assume labour in a form that belongs exclusively to human beings.
A spider carries out operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts many a human builder to shame with its wax cells. But what sets the worst builder apart from the best bee from the start is that he has built the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the end of the labour-process there is a result that was already present in the worker's idea at the beginning. He does not only change the form of natural material. At the same time, he realizes his own purpose in that material; he knows that purpose, it gives law to the way he acts, and he has to subordinate his will to it. This subordination is not a single passing act. The worker also has to keep willing the task. That will shows itself as attention, and it has to last as long as the work lasts. The less the work itself draws him in, and the less he enjoys doing it, the more effort that attention takes.
The simple moments of the labour-process are purposive activity, or labour itself; the subject it works on; and the instrument it uses.
The earth — economically speaking, water included — originally equips human beings with provisions, with finished means of subsistence, without any action of their own. In that form it stands there as the general subject of human labour. All the things that labour merely separates from their immediate connection with the earth as a whole are subjects of labour found ready in nature: fish caught and taken from their element, water; timber felled in the virgin forest; ore broken loose from its vein.
If, on the other hand, the subject of labour has already been filtered, so to speak, through earlier labour, we call it raw material: for example, ore already broken loose and now being washed. Every raw material is a subject of labour, but not every subject of labour is raw material. A subject of labour is raw material only once it has already undergone a change mediated by labour.
An instrument of labour is a thing, or a set of things, that the worker places between himself and the subject of labour and that serves as the conductor of his activity upon that subject. He uses the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of things as powers acting on other things, according to his purpose. Apart from taking hold of finished means of subsistence, such as fruit, where his own bodily organs alone serve as instruments, the first thing the worker takes possession of is not the subject of labour but the instrument. So nature itself becomes an organ of his activity, an organ he adds to his own bodily organs, lengthening his natural body despite the Bible.
Just as the earth is his original storehouse of provisions, it is also his original arsenal of instruments. It gives him, for example, the stone with which he throws, rubs, presses, cuts, and so on. The earth itself is an instrument of labour, but using it that way in agriculture already requires a whole series of other instruments and a relatively high development of labour-power. Once the labour-process is even slightly developed, it already needs worked-up instruments. In the oldest human caves we find stone tools and stone weapons. Alongside worked stone, wood, bone, and shells, the tamed animal — itself already changed by labour and breeding — plays the main role as an instrument of labour at the beginning of human history.
The use and making of instruments of labour, although present in germ among some animal species, characterize the specifically human labour-process. Franklin therefore defines the human being as "a toolmaking animal." Relics of instruments of labour have the same importance for judging extinct economic social formations that bone relics have for knowing the organization of extinct animal species. It is not what is made, but how it is made, and with what instruments, that distinguishes economic epochs. Instruments of labour are not only measures of the development of human labour-power; they are also indicators of the social relations in which work is done. Among instruments themselves, the mechanical instruments — the bone and muscle system of production — give much more decisive marks of a social epoch of production than instruments that serve only as containers for the subject of labour, such as pipes, barrels, baskets, jars, and the like, which can be called the vascular system of production. Only in chemical manufacture do these become especially important.
In a wider sense, the labour-process counts among its instruments not only the things that mediate the effect of labour on its subject and so serve in one way or another as conductors of activity. It also includes all objective conditions required for the process to take place at all. These do not enter directly into the process, but without them it either cannot happen or can happen only incompletely. The general instrument of this kind is again the earth itself, because it gives the worker a place to stand and gives his process its field of action. Instruments of this kind that have already been mediated by labour include work buildings, canals, roads, and so on.
In the labour-process, then, human activity uses the instrument of labour to bring about an intended change in the subject of labour. The process goes out in the product. Its product is a use-value: natural material made fit for human needs through a change of form. Labour has joined itself with its subject. The labour is objectified, and the subject is worked up. What appeared on the worker's side as unrest now appears on the product's side as a resting property, as a form of being. He has spun, and the product is yarn.
If we start from the finished product, the subject worked on and the instrument both look like means of production, and the work itself looks like productive labour.
When a use-value comes out of the labour-process as a product, other use-values, products of earlier labour-processes, enter it as means of production. The same use-value that is the product of one labour-process forms the means of production for another. Products are therefore not only results of the labour-process, but also its conditions.
Except for extractive industry, which finds its subject of labour directly in nature — mining, hunting, fishing, and agriculture insofar as it first breaks up virgin soil — every branch of industry works on a subject that is raw material: a subject of labour already filtered through labour, already a product of labour. Seed in agriculture is one example. Animals and plants that we tend to view as products of nature are, in their present forms, not only products perhaps of last year's labour, but products of a transformation continued through many generations under human control and by means of human labour. As for instruments of labour in particular, the great majority show the trace of past labour at the most superficial glance.
Raw material can form the main substance of a product, or it can enter into the product's formation only as an accessory material. An accessory material may be consumed by the instrument of labour, as coal is consumed by the steam-engine, oil by the wheel, or hay by the draught horse. It may be added to the raw material to bring about a material change, as chlorine is added to unbleached linen, coal to iron, or dye to wool. Or it may support the carrying out of the work itself, as with materials used for lighting and heating the workplace. The difference between main substance and accessory material becomes blurred in true chemical manufacture, because none of the raw materials used reappears as the substance of the product.
Since every thing has many properties and can therefore be put to different uses, the same product can form the raw material of very different labour-processes. Corn, for example, is raw material for the miller, the starch maker, the distiller, the cattle breeder, and so on. It becomes raw material for its own production as seed. In the same way, coal comes out of mining as a product and goes back into mining as a means of production.
The same product may serve in the same labour-process as both instrument of labour and raw material. In cattle fattening, for example, the cattle are the raw material being worked on and at the same time the instrument for producing manure.
A product that exists in a form ready for consumption can become raw material again for another product, as grapes become the raw material of wine. Or labour can release its product in forms that are useful only as raw material again. Raw material in this condition is called a semi-finished product, though it would be better called a stage-product: cotton, thread, yarn, and so on. Although it is already a product, the original raw material may have to pass through a whole ladder of different processes. In each process, in a changed shape each time, it functions again as raw material until the final labour-process casts it off as a finished means of subsistence or a finished instrument of labour.
We can see, then, that whether a use-value appears as raw material, instrument of labour, or product depends entirely on its definite function in the labour-process, on the place it takes in that process. When that place changes, those determinations change with it.
When products enter new labour-processes as means of production, they lose the character of products. They function only as objective factors of living labour. The spinner treats the spindle only as the means he spins with, and the flax only as the subject he spins. Of course one cannot spin without spinning material and a spindle. So the existence of these products is presupposed at the start of spinning.
In the process itself, however, it is just as indifferent that flax and spindle are products of past labour as it is, in the act of eating, that bread is the product of the past labours of farmer, miller, baker, and so on. Conversely, means of production assert their character as products of past labour in the labour-process through their defects. A knife that does not cut, yarn that keeps snapping, and the like vividly remind us of cutler A and yarn-finisher E. In the successful product, the mediation of its useful properties by past labour is erased.
A machine that does not serve in the labour-process is useless. Besides that, it falls prey to the destructive power of natural metabolism. Iron rusts; wood rots. Yarn that is not woven or knitted is spoiled cotton. Living labour must seize these things, wake them from the dead, and turn them from merely possible use-values into real and effective use-values. Licked by the fire of labour, appropriated as bodies of labour, animated for the functions they are meant to perform in the process, they are also consumed — but consumed purposefully, as formative elements of new use-values, new products that can enter individual consumption as means of subsistence or enter a new labour-process as means of production.
Existing products are not only results of the labour-process but also conditions of its existence. At the same time, throwing them into the labour-process — bringing them into contact with living labour — is the only way to preserve and realize these products of past labour as use-values.
Labour uses up its material elements, its subject and its instrument; it eats them, and is therefore a process of consumption. This productive consumption differs from individual consumption in this: individual consumption consumes products as means of life for the living person, while productive consumption consumes them as means of life for labour, for labour-power in action. The product of individual consumption is therefore the consumer himself; the result of productive consumption is a product distinct from the consumer.
Insofar as its instrument and its subject are themselves already products, labour consumes products in order to create products, or uses products as means of production for products. But just as the labour-process originally takes place only between human beings and the earth present without their action, so even now means of production still serve in it that exist by nature and do not represent any union of natural material and human labour.
The labour-process, as we have presented it in its simple and abstract moments, is purposive activity for making use-values. It is the appropriation of natural material for human needs, the general condition of the material metabolism between human beings and nature, the eternal natural condition of human life. For that reason it is independent of every form of that life, or rather common to all its social forms.
We therefore did not have to present the worker in relation to other workers. The human being and his labour on one side, nature and its materials on the other, were enough. Just as one cannot taste in wheat who grew it, one cannot see in this process itself the conditions under which it takes place: whether under the brutal whip of the slave overseer or under the anxious eye of the capitalist; whether Cincinnatus performs it in cultivating his few acres or a savage does it by killing a beast with a stone.
Let us return to our would-be capitalist. We left him after he had bought, on the commodity-market, all the factors needed for a labour-process: the objective factors, or means of production, and the personal factor, labour-power. With the sharp eye of a connoisseur, he chose the means of production and the kinds of labour-power suited to his particular business, such as spinning, bootmaking, and so on.
Our capitalist now sets about consuming the commodity he bought, labour-power. That is, he has the bearer of labour-power, the worker, consume the means of production through his labour. The general nature of the labour-process is of course not changed because the worker carries it out for the capitalist instead of for himself. Nor can the definite way of making boots or spinning yarn be changed at first merely by the capitalist's stepping in. He must first take labour-power as he finds it on the market, and therefore also take its labour as it arose in a period when there were not yet any capitalists. The transformation of the mode of production itself through the subordination of labour to capital can happen only later, and therefore has to be considered only later.
The labour-process, as it proceeds as the capitalist's process of consuming labour-power, now shows two peculiar phenomena.
First, the worker works under the control of the capitalist, to whom his labour belongs. The capitalist watches to make sure the work is carried out properly and the means of production are used in a purposive way: that raw material is not wasted, and that the instrument of labour is spared, meaning destroyed only as far as its use in the work requires.
Second, the product is the property of the capitalist, not of the immediate producer, the worker. The capitalist pays, for example, the day's value of labour-power. Its use, like the use of any other commodity — a horse rented for a day, for instance — belongs to him for that day. The buyer of the commodity owns the use of the commodity, and the possessor of labour-power in fact gives only the use-value he has sold when he gives his labour.
From the moment the worker entered the capitalist's workshop, the use-value of his labour-power, and therefore its use, labour, belonged to the capitalist. By buying labour-power, the capitalist has incorporated labour itself, as a living ferment, into the dead formative elements of the product that also belong to him. From his standpoint, the labour-process is only the consumption of the commodity he has bought, labour-power; but he can consume it only by adding means of production to it. The labour-process is a process between things the capitalist has bought, between things belonging to him. The product of this process therefore belongs to him just as much as the product of fermentation in his wine cellar.
The product, which belongs to the capitalist, is a use-value: yarn, boots, and so on. But even if boots are, in a certain sense, the basis of social progress, and even if our capitalist is a decided man of progress, he does not make boots for their own sake. In commodity production, use-value is not the thing one loves for itself. Use-values are produced here only because, and only insofar as, they are the material body that carries exchange-value.
Our capitalist is after two things. First, he wants to produce a use-value that has exchange-value: an article meant for sale, a commodity. Second, he wants to produce a commodity worth more than the sum of the values of the goods needed to make it - the means of production and labour-power for which he advanced his good money on the market. He wants to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not only value, but surplus-value.
Since we are dealing here with commodity production, we have plainly looked at only one side of the process so far. Just as the commodity itself is a unity of use-value and value, its production process must be a unity of the labour-process and the value-forming process.
Let us now look at the production process also as a value-forming process.
We know that the value of every commodity is fixed by the quantity of labour materialized in its use-value: by the socially necessary labour-time needed to produce it. This also holds for the product our capitalist got as the result of the labour-process. So the first thing is to calculate the labour objectified in that product.
Take yarn, for example.
To make the yarn, raw material was needed first: say 10 lbs. of cotton. The value of the cotton does not have to be investigated now, because the capitalist bought it on the market at its value, say 10 sh. In the price of the cotton, the labour needed to produce it is already expressed as general social labour. Let us also assume that the mass of spindle used up in working the cotton - standing here for all the other instruments of labour used - has a value of 2 sh. If a mass of gold worth 12 sh. is the product of 24 hours of labour, or two working days, then, to begin with, two days of labour are objectified in the yarn.
Do not be thrown off by the fact that the cotton has changed form and the used-up spindle has disappeared. By the general law of value, 10 lbs. of yarn are an equivalent for 10 lbs. of cotton and one-quarter of a spindle if the value of 40 lbs. of yarn equals the value of 40 lbs. of cotton plus the value of a whole spindle - that is, if the same labour-time is required to produce both sides of the equation.
In that case, the same labour-time appears once in the use-value yarn and once in the use-values cotton and spindle. Value is indifferent to whether it appears in yarn, spindle, or cotton. The fact that spindle and cotton do not lie quietly side by side, but enter the spinning process together, change their use-forms, and turn into yarn, affects their value no more than if they had simply been exchanged for an equivalent amount of yarn.
The labour-time needed to produce the cotton is part of the labour-time needed to produce the yarn, since cotton is the yarn's raw material; so that labour-time is contained in the yarn. The same is true of the labour-time needed to produce the mass of spindle, since the cotton could not be spun without the spindle being worn down or consumed.
So, when the value of the yarn is at issue - the labour-time needed to make it - the different particular labour-processes, separated in time and place, can be treated as successive phases of one and the same labour-process: producing the cotton, producing the used-up spindle, and finally making yarn out of cotton and spindle.
All the labour contained in the yarn is past labour. It makes no difference that the labour-time needed for its elements lies further back, while the final spinning is closer to the present. If 30 working days are needed to build a house, the total labour-time worked into the house is not changed by the fact that the thirtieth day entered production 29 days after the first. In the same way, the labour-time contained in the material and instruments of labour can be treated as if it had been spent in an earlier stage of the spinning process, before the labour finally added in the form of spinning.
The values of the means of production, the cotton and the spindle, expressed in the price of 12 sh., therefore form parts of the yarn's value, or of the value of the product.
Only two conditions have to be met. First, cotton and spindle must really have served to produce a use-value. In our case, they must have become yarn. Value is indifferent to which use-value carries it, but some use-value must carry it.
Second, only the labour-time necessary under the given social conditions of production is assumed to have been used. If only 1 lb. of cotton is needed to spin 1 lb. of yarn, then only 1 lb. of cotton may be consumed in forming 1 lb. of yarn. The same holds for the spindle. If the capitalist gets the fancy to use golden spindles instead of iron ones, then the value of the yarn still counts only the socially necessary labour - that is, the labour-time needed to produce iron spindles.
We now know which part of the yarn's value comes from the means of production, cotton and spindle. It equals 12 sh., the material form of two working days. The question now is the part of the value that the spinner's own labour adds to the cotton.
We now have to consider this labour from a very different standpoint than in the labour-process. There it was a purposeful activity, turning cotton into yarn. The more suited the labour was to that end, assuming everything else stayed the same, the better the yarn. The spinner's labour was specifically different from other productive labours: different in its aim, in its method, in the nature of its means of production, and in the use-value of its product. Cotton and spindle are means of life for spinning labour, but you cannot make rifled cannon with them.
But insofar as the spinner's labour forms value, and so is a source of value, it is no different from the labour of the cannon-borer, or, closer to our case, from the labour of the cotton grower and the spindle maker already realized in the yarn's means of production. Only because of this sameness can cotton growing, spindle making, and spinning form merely quantitative parts of one total value, the value of the yarn. Here the quality, character, and content of the labour no longer matter; only its quantity does. That quantity simply has to be counted. We assume that spinning is simple labour, society's average labour. Later we will see that the opposite assumption changes nothing.
During the labour-process, labour is constantly changing from unrest into being, from motion into objectivity. At the end of one hour, the spinning motion is represented in a certain quantity of yarn; in other words, a definite quantity of labour, one labour-hour, is objectified in the cotton. We say labour-hour - the spinner's expenditure of life-force for an hour - because spinning labour counts here only insofar as it is expenditure of labour-power, not insofar as it is the specific labour of spinning.
It is now decisively important that, for the whole duration of the process - the transformation of cotton into yarn - only socially necessary labour-time is consumed. If, under normal, average social conditions of production, a lbs. of cotton must be turned into b lbs. of yarn in one labour-hour, then a working day counts as a 12-hour working day only if 12 x a lbs. of cotton have been turned into 12 x b lbs. of yarn. Only socially necessary labour-time counts as value-forming.
Like labour itself, raw material and product appear here in a quite different light than from the standpoint of the actual labour-process. The raw material counts only as the absorber of a definite quantity of labour. By this absorption it really does turn into yarn, because labour-power has been spent and added to it in the form of spinning. But the product, the yarn, is now only the gauge of the labour absorbed by the cotton.
If 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton are spun, or turned into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn, in one hour, then 10 lbs. of yarn indicate 6 absorbed labour-hours. Definite quantities of product, fixed by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of congealed labour-time. They are only the material form of one hour, two hours, a day of social labour.
That the labour is specifically spinning labour, that its material is cotton, and that its product is yarn, is now just as indifferent as the fact that the object of labour is itself already a product, and so raw material. If the worker were employed in a coal mine instead of a spinning mill, the object of labour, coal, would be present by nature. All the same, a definite quantity of coal broken from the bed, say a hundredweight, would represent a definite quantity of absorbed labour.
When labour-power was sold, we assumed that its daily value was 3 sh., and that 6 hours of labour were embodied in that value; this quantity of labour is therefore needed to produce the average sum of the worker's daily means of subsistence. Now if our spinner turns 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn in one hour, then in 6 hours he turns 10 lbs. of cotton into 10 lbs. of yarn. During the spinning process, then, the cotton absorbs 6 labour-hours. The same labour-time is represented in a quantity of gold worth 3 sh. So spinning itself adds a value of 3 sh. to the cotton.
Now look at the total value of the product, the 10 lbs. of yarn. In them, 2 1/2 working days are objectified: 2 days contained in cotton and spindle mass, and 1/2 day of labour absorbed during the spinning process. The same labour-time is represented in a mass of gold worth 15 sh. So the price adequate to the value of the 10 lbs. of yarn is 15 sh., and the price of one pound of yarn is 1 sh. 6 d.
Our capitalist is startled. The value of the product equals the value of the capital advanced. The value advanced has not become more value, has created no surplus-value, and so money has not been transformed into capital. The price of the 10 lbs. of yarn is 15 sh., and 15 sh. were spent on the market for the elements that formed the product - or, what is the same thing, for the factors of the labour-process: 10 sh. for cotton, 2 sh. for the used-up spindle mass, and 3 sh. for labour-power.
The swollen value of the yarn helps nothing, because its value is only the sum of the values earlier distributed among cotton, spindle, and labour-power; out of such a mere addition of existing values, surplus-value can never arise. These values are now all concentrated in one thing, but they were already concentrated in the money sum of 15 sh. before that sum was split up through three purchases.
In itself, this result is not surprising. The value of 1 lb. of yarn is 1 sh. 6 d., so our capitalist would have to pay 15 sh. on the market for 10 lbs. of yarn. Whether he buys his private house finished on the market or has it built himself, neither operation will increase the money laid out to acquire the house.
The capitalist, who knows his way around vulgar economics, may say that he advanced his money with the intention of making more money out of it. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and he could just as well have intended to make money without producing. He threatens: he will not be caught again; next time he will buy the commodity ready-made on the market instead of producing it himself. But if all his brother capitalists do the same, where will he find commodities on the market? And he cannot eat money.
He preaches. Think of his abstinence, he says. He could have squandered his 15 sh.; instead, he consumed it productively and made yarn. But for that he now has yarn instead of a bad conscience. He must not fall back into the role of the hoarder, who already showed us what comes of asceticism. Besides, where nothing exists, even the emperor loses his right. Whatever the merit of his renunciation, there is nothing there to pay it with, since the value of the product that comes out of the process is only equal to the sum of the commodity values thrown into it. Let him comfort himself, then, that virtue is its own reward. Instead, he becomes pushy. The yarn is useless to him; he produced it for sale. Then let him sell it - or, still more simply, let him produce in future only things for his own needs, a cure his house doctor MacCulloch has already prescribed against the epidemic of overproduction.
He plants himself defiantly. Could the worker create products of labour, produce commodities, with his own limbs in the blue air? Did the capitalist not give him the material in and through which alone his labour could take body? Since most of society consists of such have-nots, has he not performed an immeasurable service to society with his means of production, his cotton and spindle - and to the worker too, whom he also supplied with means of subsistence? And should he not charge for the service? But did the worker not render him the counter-service of turning cotton and spindle into yarn? Besides, this is not about services. A service is nothing but the useful effect of a use-value, whether of a commodity or of labour. Here, however, exchange-value is at stake. He paid the worker the value of 3 sh. The worker gave him back an exact equivalent in the value of 3 sh. added to the cotton: value for value.
Our friend, just now so capital-proud, suddenly takes on the modest bearing of his own worker. Did he not work himself? Did he not perform the labour of watching over and superintending the spinner? Does his labour not also form value? His own overlooker and manager shrug their shoulders. Meanwhile, with a cheerful smile, he has already taken on his old face again. He fooled us with the whole litany. He does not care a whit about it. He leaves this and similar lazy excuses and hollow phrases to the professors of political economy who are paid for them. He himself is a practical man: he may not always think about what he says outside business, but in business he always knows what he is doing.
Let us look more closely. The daily value of labour-power was 3 sh. because half a working day is objectified in it - that is, because the means of subsistence needed each day to produce labour-power cost half a working day. But the past labour contained in labour-power and the living labour it can perform, its daily maintenance costs and its daily expenditure, are two quite different amounts. The first determines its exchange-value; the second forms its use-value. That half a working day is needed to keep the worker alive for 24 hours does not prevent him from working a whole day.
The value of labour-power and the value made by using it in the labour-process are therefore two different amounts. This difference in value was what the capitalist had in view when he bought labour-power. Its useful property of making yarn or boots was only a necessary condition, because labour must be spent in a useful form in order to form value. What decided the matter was the specific use-value of this commodity: to be a source of value, and of more value than it has itself. This is the specific service the capitalist expects from it.
And in this he proceeds according to the eternal laws of commodity exchange. In fact, the seller of labour-power, like the seller of any other commodity, realizes its exchange-value and gives up its use-value. He cannot keep one without giving away the other. The use-value of labour-power, labour itself, belongs as little to its seller as the use-value of sold oil belongs to the oil-dealer. The money-owner has paid the daily value of labour-power; therefore its use for the day, a day's labour, belongs to him. The fact that the daily maintenance of labour-power costs only half a working day, while labour-power can act, can work, for a whole day - so that the value its use creates during a day is twice as great as its own daily value - is special good luck for the buyer, but no wrong at all against the seller.
Our capitalist foresaw the case that makes him laugh. The worker therefore finds in the workshop the means of production needed not only for a six-hour labour-process but for a twelve-hour one. If 10 lbs. of cotton absorbed 6 labour-hours and turned into 10 lbs. of yarn, then 20 lbs. of cotton will absorb 12 labour-hours and turn into 20 lbs. of yarn.
Look at the product of the prolonged labour-process. In the 20 lbs. of yarn, 5 working days are now objectified: 4 in the consumed cotton and spindle mass, and 1 absorbed by the cotton during the spinning process. The gold expression of 5 working days is 30 sh., or 1 pound sterling and 10 sh. This, then, is the price of the 20 lbs. of yarn. The pound of yarn still costs 1 sh. 6 d. But the sum of values of the commodities thrown into the process was 27 sh. The value of the yarn is 30 sh. The value of the product has grown by 1/9 over the value advanced for its production. So 27 sh. have become 30 sh. They have created a surplus-value of 3 sh. The trick has finally succeeded. Money has been transformed into capital.
All the conditions of the problem have been solved, and the laws of commodity exchange have not been violated in any way. Equivalent was exchanged for equivalent. As buyer, the capitalist paid each commodity at its value: cotton, spindle mass, labour-power. He then did what every other buyer of commodities does. He consumed their use-value. The consumption process of labour-power, which is also the production process of the commodity, yielded a product of 20 lbs. of yarn with a value of 30 sh.
The capitalist now returns to the market and sells a commodity after having bought commodities. He sells the pound of yarn for 1 sh. 6 d., exactly at its value. And yet he draws 3 sh. more out of circulation than he originally threw into it. This whole course, the transformation of his money into capital, takes place in the sphere of circulation and does not take place in it. Through the mediation of circulation, because it depends on buying labour-power on the commodity market. Not in circulation, because circulation only opens the valorization process, which takes place in the sphere of production. And so everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
By turning money into commodities that serve as material formers of a new product, or as factors of the labour-process, and by incorporating living labour-power into their dead objectivity, the capitalist turns value - past, objectified, dead labour - into capital, into self-valorizing value: an animated monster that begins to "work," as if it had love in its body.
If we now compare the value-forming process and the valorization process, the valorization process is nothing but the value-forming process prolonged beyond a certain point. If the value-forming process lasts only until the point where the value of labour-power paid by capital has been replaced by a new equivalent, it is a simple value-forming process. If the value-forming process lasts beyond this point, it becomes a valorization process.
If we further compare the value-forming process with the labour-process, the labour-process consists in useful labour that produces use-values. The movement is considered qualitatively here, in its particular way, by aim and content. The same labour-process presents itself in the value-forming process only from its quantitative side. The only issue is the time the labour takes for its operation, or the duration for which labour-power is usefully spent.
Here the commodities that enter the labour-process no longer count as particular materials with particular jobs in useful work. They count only as definite amounts of past labour. It no longer matters whether that labour is already in the means of production or is newly added by labour-power. From this side, labour counts only by time: so many hours, days, and so on.
But labour counts only insofar as the time consumed in producing the use-value is socially necessary. This includes several things. Labour-power must function under normal conditions. If the spinning machine is the socially dominant instrument of labour in spinning, the worker must not be handed a spinning wheel. Instead of cotton of normal quality, he must not be given trash that tears every moment. In both cases, he would spend more than the socially necessary labour-time producing a pound of yarn, but this surplus time would form neither value nor money. The normal character of the objective factors of labour depends not on the worker, however, but on the capitalist.
A further condition is the normal character of labour-power itself. In the trade where it is used, it must possess the prevailing average measure of skill, dexterity, and quickness. But our capitalist bought labour-power of normal quality on the labour market. This power must be spent with the usual average degree of effort, with the socially usual level of intensity. The capitalist watches over this just as anxiously as he watches that no time is wasted without work. He bought labour-power for a definite period. He insists on having what is his. He does not want to be robbed.
Finally - and for this our same gentleman has his own penal code - no purposeless consumption of raw material and instruments of labour may take place, because wasted material or instruments of labour represent quantities of objectified labour spent in excess, and therefore do not count and do not enter the product of value-formation.
We see that the distinction earlier won from the analysis of the commodity - the distinction between labour insofar as it produces use-value and the same labour insofar as it creates value - has now presented itself as the distinction between different sides of the production process.
As a unity of labour-process and value-forming process, the production process is a process of producing commodities. As a unity of labour-process and valorization process, it is the capitalist production process, the capitalist form of commodity production.
Earlier we noted that, for valorization, it makes no difference whether the labour capital takes over is simple average labour or more complex labour. More complex labour means labour-power that cost more to train and produce. Because that labour-power has a higher value, its labour counts as more simple labour in the same amount of time.
Yet whatever the degree of difference between spinning labour and jeweller's labour, the part of labour by which the jeweller merely replaces the value of his own labour-power is in no way qualitatively different from the additional part of labour by which he creates surplus-value. As before, surplus-value comes out only through a quantitative excess of labour, through the prolonged duration of the same labour-process - in one case the process of yarn production, in the other the process of jewel production.
On the other hand, in every value-forming process, higher labour must always be reduced to average social labour - for example, one day of higher labour to x days of simple labour. We therefore spare ourselves a superfluous operation and simplify the analysis by assuming that the worker employed by capital performs simple average social labour.