Exploitation
Reading Capital: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value
The eighth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, covering the whole of Part Three — Chapters Seven through Eleven, the analytical and moral heart of the book. Having passed through the door marked ‘No admittance except on business,’ Marx shows how surplus-value is actually produced in the workshop, how it is measured, and how the hunger for it turns the length of the working day into a battlefield. The word that governs the part is absolute: here surplus is squeezed out by the crudest method, lengthening the day. The objections run from the transformation problem to automation to the historical fall in working hours.
Read more →Reading Capital: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power
The seventh entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, and the climax of Part Two. Five chapters of demolition have left only one possibility standing: somewhere on the market there must be a commodity whose use creates more value than it costs. Chapter Six names it — labour-power, the human capacity to work — sets out the strange double freedom of the worker who sells it, works out its price, and then leads buyer and seller off the bright street of exchange and down into the hidden abode of production. The objections this time run from rising wages to the freedom of contract.
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