Productive Labour

Reading Capital: The Production of Absolute and of Relative Surplus-Value

The tenth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, covering Part Five — Chapters Sixteen through Eighteen. This is the book at its most clinical: Marx knits the two methods of extracting surplus into one combined process, works through the algebra of how the length, intensity, and productivity of labour move surplus-value and wages together, and settles the correct way to express the rate of exploitation. Two sharp ideas hide in the arithmetic — a redefinition of ‘productive labour’ that turns a compliment into an indictment, and the charge that the ordinary way of measuring profit systematically conceals the rate of exploitation. The objections run from loaded vocabulary to question-begging measurement.