Surplus Value
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: Contradictions in the General Formula
The sixth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital. Chapter Four left a riddle: capital returns as more money, yet exchange only swaps equal values and creates nothing. Chapter Five is the most lawyerly chapter in the book — Marx plays prosecutor against every easy explanation of profit, proving that surplus can arise neither inside the marketplace nor outside it, until the gain seems not merely unexplained but impossible. Then, in the last paragraph, he names the single narrow opening through which the whole of capitalism will pass. The objections this time run from gains-from-trade to unequal exchange.
Read more →Reading Capital: The General Formula for Capital
The fifth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, and the first of Part Two. Here money stops serving exchange and begins serving itself: a person lays out money not to buy something to use but to end with more money than he began with. The result is capital — value in motion, self-expanding, endless — and the human capitalist is demoted to its conscious instrument. The chapter ends by setting a trap, the riddle of where the increment comes from, which the next chapter must spring. Critiques this time run from methodological individualism to Schumpeter’s growth engine.
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