ORGANI SATION
Chapter 6. The Becoming of Capital
6. The Movement of Capital
Before the development of the capitalist mode of production, accumulation was mostly a non-reproductive process. Whether through expropriation, interest on debt or trade, surpluses were generally merely transferred from A to B. At this time, capitalist exploitation took place only in few branches of production in certain towns, and rarely included the whole commodity chain. The epochal shift introduced with the the capitalist mode of production is that this process is made reproductive. Capital comes back to posit its own beginning: M-C-M'. Whilst the line of regular trade begins and ends with the material consumption of wealth, C-M-C, two encounters between individual atoms that eventually compose each with a product, in capitalism this process
other forms of income or cultivate small plots of lands for the market on the side.
585 Ibid., 464.
586 'All directly social or communal labour on a large scale requires, to a greater or lesser extend, a directing authority, in order to secure the harmonious co-operation of the activities of individuals, and to perform the general functions that have their origin in the motion of the total productive organism, as distinguished from the motion of its separate organs. A single violin player is his own conductor: an orchestra requires a separate one.' Ibid., 448.
587 Ibid., 464.
588 Ibid., 460. See also E.P. Thompson's seminal article “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38, no. 1 (December 1, 1967), 56–97.
gets a life of its own. Marx, as we have seen in the previous chapter, often likens the capitalist mode of (re)production to an organism. Life, notes Hegel, is a very precise moment designating the articulation of chemical component into a living process: 'life is a perenniating chemical process.'589 For him, complex life is distinguished from simple life by being an organised whole. The organising function is called the soul: '[e]ach member has the entire soul within it, and is only independent through its being connected with the whole.'590 For Marx, capitalism is precisely defined by being a 'self-valorising-value' or 'value in process', which he speaks of in several places as the soul of capital.591 Thus he speaks of capital as a 'social soul' that enters the body of labour and products,592 when they are organised as elements in the life process of capital. Whereas the labourers had previously worked the land and made products for their own reproduction, the sustenance of their bodies is now predicated on helping the soul of this new mode of production wander:
While productive labour is changing the means of production into constituent elements of a new product, their value undergoes a metempsychosis [Seelenwandrung]. It deserts the consumed body to occupy the newly created one. But this transmigration [Seelenwandrung] takes place, as it were, behind the back of the actual labour in progress.593
Contrary to the common impression that this focus on the 'metaphysical subtleties' of capital is merely a satirical play with metaphors, our reading goes some way to show that these natural-historical concepts are precise notions of relationality, organisation, and reproduction. When money becomes capital, or rather when C-M-C becomes M-C-M' we have the shift from a chemical to a teleological process, i.e. from encounters that might produce sequences, to a self-reproducing and expansive system. This is the 'natural historic' logic of organisation which underlies what Antonio Negri calls Marx's 'method of the tendency.'594 However, the most precise layers of Marx's discourse are obviously those that critically work through the concepts of political economy, precisely
589 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature II, 219. See also Cinzia Ferrini, “The Transition to Organics: Hegel’s Idea of Life,” in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Chichester:
Blackwell Publishing, 2011).
590 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature III, 13, §337.
591 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 253–57. See appendix 6.4. on the 'soul' of capital. David McNally is one of the few to give attention to this, even if his reading ultimately stretches the idea of the soul in a metaphoric direction. Monsters of the Market (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 125.
592 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 909. My emphasis.
593 Ibid., 314.
594 Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991).
because the concepts of political economy refer to real abstractions.
So the epochal beginning of the capitalist mode of production marks the moment in which accumulation becomes a self-expanding self-positing process of self-valorisation.
The extraction of surplus-value which drives this process takes two forms. These two modes are the extraction of absolute and relative surplus-value: The former is related to strategies for increasing the total number of hours worked by increasing the workday and the workforce. The latter seeks to increase the intensity and productivity of work, by employing more and more machinery:
The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively on the length of the [social] working day, whereas the production of relative surplus-value completely revolutionizes the technical processes of labour and the groupings into which society is divided. It therefore requires a specifically capitalist mode of production, a mode of production which, along with its methods, means and conditions, arises and develops spontaneously on the basis of the formal subsumption of labour under capital. This formal subsumption is then replaced by a real subsumption.595
In formal subsumption, capital exploits a given labour process as it finds it by extracting the difference between the cost of labour-power (i.e. its means of reproduction) and the products of labour. This difference is absolute surplus-value.596 In real subsumption, the telos of capital organises the labour process itself in order to extract greater surplus-value relative to other capitals, through the introduction of labour saving technologies.597 Real and formal subsumption, as well as relative and absolute surplus-value, are systemic-logical concepts, however, they often also play a periodising function in Marx. They can thus help us trace the narrative of the shift from the dominance of trade and manufacture to industrial capitalism, which we have seen above, is the historical expression of the development of real subsumption out of formal subsumption. As Marx writes, with real subsumption, 'capitalist production ...
establishes itself as a mode of production sui generis and brings into being a new mode of material production.' What this means is that it produces not only profits, but capitalist social relations; capital thus begins to produce its own conditions.598
595 Ibid., 645. My emphasis.
596 Ibid., 1021.
597 Ibid., 1025.
598 Ibid., 1035.
[O]nly capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionises the entire structure of society by its organisation of the labour-process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all former epochs.599
As long as capital can extend this day, or more precisely extend the time of surplus-labour absolutely, by employing more workers who were hitherto out of work, or by lengthening the working day of the existing workforce, there is little pressure to invest in labour-saving machinery. The extraction of relative surplus-value happens exactly where the extension of the workday reaches the limit of the number of workers available within a given capital's field of operation, the limitation of the length of the working day whether by custom, struggle or law, and the 'natural' limitations of the working day, the 24 hours, or the number that a given body can labour before it collapses physically or psychically.
Capital's two fundamental strategies of exploitation, the production of absolute or relative surplus-value, give us two different logics of capitalist expansion (totalisation) on the level of social capital (in the process of expanded reproduction). On the one hand there is the connective and extensive logic of formal subsumption, and on the other the intensive and organisational logic of real subsumption. However, at this point we have only understood capital itself an expansive process of self-reproduction – and it cannot be understood as an organic process until we understand how it posits not only itself, but its presuppositions.