Class 16: Capital Chapters 17-20: Wages; Chapters 21-24: Accumulation, Reproduction

(grandiose orchestral music) - But remember that in general, the wage form is what Marx calls an eraser, it erases the capital relation. It does this by erasing the division of the day into necessary labor and surplus labor, because it looks like you're getting paid all the way through. If you compare it to corvee labor, which is why he spent so much time setting up this strange leftover of a medieval form, corvee labor, it's because the division is visible there, you know, you're working extra unpaid labor. The lord says "Not only do you have to do this every year, but when I ask you to, you have to do even extra, extra labor; and I will tell you, and you will be upset about it, you will take time away from your other harvesting, but you will know really clearly. " There isn't a, you could say, a politics of appearance in feudal forms, at least not in the same way that it is for capital, capital has as one of its mechanisms the mechanism of appearing as what it is not; "Actually, I'm gonna give electron power at University of Virginia next week," which is something else that appears as what it is not, but a much older thing. In capital, wages are the appearance of the capital relation, the misleading appearance. You could call it a false appearance, but it's not just merely false, it is directly correlated to the need of the system to present things differently than they are, the system would not function... This is the great hope of this book too, the system would not function if things appeared as they are, and the great hope of the book is, things will start to appear as they are and people will make different decisions. Marx says to compare wage labor to corvee labor where the division is visible between necessary and surplus labor, and also to compare it to slave labor where the labor appears totally unpaid. But in fact that's not true either, because the owners of enslaved people have to feed them and house them and do all the minimal things that you would need to do for wage workers as well. So there's something like reproducing their labor power, there's something like the cost of that labor power that even slave labor owners need to pay. Wage work is an eraser, not because it just makes it seem like nothing's there, but it everything is fine. Wage labor makes it seem like all labor is paid for. For Marx, all possible moral positions in a capital system rest on this illusion: if you push for better pay for work, you are taking a moral stance on a false basis; because this is not pay for work, and even if you improve it, you'll still have to take surplus value out of the day. All of the questions of morality vis-a-vis workers, what is good, what is just, what is free, what is maybe slightly better, if they stand on this false basis, they are also false. This is where he quotes the Roman legal economic cliche or phrase, (speaks Latin) these are two sides of an exchange relation with labor, "I give so that you will do, you do so that I will give," this is the reciprocal relationship. But in my very probably wrong Latin, what Marx is saying is what capitalism does is breaks this ancient law of exchange and changes it to (speaks Latin), "I give you little, and you do a lot. " But that's the part that's erased by the wage form. So there are several deceptions going on here; one is that, and Marx starts to lay them out, this one refers back to Chapter 4, Section 3, that workers are paid for the amount they work, right? We know they're paid only for necessary labor and not for surplus labor. But the illusion here is that it's an exchange of equivalents, (speaks Latin). The evidence to this, according to the vulgar economists, is that the workers agreed to the wage, and that the sale is successful

this is part of the faulty reasoning here. The essence that hides behind this unequal pay for equal work is the extortion of the capital relation, what you can't see because of the wage is that the reason you have to go to work is not because you've made an equal deal, but because the owners hold the means of production, you have to go there in order to get anything. That's the first deception that workers are paid for the amount they work. The second deception is that workers are paid for more if they work more. Do you remember this from the Time Wage section? And the evidence is that if you work more, you get paid more, but, of course, for every extra hour you work, especially if you're on an hourly wage, surplus value is coming out of that as well. So it's not a full lie that you get paid more for working more, you do get paid somewhat more for working more. And, in fact, for hourly workers whose work time can be reduced and expanded, it's sometimes necessary to work much more in order to make just what you need to live. Surplus labor is still a percentage of those extra hours. And keep in mind that the higher pay for overtime according to Marx's marginal, for reasons of marginal utility, the quality of that labor goes down, so you have to pay more to get people to do it and to get the same value out of it. And the third deception under this eraser of wage labor is that wage labor provides all needs in society. He does not spend a lot of time on this, but a lot of people have filled it in, starting with Rosa Luxemburg going all the way down through feminists and others, and now people who write about the informal economy, "To prop capital up, there's a whole host of labor that is unpaid, including domestic labor in the house, family labor, biological reproduction, care work, the work of children educating themselves, which we call work, but we don't pay. " Hidden inside this third deception that wage labor provides all the needs of society is that other kind of labor, reproductive labor: the labor needed that isn't explicitly counted in the wage, but the wage has to cover in some way to send workers back to work. And that includes the reproduction of future labor, including the reproduction of human beings, biological reproduction, if we can even use that word, and we're gonna start talking about that today. One other side of this, these supplements to wage labor, which wage labor really needs, so it needs overtime, and it needs reproductive labor in the house, and it needs the whole informal economy probably to keep it going where people are paid even at a lower rate; it also needs all the state aid that goes to keeping workers coming back that our taxes pay for. So in addition to not covering all the labor, it also doesn't cover all of our needs as workers, those are taken up by being spread out socially, or societally, through taxes. Does that make sense? The wage form for Marx is the great eraser. Any questions about that? Great, let's talk about time wages. All of these things have subtleties that make them really useful, and if you become an expert in time wages, you can either exploit your workers really effectively, or you can fight the exploitation really effectively. So time wages are the main wage form across the globe; this is, the wages are a form, the wage form is a form of paying people. It's not the only way to pay people, wages are just one form, and this is a form of the form: time wages. He breaks it into time wages and piece wages, we're gonna talk mostly about time wages. Marx's question is "How can time wages be manipulated by capitalists to get more out of what they've already agreed to? " We know that the wage is already an eraser of the basic inequality, right, that the wage equals the cost of subsistence, not the value produced. But it can be made more unequal, and that's what the time wage seems to do according to Marx. For example, if the wage is weekly or daily

the owner can buy six days of labor for X amount of money and then extend the workday by a bit, because in a daily wage or a weekly wage, it isn't explicitly said how long a day is. And we've seen in earlier chapters that adding 15-minutes, even 15-minutes a day means a lot of extra surplus value over the year. Every time there's an extension within an agreed upon wage period, the effective hourly wage drops. So this is a way to get around bargaining too. Again, a version of this is the yearly salary, which is an invitation to overwork, even for the management class, especially which many of us will be in. It's an invitation to overwork because nothing about the times of day is specified. So that's number one; if it's weekly or daily or monthly or yearly, that's an invitation for the capitalist to extend the time as long as they possibly can, there is no grounds to contest that. If you're paid by the hour, however... Do you remember this from reading the chapter? Is this all clear? Were these chapters hard or difficult? "Not so hard," okay. It's hard to know if I'm going over what's obvious with Marx, you know, some things are absolutely complicated. Anyway, tell me if this is too obvious. If you're paid by an hour, a worker can make more by working longer, we just said, but that's of course still divided into surplus value and the cost of labor power. And even in an hour, there's room for nibbling, where an hour is an hour and five minutes, and those things all add up. I like that technical term and the critique of political economy: nibbling. The hourly wage has other advantages for the capitalist, just to go over what Mark said. First of all, they can reduce the hours at will and add hours at will. You have not signed any contract to hire someone for a certain amount of hours. It breaks the day down into chunks that the capitalist can use. And if they can increase the intensity of work and lower the extension, they're actually making much more surplus value in the lower amount of time and paying less. This requires workers to work double shifts, to work overtime. This makes sense? This is an opportunity to produce across a whole labor field, a lot of underemployment. Hourly wage is an invitation to produce underemployment, it allows the capitalists to reduce wages in their particular sphere to less than what a person needs to survive. Of course, then the person is on their own to find the rest of their wages somewhere else. And then there's overtime. This is another way in which a capitalist gets more out of workers, they pay more for overtime, but there's still surplus value created, okay? So these are Marx's critiques of the political economists who thought "It's great if you have a wage, it's people earning what they deserve. And it's great if you have hourly wage, 'cause then they can work more if they need to work more. " Marx is taking apart these categories for the ways in which they can be exploited by capitalists. I'll mention one other thing from the Time Wage chapter, which is interesting. Marx's asked this strange question, which is, "Well, how does anyone decide on a wage? " And economists might say, "It's about supply and demand;" political economists might say, "Well, it's about the cost of necessary labor time. " Marx says something else, he says, "There's a kind of secret calculation. " This, I think would need to be followed up; that a person is gonna live X number of years, how long do we want a person to be able to live? This is a background calculation that isn't even maybe conscious to the individual capitalist, but the system is thinking, "How long do we think the workers should be allowed to live? How long should their energies last? We will give them enough sustenance for that," right? This is a kind of harrowing thought on Marx's part. So they need a certain amount of the means of subsistence, which more or less comes to X dollars an hour, or X dollars a week, that we can then pay them over their lifespan. There is a sense here that the decisions on living are being subsumed by the capital system

in a drastic and somewhat monstrous way. So what Marx is saying there is that the real floor of wages is when the capitalist imagines that the worker can't go on living anymore; that's the lowest floor, and they're always moving towards that lowest floor. Anything more for the workers is added to that lowest floor usually under duress. I'm sure there are other factors, he doesn't develop this here, but it is a harrowing thought. We start with, "How can we drive this population to the minimum, and then if we're forced to up it in different ways, we might. " Questions about that, wages? What are you gonna do now? You have to go out and work. Will you be thinking about the wage form when you're on the job market? More or less. All right, so maybe I take this as relatively straightforward. But let's talk about another phenomenon that's very important to the logic of capital. We talked a little bit about different modes of this logic in the beginning, for example, when we were talking about exchange, and Marx invented these categories, the relative and the independent... What was it? - Equivalent? - The relative equivalent and the general equivalent? - Something. - Hmm. - Universal equivalent? I can't remember. One of them is independent, and that's money, and the other are the relatives that are all relative to everything else in, let's say, a barter society. You have these two modes of logic; something could be what it is relative to something else and be reflected through that thing, and something can be what it is independently to a certain degree, that's part of the logic. Another aspect to the logic which is coming out now in the second half of the book is this... Or an earlier... Let me give you another example of how logic works for Marx. Earlier, you'll remember, it's important to him to teach you that quantity goes over into quality. How does that work? In commodities, you make a lot of something, and when something reaches a big enough size, the quality of the whole system changes, it's not just more of the same. That's another way in which Marx is using a particular logic which he is adapting there from Hegel to show you the strangeness of the capital system. So here's a third instance in which logic becomes very important, and it also comes from Hegel in the background, and that is when a premise becomes a result. This has a lot of bearing on the resistance of the capital system to change, because whatever was its premise becomes its result. What does that mean? Well, here's an example: a worker has to work overtime in order to supplement the low wages. This low wage, which the worker can then slide by on by working even more, becomes the basis for competition, "I have lower wages," and the result is that from now on, workers will always need to work overtime to survive. What was a premise at the beginning, say, "Well, maybe we can get capitalism to work a little better this way," becomes the result of its own process, and then you can't stop it usually because of competition. So you wanna keep an eye out for this strange locking mechanism endemic to capitalism. We'll see it again when we come to accumulation that a premise becomes a result, the premise that I'm advancing capital becomes a result that capital comes out of the process. It's an odd fact of this highly necessitarian system that I do something, I'm like, "Well, let's use a machine that makes these widgets," and then everyone has to do it, and then you have no choice, and you will never make those things in any other way again, unless someone has another innovative idea that then becomes the result. Does that make sense? Now we're moving into a zone in which premises become results. The premise, "Let's do this thing called capital," becomes its own result, and it can't be stopped. We will start to get a picture of the endless accumulation and the drive to endless accumulation of capital here. Let's turn to Part 7.

Piece wages in case, again, it's not that complicated. Piece wages are, Marx says, the epitome of capital's wage forms, because they can tell exactly how intensely you're working by how many pieces you make. They can drive up the intensity, it's all obvious to them, and it's a much better, much more capitalist form even than the hourly wage form, the piece form. But before we step into Part 7, which is the last part... Woo, excited? - Woo! - We'll make it through Volume 1, that's good. You'll be among the few, the brave, the miserable. (chuckles) Now, are there questions up till now about wages? Yeah. - Could you talk about the qualitative work in all these things? - Yes. This is an important innovation in Hegel's thinking about history that if you think arithmetically, every time you add something to a pile, the pile doesn't change, it's always a pile, it's a pile of those same things. If you think dialectically, there is a point at which that becomes something else, because the force of those many things is very different than the force of a few of them. So we saw this in cooperation, if you have a large workforce, you can actually do qualitatively different work, and you do it in a qualitatively different way. So adding workers is not making a simple pile of workers. And that's really important for accumulation, because we are moving away from the pile. The capital appears like an immense pile of commodities; false, that's what it appears like. What it is a drive to accumulate, and that changes even what an individual commodity is, is an instrument of accumulation, transitory instrument of accumulation. Other questions that we have till now? At this point, do you love or hate capital? - The book or the system? - The book. - What? - The system, I assume. (students chuckling) It's okay. (chuckles) Okay. - Love the system. - Love the system, hate the book? There might be few people, yes. - It seems like because of this working mechanism that you're describing, like regulation would actually benefit capitalists in certain ways, in the sense that you could sort of restart with a competition who reproduce, say, cheaply at a less intense point? Is that an overly simplistic- - No. - Reading in Marx? - No. So that's just exactly what a worker advocate might say; "Well, you know, you must give them eight hours. " And then that would, as we know, move capitalist's innovation and surplus value production elsewhere. But that certainly is a mode of pushing back. Yeah, AJ. Sorry, lots of question here. Let me start and move down. Yes, you. - Question about managers. Is that trouble in some way, like presuming the rise of the managerial tax, like, when workers are contracting workers? And when you talked like capitalism impact workers, like considering just how, like, stride up this point to divide and give worker's income, then does this trouble the dynamics of the system in a way that like Marx does it? - The question is whether the rise of the management class troubles the system as Marx lays it out, because he's really interested in the producing class. And managers don't produce, managers organize production, organize and supervise production. They are just a function for Marx. Not being a sociologist of work is a real limitation here, so I can't really help you about the real system except to say that the managerial class, the global managerial class is tiny in comparison to the global worker class, producer class. So in that sense... And this was a trepidation of me teaching this book, my trepidation, because we don't see production in the core, especially in this, you know, kind of late imperial core economy, we don't see production directly, even in our lives, very little. We get some notes from Amazon warehouses about working conditions, that's not exactly production, that's distribution

and that belongs to the circulation system and doesn't add value. It depends; it's also parasitic on the value of the producers producing the product. If you're interested in that, you could take Volume 2 next semester with me, but that is a grad class, and so take it under caution. It's much less, actually less lively of a book than this one, but really fascinating. That was my plug. Okay. AJ. - Yeah. So I know we've discussed previously when we're talking about time wages, specifically the hourly form, but there are certain pushes and force so that the workers can actually have some semblance of agency over the system, specifically like when talking about the workday. - Mm-hmm. - I think we might be asking you for advice in a certain regard, but I think like you point out pretty astutely a lot of us are gonna be salary workers eventually at some point in our lives- - Yeah. - I think like one of the questions that remains with me is like, are there certain levers of control that, you know, workers can have under the salary form? - So you can resist that; I think attitudinally, you can resist that, I think that generations coming up are just not as willing to spend all their life at work, even though the companies at which you will be managers might still be demanding it. So, you know, use it, just say, "Hey, we're gen," whatever, I lost track of the letters, "We don't do this," and see what happens. You know, they have to hire somebody, and if everybody resists, that's a thought. On the other hand, let's work towards socialism, people. (students chuckling) - My question was could you talk about overtime just must end. I'm trying to understand what the incentive for the capitalist might be if the quality of the labor is not as good- - Right. - As before, but you should maybe pay more? - They just do a cost-benefit analysis, and if they need to keep the machines running, and they can still make enough surplus value, then it's in their interest to offer overtime. And apparently it is most of the time, so there's enough of a percentage of surplus value produced there for them. Okay. So now, I hate to tell you this, but we start the book again. There's three places you could start reading this book; you could start it at the beginning, which we did, very painful, you could start it at Chapter 8, the Working Day, and you'd be like, "This is the plight of workers? ", much less painful. I think, wrong, because the working day chapter is only there to exemplify the production of absolute surplus value and the battles over that. If you don't know what absolute surplus value is, you're just reading a history, which is fine, but would be confusing. The other place to start would be Part 7: Capital's Process of Accumulation. Let's look at page 519. We have seen how when capital takes the form of a commodity, it produces surplus value. This is like he's starting again; so we thought of the opening as the narrow entry point through the commodity, very hard to see the whole system from there, you're stuck with this one thing, it's a very strange thing, it has strange relations, it turns everything on its head. You have to understand the bare gelatinous blob, that is value that's carried around by a commodity, but you can't really see it, it's a sensual, super sensual thing. Remember all this months ago? Now we're starting from the wide entry point, the entry point of an abstract view of the whole system. So this was a three volume and was meant to be a four volume work; you need the second volume and the third volume to get accumulation, right, he's gonna give you a first go at it. The surplus value embedded in a commodity is realized only when the commodity is sold as is the capital value that was advanced to produce the commodity. Capital's process of accumulation thus presupposes its process of circulation, so, in fact, we have to understand circulation, that's Volume 2. The same thing goes for the different types of capital, which we haven't even talked about, which he lists in the second paragraph here on 519: profit, interest, trade, surplus, ground rent, and so on. There are many types of capital, not all of them are in the production realm to begin with, you need to understand their relationship. Like, we've been talking about surplus value, what is profit then? We've been talking about profit as what the economists think you do when you're a smart person, and you sell for less than the value, but we know now from Marx that you can't do that

over any extended period of time, nobody would buy anything for less than its value over that period of time. So the transformed forms of surplus value show up in Volume 3, just so you know. Now we're going to begin considering accumulation in abstract terms. It's abstract because we don't have the whole context. We're gonna work with some formulas and some kind of small relations. We're talking here about bare accumulation. It turns out that making one product a commodity, exchanging it, never happens. Making two commodities, exchanging them, never happens. Capitalism requires the entire system, and the entire system in an integrated way for any of this to work. In the entire system, there's a force that is even stronger than let's say valorization. This was the force that Marx wanted us to see, that is the real within the appearance of producing use-values, it looks like the producers are producing use-values; a hammer that I can bunk students on the head with, or they can bunk me, a carrot that I can give out to you after the stick of the hammer. It looks like these things are usable, but really, they're made to valorize value, to put value in them, to preserve the value that's there, to add value to them through the work, and to transfer that value to the owners, right? The first part of this book is about the valorization process, and it's hard to understand. Now we're moving into a different process which is accumulation. It turns out that accumulation and its drive drives the valorization process. So we have to understand accumulation. The only reason you need to valorize is because your more has to be more at the end of the year, it has to accumulate. We start out talking in the accumulation chapters about mere accumulation, which looks at first like a mere repetition of the same, but, again, quantity goes over into quality. It looks like a pile, like treasure, like I'm piling up all the surplus value that I get as a capitalist, like, any one piece of it is good as the next; no, there's a piece that tips the balance and changes the system completely. It looks as if it's a pile of treasure where all actions to it and from it are external, like, there's this neutral pile of treasure there, the dragon is guarding it, the hero comes up to fight for it, someone puts more in, a king takes some out for wars, a tax man comes and takes it from you and puts it in there. But in fact, we are looking not for a simple pile, we're looking for a mediating accumulation, an accumulation that transforms the process. A mediation that's more... Sorry, an accumulation that's less like a pile and more like a drive, a drive to accumulate. When it becomes this, it becomes a governing purpose for the system, and it affects all the aspects of the system. So, in fact, you can't understand from Chapter 1 through chapter... What chapter is this? - 21. - 21, through Chapter 20, until you read Chapter 21. This is, sorry, the beauty of dialectics; you can only understand it from the end, but you can't understand the end until you've gone through the beginning. But that's just telling you as soon as this class is over, you read the book again. (student chuckling) So to get to accumulation, we start with a fact of surplus value, you have to know that because what's being accumulated is actually surplus value, but surplus value is gonna change its character. It means surplus value is a different kind of thing when it is being governed by accumulation. And, again, the appearance of surplus value as what it is not allows accumulation to operate in an unregulated way. And so far, as workers think that they're getting paid for all of their work, accumulation can be pushing both workers and capitalists to drive up the surplus value, drive down the necessary labor time, to subsume nature and labor into... Right, we're getting to understand the reason for all the parts we've talked about. Does that make any sense? I had this professor in grad school who always... He would look up... He was a brilliant guy, the best seminar I ever took, he would look up in the corner and...

(Paul and students laughing) That's funny. He would look up in the corner and see Hegel standing there, and he would like develop this discourse, and then he'd turn to everybody, "Does that make any sense? " You're like, "Well, I hope. You thought it did from the beginning, otherwise... " In any case, my tics aside inherited from my Dr. Walther, aside, we're starting with Simple Reproduction, Chapter 21. The motto of this kind of reproduction, which doesn't really exist, but it is an analytic step to getting to... What's the next kind of reproduction? - Expanding. - Expanding reproduction, beautifully said, because it's not expanded, it's constantly... Oh, I wrote it on the board. - Yeah. (students laughing) - Ah, great, 'cause I'll just take that to mean I am making sense. - Yeah. (chuckles) - The motto of Simple Reproduction is the second time is not the first time all over again, or how capital becomes accumulation. This chapter is talking about a circle, let's just say. This one is talking about a spiral. Okay. The production process has to be continuous. Uh-oh, this is new, page 521. Actually the continuity of the production process is a condition for the possibility even of making a single commodity. We started from the narrow entry point, we've got to something like the basis of the abstract view. It doesn't matter what social form it takes, so this is something he's saying beyond even capital, it must periodically repeat the same phases anew. A society can stop producing no more than it can stop consuming, thus, when viewed both as an integrated whole and as always being in the flux of renewal, every social production process is also a production is a process of reproduction. Production is always reproduction, we didn't know this. The "re" is always implied in production, the "re" actually comes before, insofar as the species perpetuates itself, and social forms perpetuate themselves, and that's what a society means. Society does not just mean distribution of labor, distribution of wealth, and social interactions, it means what's gonna happen next year, it is temporarily extended. You could say this, I'm gonna say it in a very general, philosophical way, everything that calls itself a society has a future in mind, and part of its job is to structure that future, whether by accident or by plan, or by hyper-systemization, which, you know, capital is good at. Okay, so we start with the simple reproduction process. What would simple reproduction be? Let's do a little seminar moment, seminar break, what would simple reproduction be, why is it necessary, what are its ingredients? Shout 'em out. It's right there in the book. Yep. - It removes its actual origins in production, like that which are produced go back what's favoring the worker that does the production for like serving it around. - Great, we've already seen that, that commodities are actually meant to re-up the worker, the majority, the vast majority of them, right? This is how capital can drive down the cost of labor power because it's in control of making the commodities that they must then consume. So already we can see from the beginning, we've been cribbing, but right there is the idea that this is all for the workers to reproduce themselves, to reproduce their labor energies, that's one mode of reproduction, that's one object of reproduction, reproducing labor energies from day to day, from week to week in any periodization you want. This is not this so different from life. Marx does make this underground contrast between capital and life, it's really important, and I know my colleague, Michael Denning, has been working on the concept of life and Marx for a long time. It is interesting to understand what he means by that and not readily apparent, but it is something like the opposite of capital

that capital has to be parasitic on in order to do what it does, so if people didn't have life drives and life needs and life desires, capital couldn't function, there's no capitalism of stones, right? Geology probably couldn't be brought into a capital system, wholly, only for the use of human beings who have these repeated needs and repeated desires that can be subsumed. So life is not totally different than capital, but it does take on a different characteristic. So we could say life demands repetition, we can say life demands continuity, not just repetition, not just that "There will be food, but I will be there tomorrow," right? All there needs to be a continuity there. And those are big demands that is a limit to capital, and it's also a vehicle for capital to do what it does. The argument that Marx makes from societal needs is that we really can have no break in our sustenance. And so, insofar as we can have no break in our sustenance, and insofar as the capital system is providing that, we can have no break in the capital system. If you could make an alternative big enough to sustain enough people, capitalism could wither; you could imagine the challenge of that. That's the argument from societal needs: once capitalism gets established, it has to keep going or we won't eat. There's an argument that Marx shows us from capital's needs as well, which is value has to valorize itself, and this has already edged out the societal need, or it has subsumed it into itself, it goes over the top, societal needs are secondary products to capital's need to valorize itself, so that food and clothing and relationships, a future, respect, self-governance, these are all secondary products of capital's need to reproduce itself. What Marx is gonna lay out for us here is the terms of capital's need to reproduce itself because life's is subsumed into capital, or getting to subsume that. So the first thing he said as well, obviously, capital needs to replace what it used, this would be a kind of mere repetition, this is on page 521. I wanna point out to you here an important sidebar at the bottom of 521 in which Marx brings up for maybe the fourth or fifth time the idea that a capitalist is a mask, just for those people who are interested in the theatricality of social life, it doesn't go away under capital. One way to think of the capitalist and the worker for that matter, managers, is as roles, sociology gave us this term, took it from theater and and Marx is being explicit in talking about these as masks, the economic actor's mask, capitalist will stay on a person only if his money keeps functioning as capital. So here is a kind of personal motivation that's more than greed: the fear of falling, falling out of your class. If you want that mask to stay on, because these are not natural categories, if you want to be a capitalist, this system has to keep going and you have to contribute to its perpetuation. But it isn't just replacing what was used up, right? You can imagine this in your own subsistence living, your plate is empty, you go back into the servery in the dining hall to get more; no, that's not right. You have your supplies at home, they get used up, you replace them. There's no need for them to kind of grow on their own and take on a life and, you know, change the relations in the kitchen, they're just merely replaced. Things do have to be merely replaced, but that's not enough. If you start looking on the next page, on 522, the system begins to get its new characteristics. We have mere repetitive reproduction with no new characteristics, and now we have still simple reproduction with new characteristics

because every act of production needs to keep in mind, not just this act of production, but a future act of production, it's a different production process. Every act of production is also thinking, "Will this be able to be repeated next year? And what do I need to include in this act such that it can be repeated? " That would mean not using up all the resources, not burning down the factory, lots of preservation takes place here. Does that make sense? So we're beginning to think in more existential terms or cultural terms, how capital imagines a future for the whole system and how we are complicit in imagining that future. Every time we contribute to capital, we are reproducing it in a certain way for a future and doing special things. So the first special thing we do is the labor fund, just to go through these things, so you know what they are. The labor fund, and here we get back to a certain contradiction of capital, which we learned about early on, that is that laborers don't only produce their wages in the future, they produce the wages before they've even worked. It doesn't matter where the capitalist gets the capital that they advance, let's say it's a thousand dollars for labor, they borrowed it from their mother, they took it on credit, they had it from work, or they found it in the ground, they had it from workers who worked at a different factory they owned, they go in, they put this into practice, and it will be replaced by surplus value produced by those laborers. So in every case, laborers are producing the future, and part of what they need to do is to produce a labor fund so that the capitalists can hire potentially more workers or the same workers again, let's say, the next year, the next week, right? So surplus value is always produced to produce a labor fund, which only belongs in capitalist accumulation; the labor fund. He says on page 523, which I think is telling that the capitalist class constantly gives the working class drafts, drafts in the form of money, on a portion of the product produced by members of the latter class and appropriated former ones; that is to say workers produce the surplus value out of which comes the fund for their own payment, their past payment, and their future payment. This is part of the special kind of reproduction under capital. And this is to say that... What do I wanna say about this? That capitalists don't even advance capital. All right, very quickly, the second mode of reproduction with different characteristics, which I want to call "keeping the worker down," is that part in which the workers eventually produce enough surplus to repay the original advance. This is where it turns the premise, "I'm a capitalist, I advance the money for this," into a result, "I become a capitalist because you have made me a capitalist. " So part of the capital is that, even that advance becomes a fiction, a lie, a form of appearance, and at the end, the workers will have paid back the capitalist for what they purportedly advanced, which obviously came from someone else's labor somewhere else; such that what capital pretended to do itself, it didn't even do itself. And the capitalist knows this, that all of the capital is coming from the workers, and so, the incentive in every act of pseudo-advance is to keep the workers from making more than they usually make, it's to reproduce the capital relation, because even the capital comes from the workers. So in every act of production in the capital system is a reproduction of the class relation in which few have the products taken away from them, and many have the surplus value accrue to them, this has to happen over and over again. This is envisioned, that is to say, there can't be anything in a productive act

that moves workers from being subordinated to capital; that's something that has to be reproduced in every act. They have to remain dependent, pay has to be kept as low as possible, but the... I'm gonna let you go in one second. Just to say that the great irony in this is that there's a lot of surplus coming out of the labor process, but in reproduction, the capitalists, and even the workers to a certain extent, have to make sure it never goes back to the worker, because the capitalists know they cannot be capitalists anymore in the next year, if that advance has not given back to them. Okay, I will see you on Monday. (ethereal music) (switch clacking) (electricity buzzing) (air whooshing) (logo chiming)