Class 15: Chapter 15: Increase and Decrease in LP and SV & Chapters 17-20: Wages

(upbeat music) - He would've been a great detective, Marx, because he could always tell you how someone was making out better in something that looked fair. So in 15, before we move on to wages, we're talking about again the space between B&B prime, the variable or the effect or the desire of capital here. The object of its desire is productivity. And this is what happens when you enter an age in which most things have become fixed, but you still need to get surplus value and you need to get increasing an increase in the increase of surplus value. You turn to productivity. That is here, the only dispositive that capitalists have at hand, at least in the middle of the 19th century. So you have this series of action mechanisms. When one thing moves, the other thing moves sometimes in the same direction, something in a different direction. These things are correlated. One is the price of labor power, the other is the surplus value produced. But there are three variables, we talked about that last time. Extension of labor, intensity of labor, and then productive power. I'm just gonna note a couple of things that we didn't get to last time. We know that with variable productive power, if it goes up, overall production of value does not go up because there's no added living labor. And according to Marx, there's no extra value there. There's no socially necessary labor time that's being added, just being transferred the value of the machine. So you have that value trap that is if you double your productivity in a day, you're making twice the amount of products and each one is worth half the value except at the very beginning of a spike in productivity where prices remain at the old level of value. But after it evens out, people are making half per product. So all sorts of things happen there. The market has to be expanded. The number of workers have to be expanded to produce that much. So productive power is a double-edged sword, just to say that again. We know that labor power and surplus value cannot both rise or both fall at the same time. This is the law, Marxian Law of production of value. In order for surplus value to go up, labor power has to go down. If labor power goes up, surplus value goes down, right? They vary inversely with one another. And that's a law. This brings with it according to Marx if you read chapter 15, "A Law of Diminishing Returns," which is interesting for the capitalist because say that you have a day which is in the relation of LP to SV, 100 to 50. And you manage to drive LP down to 75, what do you get out of surplus value? Well. - 75. - Yeah, you get 75. Now the rate of exploitation is 100% and your surplus value has gone up by 50%. Unfortunately, you can only drive this down so much. So it's often the case that the first time you decrease the cost of labor power, you get a huge increase relatively in your surplus value. But after that, you're getting less and less every time because you can't starve your workers. So you can see that there's a law of diminishing returns where the first change you make looks like a huge amount of growth in your profits. But the second change you make is much less, given the nature of labor power. So again, capital comes up against its limits. It finds a way around and it will find a way around this as well. But in our era of plateauing growth or even diminishing growth in the core economies, you can see that even the great joy of driving down the cost of labor power that is making the means of subsistence cheaper has its internal limits. Earlier changes are substantial, later changes are smaller.

Generally speaking. We talked last time about another law that Marx brings up that comes from Ricardo, in which the causality moves only in one direction. If you increase labor power, you increase surplus value. But if you decrease surplus value, you do not increase the cost of labor power. You just lose your surplus value. So you can see all the pressure goes on this, making it cheaper to reproduce your workers in order to increase your surplus value. Marx notes to us that this doesn't mean that the quantity of means of subsistence for the workers goes down. It doesn't mean you're feeding them less. Maybe they're swelter, maybe they decided they don't need such expensive food. That could be. But in general, quantity stays the same and you've driven down the value of that quantity because it's become cheaper to produce, right? They still need the same amount of stuff for the most part. So you have a kind of satanic ratio, especially in the agricultural areas where you're basically making it much less... What do I wanna say? Wealth producing for agricultural workers in order that everyone else can have the same amount of means of subsistence but at a lesser cost. Does that make sense? It also means you have to, because you can't reduce the amount that people eat, let's just take food. It means you're expanding into richer and richer agricultural zones. That's called imperialism or colonialism. And those are just naturalized and brought into the capital system as part of its needs. Those are not the only reasons for colonization. There are old ones too, but that's the new reason for its continued necessity. There's another issue. Yeah. - How is intensity of labor different from productivity? - Intensity of labor means I actually put more of my energy into something. And so socially necessary, labor time is measured on duration and intensity of time. There's two dimensions of the amount I put into working, right? Because I could work for an hour kind of like this or I could work like Charlie Chaplin did. That's intensity of labor. And you produce much more and value goes up if you work at a higher intensity. That also has its limit because you get exhausted more quickly or you just get exhausted, you can't do anything at a certain moment and you can't go on. So there's a trade off for the owner who says, "Well, I can work them at a lower intensity for a much longer time. Is this more beneficial to me or is it to shorten the working day and work at a much more intensive? " If there's a large population of workers, it's more beneficial for you to shorten the working day, get a higher intensity of work, send those exhausted people home, and then bring on a new fresh batch of people, and you actually have higher intensity and a longer day with more a larger number of workers. These are the variables. I should have studied, you know, economics. So I had to figure out how all this stuff worked myself. I studied philosophy and literature. But actually the mathematics is very simple. Something goes up, something goes down. That's all it ever is. And an interesting fact about this third, what he calls the third law where causality moves in a particular direction. That the more labor power goes down, the more surplus value goes up, but the workers are getting the same amount. So you can see what's happening here. The workers are getting the same amount of means of subsistence, but the capitalists are getting more and more and more and more. So not only do they have more to invest and to reify and solidify the capital system, but they have more for themselves so they can live at an increasingly high standard of living while workers live at the same standard of living. And the cost of that standard of living is being driven down, but the impetus to raise the standard of living is zero. That's why you have to have international organizations and other kind of moral moments that step in and say, "Well, we could just raise the bottom up and we would be happy. " But the capital system has no interest in that. This is a another perversity of capital that as the means of subsistence is dropping in cost, the quality of subsistence of capitalist is going up. If you want to look here for a source for what we call inequality these days, you can.

So these are all scenarios in which productivity increases. Now he gives a couple of scenarios in which productivity is fixed and first intensity of labor varies. That is goes up. And then where productivity and intensity are fixed and extension varies, that is goes up, right? Just to say a couple of things about that. Where the length of the working day and the intensity of labor is fixed, you're like, we're working these people as long as we possibly can and to the point at which they're about to collapse. No, sorry. And we're not increasing the productivity, but the intensity of their labor varies. He notes an effect, which is that, as the intensity goes up, the value goes up. But when you reach a certain level of intensity at this... Sorry. Intensity as it goes up is a new thing and can produce more value in one sector as it goes up. But soon through competition it gets spread around and it becomes the new normal. It is no longer an increasing intensity that gives extra value to one place, becomes a new normal and all other laborers are expected to live up to that intensity. So beware of intensity pushes in certain areas 'cause they will soon go to other areas. The last thing he talks about is the fixed productivity, fixed intensity and varying extension of the day. This is interesting not only for our pre postmortem on capitalism where we see all the bad things it does, but also for a possibility for improvement or at least for something like socialism. It's one of the few places in the book he says, "Well, if you shorten the workday and give the time back to the workers, all sorts of things happen. " So let's go back to absolute surplus value. We knew absolute surplus value got to a limit, you couldn't extend the day anymore. And so relative surplus value became the place where you pressed because you could press on productivity. We also know that once you start pressing on productivity, absolute surplus value comes back in through the back door because you can hire more, you need to hire more workers 'cause you're producing more materials and you can increase even more absolute surplus value. Once relative surplus value becomes a lever and you're pressing on it. Once you're talking about post productivity increase, post productivity extension of the day, you can talk about shortening the working day. And you know that shortening the working day decreases the amount of surplus value and the rate of surplus value that's being made, right? And when intensity goes up, there are pressures to shorten the workday. Maybe because workers are getting sick, they're falling apart, they're getting injured more, injury rates go up dramatically. When the intensity of labor goes up, there's much less time to be careful even, not to mention the wear and tear is intensified. There's no healing time built in. There's less rest time built in. Does this make sense? But also because workers start to contest. This is too fast, this is too much. We can't do this. And so workers put pressures to shorten the workday even more. So this is something that happens and to keep in mind in our critique of capital that when intensity is in question, the length of the workday also becomes an issue. But we also know that extending the workday decreases the cost of labor power in relative terms. Again, this is just simple math. If this is the time it takes to reproduce labor power and you go to see and you extend to see prime, this part is now relatively speaking bigger than that part or labor power is relatively smaller. This is what I call the satanic ratio.

The more you work, the less you make relative to the amount that you're working. And when the extension of the working day after productivity, post productivity, PP starts to happen, you get this satanic ratio intensified where you're working more, but relative to the amount you're working, you're actually making less and less even though you're making incrementally more than you would if you were to shorter working day. Does that make sense? Marx gives some caveats here that if there's more value produced in a longer working day, wages can rise and they might need to rise to absorb the product that's being made in this extended day, right? There is the question of consumption as well. That's a caveat. It's also the case. And this is important and explains over time, which will become important in the wages chapter that over this extended working day labor quality decreases, it degenerates. The longer hours you work, the more those hours at the end of the day have deteriorated quality of labor and deteriorated output. That's why through a marginal effect, you pay overtime, you pay more, you get less, but you're still making surplus value as a capitalist. Okay, so those are some of the variables. Are there questions about that? I know it's not fun. It's like looking at a dial going like this back and forth. But these are the places in these little technical nooks and crannies, these are the places where capitalism does its exploitation. And Marx was fastidious about showing you in each case how this is working. Questions about this? Costine. - Just to be clear about the difference between intensity and productivity, productivity is tied more to process, how commodities are being produced through different kinds of machinery or whatever. Whereas intensity has to do with how the workers are working, correct? - Yeah, productivity, there's a couple of ways to increase productivity. Productivity produces more products without any more input of labor. So that could mean minimizing the loss of labor through efficiency. And it usually means technological means of producing labor where it's dead labor giving its value that's already been produced over to products. Salute. I know going into the selection we need a little bit of sunshine. So let's just take a look at page 482 to 483. If the whole workday were to shrink down to its necessary part surplus value would disappear. Something that doesn't occur under the regime of capital. And by the way, this is in the middle of the last full paragraph on page 482, chapter 15. And by the way, even in a socialist regime in a big world, you couldn't reduce labor to just what individuals produce with no surplus value. You'd have to take care of all sorts of other things that is aren't just their subsistence. There are buildings, there are probably managers of some sort. Only if the capitalist mode of production were abolished. Unusual for him to say this, it took like 482 pages. Would it be possible to limit the workday to the part when necessary labor is performed? I don't think. He indicates in other places too that it's not really possible to limit only to necessary labor. But nonetheless, the idea is, if you could get rid of most of surplus value, but even then that part would be enlarged for the worker would enjoy better life circumstances and so he would expect more from life than the minimum it takes to maintain him. Here you could be working more and getting the benefits of it. Moreover, a portion of what is now surplus labor would function as necessary labor since some labor would be needed to bring about a social reserve and an accumulation fund. So there is a need for some surplus, but that surplus would be put aside for a social reserve from each according to their ability to needs for those people who couldn't work for whatever reasons. That would be a social reserve. And an accumulation fund, which would foresee any crises in the industry, you would still need something more than just, we can't go back to a fantasy of individual labor

or of a small society. The more labor's productive power increases, the more the workday can be shortened. And is shortened, the more labor's intensity can be increased. You see how this works? So he's seeing here a little bit of technological way out of capitalism. From society's perspective, labor's productivity also increases when people work with greater economy, which entails economizing in the use of the means of production and in addition, avoiding all non-useful labor. So there's a benefit to subsumption into the process. The capitalist mode of production does in fact force every branch of industry to economize. However, owing to its anarchic system of competition, social means of production and bearers of labor power are squandered in the most egregious ways. And there are countless functions that are currently indispensable but in themselves unnecessary, that is owners, managers and everyone else. If labor's intensity and productive power are given, then the more evenly labor is divided among all the members of society capable of working. And the less one stratum of society can deflect labor, that natural necessity onto other people. The shorter the part of the social work day that is needed for material production and the larger the part that will be won for an individual's free intellectual and social activity. In this case, the absolute limit for shortening the workday is how universal labor can become. Capitalist society in contrast affords one class of people free time by turning the whole lives of most people into labor time. A very stirring passage. Problematic in some ways, but a moment to think of what Marx is doing this critique for, potentially. Ajay. - You know, this is kind of the mini argument of his book right here where he's saying, the shorter part of the social affair I would say for material production and the luckier part will be one individuals, you know, free exercise. Do you think that's like kind of the motivation behind laying out the system showing that you can actually win more to fulfill your own needs and desires? - Yeah. I do. You know, in a class in which we investigated modes of socialism, which I'm hoping to teach at some point you would wanna ask a lot of questions about this. Some critiques that come after like Postone but also Hannah Arendt's. Imagine Marx is saying, "Well, we need to, you know, make everybody work and make work the highest value so that we can have some free time. " And that has a problematic side to it. Richer. - So I'm trying to like understand like his vision of society. And like, there's kind of like no, so basically like no nation, there's was no, like what is Marx's vision of the social bearer and production, because I don't really think that those are the distinction there. Like what's social arrangement is required to take the masses of cheap old everywhere, basically since capital society is everywhere now to then truly this. - So you have two questions. One is, how is this possible? And the other is, you know, what does society look like and is he forgetting about things like nationalism and state structures? This is really an aside. So we shouldn't put too much pressure on Marx here to solve all those problems. Someone should solve them, but it's not gonna be Marx in the critique of political economy. On the other hand, this was still the mid 19th century in which he saw this as potentially spreading everywhere and actually spreading to some places, but also still stoppable from Europe if the workers rose up. So it's a different moment or stoppable from the US when the slaves grows up. So that's another issue. About what kind of sociality or what kind of social structures institutions there would be under this? He's not saying, but he is convinced, and I'm not sure if we passed the sections in which he says this, but he is convinced that the state, at least insofar as it is law, law and enforcement, and insofar as law and enforcement is about

only and purely about property, that economic considerations come first and law is secondary and props that up by secondary means. And so he really changed his mind between the manifesto and capital. In the manifesto, he's arguing for abolishing private property and that would be the way. But he sees that the capital, capital economics, that market society comes first. And only if you change that... If you change that you don't need property laws 'cause you don't have to enforce the difference between the classes. That would be Marx's take. These are very general things. And in a class on modes of socialism, we could go into the specifics. It just seemed worthwhile seeing one positive thing in this class with Marx. Chapter 16, you will have noticed, is about formulas. And there he's only showing one of the ways in which political economy, classical political economy, by which I'm referring to the thinkers from Smith to Ricardo, that classical political economy hides the capital relation. And for Marx, economics shouldn't be mathematized, but it does matter if you're gonna do mathematics about the economy that you use the right mathematics. And so chapter 16 shows you that if you compare the production of surplus value, the magnitude of surplus value to the entire working day, you get much less of a rate of exploitation that if you compare it to the production of the means of subsistence. That's that. And you can take a look through that if you need it. It's not unimportant. It is one place in which because political economy, classical political economy doesn't see the capital relation, doesn't see exploitation, it makes its formulas wrong and that continues to cover up the exploitation. It seems like capitalists just think there's a whole workday, I give my capital, which is my contribution, laborers give their labor, they get paid for the whole workday, what's the problem? Now we're gonna see the problem. The problem is that great counterpart to the fetish of the commodity, the wage form. This I think is the most explosive part of the book. And it ties directly back to chapter four, section three on the buying and selling of labor power. So we need to say a little bit about that. Do you remember the problem with labor? What kind of commodity is labor power? Here we're just gonna deal with... What kind of commodity is it? Let's do like five minutes of seminar styles. Compare labor power as a commodity that I'm selling to the university for a certain rate to a banana. - It produces value and retained by it saying that. - Okay, it's the only commodity that produces value and has value. Let's say a banana only has value. So it's a peculiar commodity. You buy it and it does something for you, right? You buy a banana and it preserves its value. I can sell my banana to Austin. I might even mark it up a little bit. although if I mark it up, Austin, the next time he is gonna be like, well I could just go to the Bow Wow and buy it for the cheaper price. So you're not a very good capitalist. I would be a terrible capitalist if I went around just marking up things I bought right at Yale by 10 cents. I'd have to find a different sucker every time. There is that side of capitalism where people try to jack up prices and make money in the interests. But the basic mechanism is the difference obviously between the cost of labor power and the surplus value that's produced. And all of that comes here. We're talking about what labor power is as a commodity. It is a commodity that makes more than itself. We talked about that in chapter four. fairly metaphysical terms. It's this weird commodity that makes more than itself. How does it do that? Just because it's not paid for its full value.

How do you buy something and not pay what it's worth? The only one you can do that with is labor power. And the name for doing that is wage. The wage is the deceptive form in which labor is bought for less than it's worth. We know that in kind of practical terms, labor is bought on spec in two ways. You buy labor power, I say you know, "I'll work to for you for this long," but I don't say, "I will produce this much value. " I don't know anything about the value I'm gonna produce. I don't have access to the means of production. As an industrial worker, I might not even know how to use the machines until I get on the floor and there'll be a little training and then I'm producing value for the owner. So it's on spec in the sense that it's about time or number but not about value. I don't say I know this is how much I'm gonna produce for you in your scheme that you will exchange for and capitalize on. And that's how much I'm gonna charge you for my labor. That's just not how the labor market works. Labor market works on, I work for a certain amount of time regardless of how much value I actually produce for you. That is not my business. So that's on spec in one dimension. It's on spec in another dimension in that I lend my labor to you and then get paid for it at the end of the week. So you don't actually have to lay out anything on me. I'm laying out my labor for you. I'm investing my capital. But there's no choice because you hold the means of production. Where am I gonna go find this machine? On the street? You invested millions of dollars in it, in the AI infrastructure that Yale is doing. Well, you have to go to Yale to do it or Google to do it. You can't do it on the street. Soon all of our laboring will be funneled through those portals and we will have to, we are already lending ourselves to them to produce the information. We will have to rent back our information from them, which we're already doing obviously in order to be able to do our work. So it's labor is lent on spec in two dimensions. That is to say, as Marx says on these pages here, it is a strange thing. It has to exist before it exists. I'm selling something that doesn't yet exist, right? I'm betting on a future. I'm saying this is what I'm, this is what I'm worth. But actually the way labor power is calculated, how is the way, how is the wage calculated? Yeah, the cost of the means of subsistence. So what looks like a wage which stretches out over the whole day is just the means of subsistence. But what the worker gets out of it, sorry, what the owner gets out of it is the cost of labor power plus surplus value. So they get, which is these two are the same. So as we said in chapter four, the workers not only paying for their own life, but they're also paying for everything to do with a capitalist. And we come to the economy and we find on the surface of the economy this thing called wages as a kind of price. $20 an hour. That's what I'm getting. Am I gonna make it work? I need to work how many hours do to pay my rent and put hamburger or veggie burger on my table and do everything else I need to do? Well, in the US it was in the third quarter of 2024, the average for a white man was 1165 per week. That's what people were making. The cost is about... I can give you the sources of these. This is gross. This is the cost of living for a single person average across the whole country. So you can see it's very close. Once you take taxes out of this and anything else, it's gonna end up being very close to this. People are being paid 120. 8 million wage workers in the United States are being paid just what it costs them to live. And what Marx wanted to do is shift the terms of the struggle around the wage from, we need a little more, 'cause life is getting more expensive to, this is fundamentally unjust because all the rest of it

which we are producing is going elsewhere. We're working more and making less and we only ever have what we need to survive even though that now may include a car and a TV and an iPhone, which it certainly didn't include in the mid 19th century. Richard. - But does Marx consider how like different populations are paid differently? I think the wage are an average in them order (indistinct) - This is my calculations from recent Bureau of Labor statistics stuff. Marx definitely is interested in the way different populations are brought into the workforce and used and can be paid less like women and children for example, and slaves at the time. He's very interested in that. But he's not doing an empirical study of those differences. - Okay. - I mean it's clear from the things he's reading that one of the ways, we saw this in the Working Day chapter that one of the ways capitalists can drive down the means of subsistence or the cost of labor powers to hire children who eat less and they are part of families where the rent is being paid by someone else. So that's the distinction in that particular category. Or women get moved into the workforce because they're unskilled. They're unskilled, obviously not by natural capacities but by historical convention in Europe at the time. And so they can be paid less. Okay. Wages. Wages are a great eraser. You find them on the surface of society as a price. The price implies value but is not the value. Why is that? Because the labor commodity is worth more, its actual value is worth much, much more than its value to reproduce itself. So the actual value of labor is what it can produce. The way it's treated is as labor power, which is what I need to reproduce to come back the next day. And the distinction here is between labor performed or labor outcome and labor power. We're going back to this distinction again, so we can talk about wages. Samuel. - When we were discussing at the beginning of the semester, the ideal value, use-value, exchange value. It seemed to me that we ended up with a notion of value that came, that was enabled by use-value, but that really stemmed from exchange value. - Yeah. - And the exchange value of labor is the way, not where the use value of labor is what it produces. So Marx saying that labor is being priced inadequately compared to its value, it seems like it being price half value. - Well, it's a different commodity because it produces more value than it is worth. Yes, exactly. And this is another way that Marx distinguishes between, let's say labor power, which is the exchange value and the total value produced, which is the use value. This is the only, it's the only commodity whose use-value exceeds its exchange value by an inordinate amount. It's a very peculiar commodity. And it's that strange commodity on which everything else functions in the system. Ajay. - I'm curious about this question of debt in this modern system of like I, yeah, essentially all that I need to survive, right? It seems like more and more a lot of people are taking out more credit in order maybe to like go beyond just means of assistance or even to meet that means of assistance but it seems like the whole concept of debt and the financial system is very absent in capital. I'm curious as to where that was just kind of an intentional matter disregarding something by Marx or if that's a kind of this story been this developed since this part? - Two answers to your question. The question is about credit and debt in this book. Credit and debt on the industrial scale that is credit and debt between businesses and finance is dealt with in book three, in volume three. This is a system that's imagined

to have all the capital it needs at any moment. Although obviously the capitalists say something happens and they don't have enough in reserve, they need to borrow some money. And that is not considered value produced. That is considered a deduction from value produced. So creditors are parasites, they don't actually produce any value. Personal credit as a systemic possibility was invented in the 1960s. A very clever invention by companies who were both producers and became financers like General Electric or Westinghouse, other places, which said, well, if these people can't afford it, if we extend them the credit, they both pay us out over time and we get to charge them interest for it in addition to the value that they don't lower the cost of their products, the price of their products. So they're earning, you know, that little bit extra that capitalists need. And how do people pay for that is the question we're gonna get there in this chapter. People pay for that by working more. You see why I gave you a little breath of possible socialism before we get into the wage chapter? All right. So labor is a strange thing. It has to exist before it exists. It is brought to market before it's created as the writer says that Marx quotes in a footnote. It's a kind of a future, a bet. And the worker is always betting much below what will actually be the worth of that labor, the value that labor will produce. But there's no choice really. The wages are not set by laborers. The wages are set by capitalists who work in this framework anyway. If they raise it anymore, their profits will be reduced. So we're starting into the discussion of wages with a couple of premises. If labor was paid at the value it produced, there would be nothing left over for the capitalist. Instead it's paid at the price of labor, which is less than the value it will create. So the oddity here is about the worker, right? You look at the worker and you say, you are worth what it costs to reproduce you. And a worker says to themselves, "Well, who owns what I create? " This is where a moment where you could go back to Marxist theory of alienation, right? Why should the worker not imagine that whatever they're going to produce they own as an extension of their activities and existence. Instead they're paid at the price of labor, exchange value and the owner gets the use value like any commodity. But because the commodity is strange, the value exceeds its value. It is a kind of sur value, a meta value. Marx says the value of labor power is the cost to reproduce the laborer. But the phrase "value of labor" is a figment. And this is what classical political economy talks about. The value of labor is elastic. It's whatever I can get out of it. Okay, let's talk about one important thing here and that is the way forms of appearance work in this system. It isn't just a material system, it's an aesthetic system. Capital. Capital has an aesthetics, has its own particular aesthetics. Aesthetics in a classical sense of the way things get perceived, or I would even say, it is a kind of phenomenology of where its phenomenology is part of its workings. Only in so far as things appear the way they do, can it work the way it does. Only in so far as you have commodity fetishism does this continue to work. And the same thing goes for wages. The wage form is parallel to the commodity fetish. The commodity presents one face but has a secret. The wage Nonetheless, they're both real and they make the system go. go by looking like what they are not. So one gesture of Marx's critique here is to say here's what they actually are or to show you their essence. It doesn't necessarily help in overcoming the system, but it certainly helps to understand where the system is being extortive and being exploitative and how it does that. If I say my wage doesn't cover the value I'm producing, which I'm sure is true even though I've finally got to this point in my life where I have a salary. But salary, you know, is the worst thing. You sign a salary contract and that is a permission for them

to get as much work out of you as possible without counting the hours. That's what a yearly salary is, by the way, according to Marx. Hourly is much better, except then they can say, well, we don't need you for these hours. Bye. One way or the other they get you. They, it's the system that gets you. Okay. So here the wage is different than the commodity. This is not a thing with social relations that conceals the social relations that makes the things. This is a form that makes it appear as though the workers are getting paid for their work, for all of their work. And it makes it appear as though the capitalist is just good at making bargains that that's how they make money. I got a good wage out of them, contract signed. There are three deeply deceptive words in the capital system: commodity, wage and profit. And we've now got to the second one. Those are by the way, the terms of both classical and neoclassical economics. They have not changed. There was a question. Yeah. - Yeah, I was wondering what about salaried workers who are paid more than their means of assistance? Where does that math exist? - Sure, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, there's the whole management class which we're not really dealing with, which came in, Marx foresaw it, but came in really in intensity in the early 20th century and now it's been divided geographically such that whole nations are full of a management class that's managing workers that are happening halfway across the globe. Foreclosing other political possibilities like an uprising of workers in Bangladesh for example, that would put pressure on the managers in Cleveland. So it's certainly the case that there is a management class and they are benefiting, even if they're not capitalists in the sense that they are advancing the money, they're benefiting from the capitalist class in order to do that work. But comparatively in terms of the world population, it's a very small population of managers. Very small. That's where we're all headed probably in this room. Professional or management. Okay. How are we doing? Yeah. - I have a question. Perhaps not related to wages but (indistinct) - Sure. - Yeah. I think so far the way you can talk, extractions, surplus value and the way Marx explains as well, it's like in kind of individual interactions between a worker and the capitalist or if like you kind of scale that up between to like many workers and the capitalist in a certain like or place. I'm just trying to understand how this might relate to like at the social level, what the use of surplus value is for like society at large, not just capitalists, right? And how this relates to say Marx's understanding of history. 'Cause I think so far the way he's historicized like historical change is that it's happening technological change and like other social change and they're kind of mutually self enforcing in some sense. But some might argue that, you know, surplus value and, and the capital that generates is required for innovation or like movement of history and society. What would Marx say- - Well, that's a good question. The question is about, let's say Marx's critique of technological progress and whether there isn't a kind of technological progress in history that isn't capitalist or that - Reliant on like surplus labor - That isn't reliant on surplus labor. I mean, you could certainly make an argument, it wouldn't be a Marxian argument, but you could certainly look for the role of surplus labor in history in producing certain kinds of cultural shifts and you know, producing change. I mean, if you do have that kind of latitude. These are really broad thoughts. So I don't think Marx is arguing that in industrial capital it's the first time where there is something like surplus labor or surplus, even just natural surplus. But the pressure to accumulate and the role of surplus and the need for constant surplus

and the way populations are driven to commiseration under the system is new. And I think you can begin to, after you read Capital, you can begin to look at histories of innovation or culture as innovation as a suspect category. I have to say. - Math history in elaborate sense. - Maybe. - Material history and class struggle. - Well, that's an early Marxist sense, history as class struggle. When we get to original accumulation, you'll see, I mean that is class struggle, but just a piece of course evidence that innovation is not so important. Up until 1780 there weren't that many, and then suddenly you're innovating all the time. All right, thank you. I'll see you next time. (bright music)