Class 13: Capital Chapters 14-16: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value

(bright instrumental music) - An important philosophical term from scholastic philosophy subsumption, to take something under something else and to do it in a way that nothing sticks out. Very important for philosophy, for understanding life. And Marx discovered that along with the other philosophical vocabulary he was bringing in to try and expand our understanding of this new capitalist economy, that subsumption was an important term. He takes it probably directly from Hegel, but it was in use in German philosophy for particular things. (clears throat) And it names the experience of everyone under the capital system, which is can be called compulsion, which starts as coercion, which is an external thing where someone forces you to do something and ends as what we know very well, self-motivation where you need a lot of aids. But those are also commodities like motivational books and tapes and videos. A motivational education, the idea is that motivation takes over for coercion and you coerce yourself. (clears throat) Marx will narrate this in chapter 14 in particular in terms of the way the capital system developed from being at its earliest stage in which coercion is the way labor is brought in and different ways of working are made part of the capital system to something like an internal necessity like process. So first things have to be forced to fit. You can see how subsumption is the right term. Things have to be forced to fit the capital system. You're like bring your artisanship into my factory. I'll take half of your working day. But you can keep doing things the way you used to do them. But by the way, I'll only give you the materials if you come and give me half of the working day. That's something like coercion. In between this process which we theorized very strongly under the cooperation chapter and the division of labor chapter and the machinery chapter, those are where process takes over for coercion. Why do you do this in this way? Because this is the next step. Because the process is a whole thing. Outside of whatever your usual ways of working were your traditional ways of working, which might have included a lot of other things, a lot of interruptions. Process has, you can see already has its necessity internal to it to something like self-motivation, coercion process and self-motivation are three stages of subsumption. We're used to this idea in which there's something that pushes us and keeps pushing us along to go to work, to adapt to the economy, to accumulate, to convert societal goods like healthcare into investment opportunities or finance instruments, privatization. There's always a push towards these things to serve the economy as our great overlord, as the thing that says you must do this. Who says it? The economy. Who speaks for the economy? The economists, not all of them speak for the economy as something that is a benevolent overlord, but all of mainstream economists speak for it as the entity that we all serve and must serve because if we serve it and serve it well and completely it's supposed to serve us. You can see that even the rhetoric has implied in it that we are subsumed into this process. We are part of the economy. Again, this was new in rhetoric in Marx's time because the economy as a giant other or a giant mother was relatively new. So what Marx is saying in this very short chapter, chapter 14 a little bit, is how the experience of a social world came to be the experience of compulsion as servitude to a system. He's not gonna tell us how it came to be historically that capital was the big mother that we all served. History just gave it to us. In fact, from our perspective, it happened by accident or there are so many causes for why capitalism became the ism that we all talk about.

And the capital system is the system that we are subservient to. There are too many causes and too little necessity in this history, long history leading up to it to make it even explainable. He will show some things in the later chapters. That's to say that history is not a process. We did not get to capital through some inexorable set of steps that led to capital. But at a certain point, inexorability started to take over. As soon as this initially very small, exceedingly ugly hungry animal came into history and started to drink up history as possibilities it needed them and it shifts from history's modality, which is contingency. This happened, but there really is no why. The whys are much too complicated to be able to lay out for you in such a way as you could say it had to happen or in such a way as you could say, these are the only reasons for which it happened. History has too many reasons. It's overdetermined. Capitalism on the other hand, redistributes this contingency on the basis of one very small, very tight necessity which Marx calls the capital relation or is the continued pressure to accumulate the need to valorize value, which puts everyone in a position of serving it. So you could say against all odds, the capital system got started. And what Marx is showing here is the process by which it went from being this small hungry animal to being the prime mover of all social, natural, and divine things. Capital is really the first mono God. We had other mono gods and other monotheisms. But the problem was there were many of them. Some of them tried to be the only mono God, but capital seems to be the one that succeeded. Another way to say is how did capital become the mono God through the process of making labor a process. And making any other kind of labor which didn't have that kind of internal compulsion to not serve the system. Making labor into a process as opposed to an activity. And initially bringing that process under the control of the capitalist. But again, capitalist is gonna be transformed into something else in which the whole thing becomes a process, including the capitalist's function. All right, so let's talk about this a little bit. We have moved on to chapter 14, which is an overview of what happened in the previous parts, parts three and parts four, chapter 14 called Absolute and Relative Surplus Value. It's interesting why he has to do this 'cause we just went through a long section on relative surplus value. What is relative surplus value? - It's extracted from like it you can get relative surplus value by manipulating the ratio of like the necessary labor, time for labor to reproduce themselves and extra labor time that the capitalists would wanna extract. - Relative surplus value. Exactly. Is that surplus value that comes from moving B2B prime or to adjusting the process so that you get more productivity out of the same amount of time given a fixed amount of time and a fixed intensity of labor in that time. The only thing you can change is productivity. How many products come out of the same amount of labor? And the chief way to do this is through machinery, but there's other ways like cooperative labor and other sorts of tactics like you know, forbidding people to go to the bathroom, work diapers. I'm sure that exists somewhere, but you can imagine all the ways in which you could close down those gaps in time and increase productivity without increasing absolute surplus value for the time of labor. I'm gonna just read the opening of this so we can get into it. How are you feeling? Ready for Marx after the little break? Yeah. Okay, that's good. We first considered the labor process in abstract terms or apart from its historical forms as a process that takes place between human beings and nature. This is the simple definition of labor. He still calls it a process, but I don't think it was a process. I contingency. There was need in simple labor, people had to eat, but there was no need to do it in any particular way except for what was imposed on you by the materials

by the climate, by the size of population. He says to look at chapter five if you wanna know about simple labor. When this process is purely individual, one in the same worker performs all its functions, uniting them and operating as his own supervisor, as he appropriates natural objects to achieve his basic life aims. This is simple labor, it's an abstraction because it really never existed. It might exist in an animal according to Marx, although I couldn't tell you if that's true or not. It certainly doesn't exist in Robinson Crusoe like stories, which is just after society, a fantasy that you could go back and get rid of society while still keeping all of its trappings like slaves and crops and accounting and bibles, right? But it's just a heuristic, simple labor to be able to understand what comes next. Later he works under others. The various functions of the labor process are distributed among multiple workers. This you could call social labor. This is actually the kind of labor still relatively simple that is pre-capitalist or non-capitalist. I work by my own lights, by my own skill, by the history that I took to get there and the training and the passing down of traditional implements and techniques. I own by the way both the manual and the mental side of this as a worker, but I'm doing it for myself and others in moderate exchange relations. In exchange relations that are still subordinated to use relations. Does that make sense? It's very important that Marx says here a little bit farther down the page, I'm looking at 465. It's the beginning of the chapter. So the labor process unites menial labor and mental labor. If you want to read a very good booklet by the Frankfurt School thinker, Alfred Sohn-Rethel who Adorno called Sohn-Rethel or such a riddle, but it's actually much less of a riddle than Adorno. A great book called "Mental and Manual Labour. " This is the key division of labor that allows capitalism to become itself. When the mental labor is separated from the manual labor and the mental labor becomes the province of machines capitalists who organize it in a whole other class called managers. So keep that in mind. These two things are eventually separated to the point where a hostile antagonism emerges. We're still living in that era in which information, capital and productive capital are against one another. But the one is dominating the other. Supply chain is a perfect example of information capital dominating manual capital. Now we know what happens next. We develop a workforce which is only there to be put over against organization of the process. You have on one side the the other side the people who carry it out subordinated to machines which are the process concretized in the most necessary. If you want to think about what happens to philosophical necessity under the capital system and why philosophical necessity is useful as a term for Marx, it's the machine because the machine in its machinic nature brooks, no resistance. It will be producing the next widget whether you like it or not, the only thing you can do is turn it off. But of course the other kind of compulsion or coercion is active there. If you turn off the machine, you lose your job. So you're subjected through this coercion to the necessity of the process. It keeps going and you follow it. So we move through cooperative labor to labor around machines, which is a version of the cooperative in which the humans are then cooperating with machines and take on a minor role compared to the major role that the machine takes on. The machine again is the concretized process. And you are only charged as a laborer around a machine with not disturbing the process. And here he says the concept of productive labor necessarily expands

as does that of its bearer, the productive worker. But the latter concept narrows to capitalist production is at bottom the production of surplus value, not merely commodities. A worker produces for capital rather than himself and thus it no longer suffices for a worker to generally produce he must produce surplus value. So there's a second outcome of the subsumption of labor into the process or the turning of labor into a process and the laborers into parts of a process which we talked about already. And the outcome of that is that you're no longer producing for needs first. You're producing surplus value. So the process you're a part of is not the mechanized work process but the valorization process. In which the machine is a part and you are a part as a laborer. Laborers gets subsumed into the capital system to the point of becoming materials for it. Not only can you not turn off the machine, you are generally not considered to have a will and an intelligence as a laborer in industrial capital. And Marx is adamant that we describe this in philosophical terms, not in sociological or empirical terms. We have to understand that as the valorization process takes over, valorization means producing something outside of the needs of the people who are producing it. A whole new system of needs, the need for value, the need to increase value and the increase, the need for accumulation and for growth. Those take over and everyone eventually is subsumed in the system including capitalists. The system has processed that is in effect this small hungry animal that grew huge after it ate everything and can't stop itself has to be fed continuously with territories, populations, technology and finance. (clears throat) I think I'm getting emotional. (clears throat) I can see why I stuck with Kant and Hegel for so many years because this is really gets you right in the heart. So I want to talk about three subsumptions. The subsumption of nature. The subsumption of labor as process. And the subsumption of humans into labor. Yeah. Oh sorry. - So this bit I didn't really understand when I read it, what does he mean by the concept of productive necessarily expands? I understood that but as does that of its bearer, the productive worker. But the latter concept narrows too. - I'm not a hundred percent sure. I feel like he's searching around there for terms, but what I can make of, do you have a reconstruction? - I think the way I understood it was this kind of related to the way he was thinking about the constructive of like the construction of the collective social worker where you kind of become an appendage. So what you're doing, if you were to do it individually, it doesn't really have any meaning. But when you all do it together- - Yeah. - Then it has like meaning to the world and to the system of productivity. So that is both an expansion and a contraction in the sense that the forms of labor that are being rendered can be expanded, but it's a contraction in terms of not labor as you said is not an activity but now a process and that is what a worker is now compelled to do. - Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So you can see what's going on here as what counts as work and the worker is being subject to reformulations at the hands of the system that you came in to make a shoe in a traditional way. They say you are not a worker. So the concept of worker has been changed. Let's say it becomes more expansive in that it will then the concept of a worker, it will then include anything that capital thinks it should include. An appendage of a machine, someone flying a drone at 5,000 miles away, computer programmers, whatever counts there counts according to the innovations of capital to valorize value in a better way. So what I would say is that the concept of worker and work becomes plastic under capital is certainly taken out of the workers' hands. Although unions don't only fight for a shorter working day, they fight for clear

and less flexible determinations of what the workers will do on the work floor as well. But that's just because the notion of work has become expensive and the productive worker has become expensive. But it narrows to in the sense that it will always be under the pressure to reduce what the worker does to a certain extent without losing the worker completely. 'Cause they're the only ones who give value. You see the inner conflict of the capitalist is we'd really like to get rid of these workers. They're the only things that make value for us. So how do we put them in as smaller box as we can? Other questions? I wanna talk about subsumption with you all, even though it's almost a side issue in these chapters because it seems to me like the most important critical tool we have now given that we will go out into a workforce and we will be subsumed in all sorts of ways. There's a lot of ways the capital system works to subsume what isn't yet capitalistic. First of all, it subsumes nature. Second labor and makes it into a process and then it subsumes human beings into the labor process as deeply and as thoroughly as possible. So let's just go back a little bit and get a sense of the subsumption of nature. We know how nature is subsumed. I'm calling it subsumption now because it comes to be, subsumption means not only that it comes to fit into the capital system. Capital system makes it fit, but it makes it look as though it produced the things. So for example, take raw materials that is fully subsumed, talk to a, I don't know what's something that goes around in a, what's a raw material? Talk to a one of those corn eating bugs. You tell that bug that it's eating your raw material and it will say, well I just found this here. This is what I do. We have to allow the bugs to speak and of course on capital, but if the bugs speak they would not know what raw material is. Raw material is already subsumed and it makes it look as though capitalism discovered nature. It capitalism produces nature as its subsidiary. So for a very strong ecologism, you'd have to start from there. Then you would say, well all the attempts to engineer ourselves out of nature does not change the basic perspective shift in which nature is already included in the system as part of the system and the names tell you that. So raw materials already subsumed. Other things that get subsumed are the sources of motive, power places get subsumed, certain times of day gets subsumed like the day daytime. This is subsuming natural aspects into the system so that they work for capital, these are formal subsumption. They come under the control of the capitalist and they belong to then a process. They become steps in a process. Is it morning we will start work? Does that make sense? Morning is for work, what do we say? It's Monday, it's a work. Let's just look at a raw material like petroleum or as the Romans thought of it, rock oil. That's the bug's perspective on petroleum rock oil. Well it's just there. You could say from nature's perspective, well it might be part of its processes, but already to think of nature as having processes is a post-capital view of nature. Science is complicit in drawing nature into the conceptual structure of capital. So you start with rock oil and in terms of economics, it's part of a metabolic process, a social metabolic process. For example, thousands of years ago in the form of asphalt or bitumen, it was used actually everywhere in the globe to stick things together in Eurasia and China and the Americas. Wherever it happened to float to the surface as bits or in seeps as it's called, it was used to stick things together. And to seal them, you could write a nice little paper on the hypothesis that rock oil was what was used to stick the bits of the tower of Babel together. This I came across on that great capitalist detritus machine called Wikipedia.

(clears throat) But it was used as a natural thing in order to fulfill needs, which Marx will tell you is part of the natural process of work. It was used as for sticking things together. It was used for lighting and it was used as a flammable object for weapons. But then it becomes something that it wasn't. It gets subsumed, it becomes a substitute for natural sources of motive power. You had water or wind or animals or yourself that pushed the pedal of the spinning journey or the spinning wheel. But soon you could have this thing. And petroleum is really a signal type of sub-summable because it changes things to such a degree that the force of labor can become subsumed into capital. (clears throat) So instead of a river turning a wheel or a foot turning a wheel, heat is extracted from the flammable oil. And this is the story really of the 19th century. It happens in the 19th century and it has an odd loop. This is by the way, the way subsumption happens in capital. It always almost doesn't happen or technological reformation is almost always tautological or always almost tautological. How so? Well in order to get oil in enough quantities to become the replacement for the motive power in machines, to make the process work more autonomously. Autonomously, right? You needed a machine to get it out of the ground. You had to use the old technology, a steam machine to get it out of the ground in the first drills in the mid 19th century, the first oil derricks. Otherwise you couldn't get to it. There wasn't enough. But those, so imagine this, a human being made that oil derrick, which then replaced their motive power with the oil it pulled out of the ground, which then replaced the steam derrick with a fossil fuel motor. This is the very knap you say in German, it's very tight. The way you move from one form of process to another, it has to make use of the old processes, but you processes just to supersede them and to make them superfluous, to put them in museums or into surplus populations. I just wanted to point that out to you. Then of course petroleum later because it's so central to increasing productivity becomes a vehicle for investment. And the reason we can't get rid of petroleum now as a substitute for motive power is because it's also a vehicle for investment. Not because it's the only substitute for motive power. This is the set of transformations of a natural object as it gets subsumed into capital, which is also changing. Does that make sense? From a raw material to a substitute for natural sources of motive power to a commodity and finally to an investment category that makes the whole system stand still, that will have to be overcome in similar ways to the ways in which steam power or foot power were overcome. It'll be a very thin passage away to the next mode. Okay that's just to talk a little bit about subsumption of natural objects and you see what happens to it in capital. As capital revolutionizes its process, the position of these things and their usefulness and even their meaning from rock oil to what do we call to fossil fuel investments. This is the trajectory of subsumption. Until it seems like not only did capital make the oil, but capital is totally identified with the oil. Next I wanna talk briefly about labor processes subsumed into capital. Do you have questions about that? Don't you like my little genealogy of petroleum rock oil? - So is a laborer and a laborer are labor and a laborer, both subsumed in the capital? - Yeah. Labor is a somewhat confusing name.

This is how I start my next list of things to lecture about. Many things are meant by labor. So here it comes. Simple activity, the kind of people who do that activity. A group that develops its own standpoint and its own politics opposed to the owners and what Marx mostly means in these chapters, a process. A process that's key to production. So when he talks about labor here, here he's talking about the labor process, but he's constantly referring to the effects of the labor process and its changes on the laborer. So let's keep those separate. What he says here is there's a process by which labor becomes a process, sorry to be nearly taught logical, but it's more funny that way. There's a process by which labor becomes a process. It goes from formal subsumption to real subsumption or it goes from absolute surplus value to relative surplus value. Or it goes from the beginning where labor comes into the factory as what it was historically and the capitalists are just like, well, you'll work longer for me, that's the first step. Labor is not yet a process. Labor is a place on the factory is the name of the place of labor, but it becomes a process only when there are limits placed on absolute surplus value and you have to get as much relative surplus value out as possible. And so productivity is important and you need process. The description of this process by which labor becomes a process. We're still stuck in this. You will see when you get out the protocols that you have to hold to efficiency protocols, productivity protocols. We are not out of this. You know, maybe even in the gig economy it's maybe even worse because all there is process. There's not even place, there's no sociality. It may be that you are taken into the process and thrown out of the process much more at will than it used to be. But that's part of the subsumption of labor under capital. It becomes labor when capital needs it, how capital needs it in the order capital needs it with the kinds of labor capital needs. So that you come out into the workforce and you're like, well where do I fit? Well that's exactly the subsumption question. You have to fit yourself into it. You don't say, I love to make pots. Now you can do this as a kind of cottage industry address and cottage core if you want. But you know the core is not the core. I hate to tell you. The process by which labor becomes a process because of the limits to absolute surplus value internal to it and applied to it from laws and strikes. The main operation of capital becomes the subsumption of labor into capital as a process. If you wanna ask whether Marx is still viable today for digital processes or for finance capital, you have to start from there. This is what capital is when it's fully developed for him. It is the subsumption of labor as process and capital constantly is doing this. It's an operation of capital. It subsumes labor into it as a process. This is how it takes over the world and why world. The how is sumption, it makes things fit to its needs, right? Just going back to the very beginning, this is the story capital of why the economy is not there to does. We don't fit the economy to our needs. We fit our needs to the economy. That's called subsumption. We go in as laborers to produce value. So capital can capitalize itself. And the why it has to take over the world in this way is because of the pressures to accumulate and to accumulate more. I'm afraid to say again that this is really described in volume three, the pressures to accumulate, but think of it as competition and the fire when a technology takes hold somewhere and it has to spread everywhere and everyone is constantly competing to increase their productivity or else they go under. Okay? So labor becomes a process because of the limits to absolute surplus value. In other words, the name for the moving of B2B prime is process. We saw at the beginning of the chapter how a productive worker looks differently

once it's subsumed and under capital. It starts out what is a productive worker? Let's just say what it is, a productive worker is. Yeah, the workable who works and that whole formula. Exactly. A productive worker is a worker that produces something that fulfills a need. This is what Marx is getting to with simple labor. It produces something that fulfills a need, it has its purpose, but the purpose doesn't demand that the worker radically reorganize their lives. The purpose doesn't demand that society radically reorganize itself. So there's this simple production which Marx associates with animals. The false version of this is Robinson Crusoe, which is impossible because really the second definition of a productive worker is one who produces societally, who is taking the signals in from society, is producing for themselves and another according to the social division of labor. So that I know that Anthony needs a literacy and justice for all sweatshirt. So that I do the lovely printing of that beautiful statement and then I can give it out to all of you. And I keep one for myself 'cause I'm also down with that project, right? Social division of labor puts me in a place where I'm thinking about society as a whole. Actually I have that thought. I have the thought of keeping my connections and of what everyone's needs are. It's a kind of Kantian Subjective Universal. Every time I work I imagine what the society is and what its needs are and will be for the foreseeable future. That's a kind of beautiful project right there. And you do it by making a sweatshirt. And making a sweatshirt you're thinking also about the corn and the asphalt and the tower of Babel that somebody wants to build. You're saying, well I'm purposefully not picking up the asphalt or making the bricks for the tower because my job is to do this. They'll be wearing my shirts. Yeah. - Yeah, are there certain types of labor that have still yet to be subsumed in that regard? Where like, you know, their end goal is still some kind of use value and not simply the production of surplus value? Like teaching comes to mind in which like is a great sentence about teaching on the page - Yeah. - What is the sentence? Can you read it out, Austin? The page 465. - Use an example from outside the sphere of material production. A school master would be productive in addition to working on children's minds. He worked himself with a bone making an entrepreneur wealthy. - Yeah. - Imagine that. - Right? But you have to also- (students laughing) - A really good video. - That's the challenge to teaching, especially in an institution like this, but really anywhere because of course the, I mean, you know, we don't have to go back to 1970 to think about our education as commodifying our intelligence is certainly doing that. Our intellectual capacities, our skills, producing skills, having our intelligence formed to do certain tasks of subsumed labor. So there are certainly things, I mean not everything is actually subsumed in capital, but capital works to actually subsume everything in capital and produces the frameworks for it and needs to keep bringing its inside into itself because of its needs to accumulate. That is by the way, summerisub. Subsumption is the operation by which capital brings the outside into it, makes it work for its purposes and makes it seem as though it created it. So a productive worker produces usable goods. societally, but then it begins to be modified even beyond those designations. We read in the cooperation chapter. The productive worker is now a part of a cooperative that it can't work without. This is a kind of subsumption cooperative labor fits in a bigger society with bigger tasks, but it's much better for the goal of capital, which is to produce value because it allows increased productivity, cooperative labor. Just to give that one example. It allows more people to work around one big project all at the same time. That is actually an increase in absolute surplus value. Do you remember the parameters of absolute surplus value?

Shout 'em out. - The length of the day. - The intensity of labor. - Productive power. No. Although we'll find out that is underlying all of it. - Physical capacity. - Physical capacities of the worker, worker. Okay. That that's there. Yep, that, so that would make at least four, but now I just forgot the one I had in mind. What did we say? - Social constraints, like child labor. - Oh no, this is where middle age has eaten my memory, My intellectual labor has not been subsumed enough into the task. Well, it'll come back to me. I did write it down somewhere, but I just leapt ahead to it. Length of time, intensity of labor. Oh and number of workers, thank you. And definitely the physical capacities, although that's, that's expressed as time worked and intensity of labor. So that would not be a separate, right. These are the parameters of absolute surplus value, length of time, which is labor over time. Intensity of labor, which is time over labor and number of workers. (clears throat) Obviously from what productive work or a productive worker looks like after the cooperative phase. I'm part of a labor is I am a producer of surplus value, which means that what labor looks like is totally fungible. I won't know maybe from day to day what my labor will look like if there's a change in efficiency protocols or the way we can produce things or the machine is speeded up or the machine has changed, or we've had to drop our X widget and pick up Y widget because the market dictated that to us. So becoming a producer of surplus value actually puts the nature of work as one of the, one of the transformations that will go on continuously such that you may not know not just how to do it, but what it is. Labor is a component in the production of surplus value. The machine is capitalist decides how much and by what process. So you can see that in these chapters we are dealing with the total conversion of the purpose of labor. From the production of use value, which we saw in capital analytically gets subordinated to the projection of exchange value. But this is only necessary if labor is not for fulfilling needs primarily, but for the production of surplus value. In so far as it's It's no longer people with minds and wills and skills and histories doing things that they know relate to the rest of society. It is just a process of which they're a part and of which they fit better or worse to worse. I'm not saying that I'm subsumed completely in English grammar. Before we go, let me say a couple of things on subsumption. Again, it's a place where Marx uses philosophical vocabulary to expand and critique and correct the political economists. The political economists, Ricardo included, although he saw a lot and is a great philosopher of the economy, if you wanna put it that way. They don't just apologize for the system when they describe it as natural. They can't see what it does to the nature of labor because they can't see subsumption 'cause they don't have a name for it because Ricardo didn't read Hegel. Basically he's a schoolboy who said, Hegel, you forgot to read Ricardo. And Ricardo, Hegel, and I'm going to get beyond both of you with a better use of your vocabulary because Ricardo didn't read Hegel or didn't read Marx, he tends to justify these practices of exploitation and can't explain the increasing misfortune of workers, even if productivity is going up. The way to explain this is through subsumption. As a basic activity of the capital system, there are two kinds, formal and real. Formal only partly fulfills the needs of the system because it isn't very efficient. Real subsumption does it, but it's a process of getting ever more real. A couple of things, let me just give you the. We'll skip to the simplest case.

Let's talk about subsumption in terms of a much older economic theorist that sometimes Marx goes to and says, Hey, this one knew better than Hegel or Ricardo, and that was this guy, Aristotle, who along with his teacher Plato, loved to think of tables. Table is like there's a great, by the way, a great book by Jacque Ranciere called, "The Philosopher and His Poor. " Which talks about the use of hand workers and the poor in philosophy to exemplify exactly what they're unable to talk about on its own terms. He's a Marxist of course. I just wanna point out to you a distinction that Aristotle made between hyle and morphe between matter and form. Hyle interestingly is a word that means matter in philosophy, but in regular parlance it just means wood. So we're talking about subsumption as the process by which wood becomes a table or comes to fit into a table with no pieces sticking out. The form of the table is what makes wood satisfy its function, which is to hold things up off the floor. In formal subsumption, the parts of the material are good enough so that it holds things up off the floor, but not so good as to forget the fact that this is just kind of tied together of material and loosely put into a form like the way I would make a table, which would look like it might hold things up only for a short amount of time. Subsumption in the Greek sense, real subsumption would require that the material be totally taken up into the form to such a degree that you can't really separate the wood from the its table anymore. In capitalistic society, the material is labor, the form is valorization, and it because it has to make the process so refined to keep increasing relative surplus value, it needs to subsume not just formally, not just I say this is a table, this is table enough. It has to be completely a table. subsumed so that every ounce of time and effort goes into adding value to the product. All right, I gave you an extra text to read. It's not that long. Excerpts from a manuscript. We'll continue talking about this on Wednesday. (gentle music)