Class 9: Capital Chapters 10-13: Relative Surplus-Value, Division of Labor, Machinery, part 1

(dramatic music) - So the working day had to be made historically. Marx is a person who is committed to the idea that human beings make their history, though not without constraints and there's a lot of constraints and forces that lead to the working day being something like complete. These are the modes in which you can get value out of materials and humans, extensively, intensively, interstitial or in terms of completeness or also there's a function of size. So the first thing was to have a complete working day. Now there is no evil demon called capital that says, "What we need in this world," right? It isn't Faust. We don't have a devil that says, "Here's how we're gonna shape history. " For various reasons, history moved in Europe towards a full working day. So Marx is clear that the struggle over the working day was first fought by people who needed to get more labor so you couldn't fight to limit it. This is where we left off last time when the fire alarm went off. Do you remember that? You're supposed to pull the fire alarm in the corporations, not in the university. He wants to know how we got to a place where there was a full working day to begin with, such that it could be struggled over for the interests of the workers. Well, first, it's in the interest of those who are getting labor out of the workers and he will tell you that there's a set of laws starting already in the 14th century that try to move people to work because work is not, although work is a natural capacity, work is not a natural necessity or natural actuality depending on the abundance of things that are around. If you live in an abundance, work is at a minimum. You peel the banana rather than planting it, growing it, packing it, shipping it and distributing it, selling it, et cetera. So he gives you an insight into factory laws from the 14th century to the late 18th century in which capitalists and others, for all sorts of reasons that are not clear until capitalism becomes industrial, try to extend the working day to a full compliment of hours. It's an uphill battle and Marx calls it what it is, a traffic in human flesh. So you could say that chattel slavery is one kind of traffic in human flesh, but this rising tide that is capital, globally because of Europe's outward movements, is in general a traffic in human flesh, which starts with two modes of violence or pressure or force being exerted. One is expropriation, which I mentioned before in which people are dispossessed of what they already have. A kind of false scarcity is made so that you need to go travel or move yourself towards work in a different way, plus extortion where those resources that have been taken away are then rented back to the workers on the condition that they work. This is a basic mechanism that Marx wants to lay out and you'll hear more about the historical events and the blood that was let in the chapter called, "The So-Called Original Accumulation. " But here he's just indicating that before it could be fought over from the workers, it had to be constituted. One big impetus here was the plague, he says, so there are historical events that are somehow kind to the movement towards capital. The plague took a lot of people out of circulation and a lot of the laws that required people to work for certain hours or even had the idea that a day could be filled up with work or even that it could be regularized came in the wake of this devastating event in Europe where people had to be moved to work because they had got unused to working. Remember this? Recently happened again, and some things that were offered in recompense were reasonable wages. These are ideas that come into European history, at least for the first time for these reasons and get taken up by capital later.

Reasonable wages for fuller work starts in the late Middle Ages, gets enshrined in law in the early Renaissance, is reemphasized, as Marx says. He's just cherry picking history here. So you could do more research in this and people have, but you notice how he uses history to exemplify how capital gets started and the kinds of things it needs. For example, Elizabeth I, in 1562, limited the length and amount of breaks that workers could take. All of these laws became custom in habit and then got used by capitalism. But it isn't until the late 18th century that workers had regular weeks, he says. It's important both to understand that the advent of capital is highly contingent and that there are other ways to do things. That's why he keeps giving you windows onto the past, not because by any means it was inevitable that capital should take over as the main social form for the entire globe. What had to be, and here's an important turning point for him in his argument, and also gives you an insight into the way capital works. What was common in the late 18th century as an effect of force or an effect of the enforcement of laws. That is to say, if you don't do this much work or if you get into debt, you will be punished. So the debtor's prison, the workhouse, punitive work gangs where people could be pressed into service. By the first third of the 19th century, this became common for all workers and began to take over as the ethos that if you didn't work, you would be punished. The punishment was taken out of the realm of law and brought into the realm of survival. That's what capitalism did. This is an important historical but also theoretical argument that he's making. First, he lays out how the working day was extended. Then he will tell you how it was fought over to limit it. And this is really the most important news of the chapter. Between 1833 and 1864, there was a set of factory laws in England and he's clear that he starts with England because that's the country in Europe that's most industrialized. And in the story of labor and sympathetic politicians, it's almost a tragedy or almost a comedy. I'm not sure what it is, but the intentions go awry. That's what the story is here. It's a tragic comedy or a common tragedy because insofar as sympathetic politicians and laborers work and successfully limit the working day, it opens up whole realms of further exploitation for capital. At a certain point, capital will say, "Well, we have a 10 hour working day. "How much more can we get out of them in the interstices "and in the intensity of labor "and in the completeness with which they use the machines "and in making the day bigger than just the day, "pushing it into the night "and then making the workers bigger "than just an individual worker "and making each worker much smaller than an individual, "just a part worker? " This is the tragic comedy of the laws that limit the absolute length of the working day, which we said was absolutely 24 hours, but also absolutely limited by an individual's ability, capacity to work for a certain amount of time. So you can follow the trials and tribulations of the factory acts. Marxs treats them, it's almost a comic moment, I have to say. The tone is comic like, "Look at what happened. "Look at these great factory acts "and look at the aftermath. " Kant's definition of a joke. Take this with a grain of salt because Kant was not a funny human being, but he was good at defining things, let's just say. So the definition of a joke is not funny and that may be a fatal flaw. His definition of a joke is taking something that's meaningful and making it mean nothing. And that is in a sense what Marx is doing with the factory legislation. It doesn't mean what you think it means under capital as any limit will not mean what you think it means under capital. That is, it's a limit to be consumed, to be gone around, to be gone under.

But you have funny stories and I wanna make sure that you understand this. Other sorts of comedies in which they're working to put into practice the Factory Act of 1833, which was largely supposed to limit the amount of hours that children worked, right, from a 12-hour day to a 10-hour day. I was trying all day yesterday to get my kid to do his homework. So I sympathize. We need some factory legislation. This is why I have bags under my eyes 'cause at midnight, we were still working on the... And he tells you all about how even if they do go into effect, the factory owners nibble away at it and it's very hard to enforce. But insofar as it failed, it opened up a whole other realm of struggle in which the workers finally won. It failed to be enforced and in effect as a law. But the workers were like, and this isn't not a bad thing, Marx thinks, it's just a fact. The workers were like, "Well, you don't have a law "that's protecting us, "that's keeping our children "from working themselves to death "or keeping us from having to work at your back and call, "so we'll just not go to work. " The factory owners were like, "Okay, here's our limit. "We'll give you a 12-hour workday "regardless of the legislation," and still the workers who fight for the absolute length of the working day are missing all the other more subtle ways in which capital will exploit them and which are very hard to fight against. You will see when we get to the other big fat chapter, the machinery chapter, how hard it is to struggle against machines. It's like they don't respond in the same way. Sabotage is possible, but machines can be fixed and repurchased and the takeover of factory work by machines cannot be stopped. Just so you know, if you want to have a horrific picture of child labor that's still going in the world, look at silk work in various places in the world where children are still employed because of their little fingers. So you can see that even limiting these things is an ongoing battle and as capital expands and takes over in other places in the world, the battles have to be fought again. Here are some of the downsides of trying to legally limit child labor. Did you get these? It kind of sucks if you wanna fight legal battles. Insofar as you limit child labor time, it establishes child labor as part of the system. This is Marx's point. Insofar as you limit child labor, it changes the terms of the battle from how long they work to what is a child? Remember these funny parts? They're like, "Well, a child doesn't start till, "you know," wait, what was it? I'm trying to limit work under 10. So they say, "Well, you know, "a child is only under six. "Sure, we can limit that. " They can redefine what a child is. counts as a starting time for labor. They can put children in relays where it doesn't take children out. It might reduce the time for any individual child, but it brings many more children into the labor force. Is that a good or a bad? You can see how capital tries to overcome all these limits through cheating, through reinterpreting, through the obvious silences of any law which always open up all the areas that are not regulated for capital to export. These are what he's showing you. Here are the limits to legal limitation on capital. Now what happened over this period until 1864 was that limits on the duration of the working day and work for certain classes of workers became defacto conventions. You couldn't get around it. So even though child labor under 14 wasn't banned until, in England, until 1933, I believe so not that long ago. All the other limits, including the limits on the working day in terms of its extensive length became conventions. You cannot ask someone to work 12 hours in our sphere of the world. So what do they do? Well, the pressure to produce surplus value

is unending and increasing. So Marx will show you how, internal to the system of capital, pardon me, there's a possibility for increasing surplus value that doesn't involve extending the working day. And here we get to Chapter 9, "The Rate and Amount of Surplus Value. " Before we get to the ABCs of capital, we'll just talk about Chapter 9 briefly. Do you have questions about 8 incidentally while we're here? Yeah, Tomas. - So we said that in the early 18th century with the work gangs and so on, the ethos of debt punishment, the ones that instituted, but I remember from other readings, even in like ancient Greece, debt punishment was a very contentious subject. So does he deal with that at all? - He's really only interested in showing how, his theoretical interest is to show how what was originally an effective force becomes subsumed into the system in a matter of course, such that by this time you get up and go to work willingly and you don't expect punishment for not going to work, you'll just starve. That's his aim here. So it's not really a historical point and he will tell you that the materials for the capital system come from all places in history and have echoes in in the world. It isn't the case that profits only are made in capital or that interest is only charged in capital, but they cometogether in this pernicious cycle with its own internal drive to exploit the worker more and more. That's only in capital. Other questions about 8? Yes, Richard. - Could you talk a bit more about the relay system? Just like why it's being considered under this kind of legislation and what Marx is like? - So the relay system, it's not a technical name for a system of work. It's what Marx and other political economists call it. It's simply a way to preserve child labor while recognizing that people are fighting for a less extensive amount of labor time for each individual child. And he wants to show you that the unintended consequence is that where before you had 10 children in the workforce, now you have 1,000. So although there were parts of the population that were spared, and the size of the workforce is gonna be a big issue here for him, for a lot of other reasons now. So you can see how it's a funny kind of feedback loop or a system that has its internal balancing mechanisms. If it gets pushed down in one area, it goes up in another. This is a mode of logic that Marx is learning from biochemistry of the time and is not a usual logic for philosophy, even in the 19th century. Hegel doesn't think in feedback groups. Richard. - I'm sort of like thinking about like the form of this chapter because like in the previous chapters, like it was very like abstract of goes awkward. Why is the upskilling randomly into all the space? - That's a great question. What is the structure of this book? Why does he suddenly talk about history after we've been talking about quasi metaphysical value objects and ghostly objecthood and money as a universal equivalent. All these highly abstract features. Well, don't forget that it is the capital system that actually and really abstracts these things. It's not a matter of abstract thought. Money is as real as anything else, even though it doesn't have any useful qualities aside from trade. So that's one answer, right? You could say, in general, this book is not abstract at all. Abstraction is not what's causing your problem because you use money all the time. Abstract is not opposite to real. Abstract means it doesn't have sensual useful qualities for your own individual life except one, in terms of money. You can trade it for anything. Why does he get to this chapter now? Well, the parts of the book really help you. So if you can really, maybe this class is only for the purposes of understanding the different parts

have to look at the index. Good thing we made an index, I mean a table of contents. He's concerned with the production of absolute surplus value. What is absolute surplus value? Does anyone know? Why is it absolute? - It's the surplus value you get from trying to extend working day. - Yeah, that's the definition. Absolute surplus value is what you get from trying to extend the working day. It's absolute 'cause It has an absolute limit, 24 hours or the capacities of an individual worker a group of workers. So you cannot extend it past a certain point so you can know it relatively precisely and permanently and where capital needs to grow, it can't find any more there. And so he needs to demonstrate this and the way he demonstrates it is by, we look at the end of Chapter 7, necessary labor and surplus labor taken together. In other words, the periods of time during which a worker produces both the replacement value of his labor power and surplus value constitute the absolute magnitude of his labor time or the working day. What he will show here is no matter what happens, you can't extend it and no matter how much it tries to be limited, well, the limits to the working day which become absolute over time, right? Absoluteness is a matter, is a historically absolute. One is logically absolute no more than 24 hours. Let me know if you figure out a way to expand that. You will be the next multi-billionaire, trillionaire if you can do that. But these other limits become absolute too. They don't change and this are the saga in which you learn how they don't ultimately change. And also how absolute value necessarily, because of capital's drive to accumulate, leads to relative surplus value as the only mechanism by which capitalists can increase their rate and amount of surplus value. Isn't this fun? Rated amount of surplus value, Chapter 9. Another question. - Why does the capitalist constantly need to increase the rate of surplus value? Like why is there no limit on the amount that would satisfy the capitalist? - Volume 3. You just have to take it on faith that capital has a drive to infinite accumulation and capitalists feel this, let's say, and become the instruments of this drive. We'll begin to see one of the reasons when we get to the concept of surplus value and also the techniques by which it's increased. But I'll give you a couple of simple reasons. So you, you understand that the book is structured to start from the narrow entry point and show you how things are not as they seem in your relationship to commodities and labor. Then it shows you the actors, the functions of capital who are the workers and the capitalists and how they relate to one another in the production of value. First, it shows you how production of useful goods becomes the production of value. Then it shows you how this production value, is production of value is fought over and shaped under the limits of capital in time and space and capacity and also in innovation. And much later, you get to the need for infinite accumulation. But there's really, let's say, let me give you three reasons for accumulation or the need for growth. It's a kind of compounding issue as you go. First of all, there's the need for more. So we are dealing now with the need for more, right? More than just the value that's created by the worker in making a thing. You need surplus value. Later, you'll understand why you need more of more. So an increasing rate of more, moreness. Why do you need more? Do you know? This, we learned in Chapter 7. - Because this more covers this about like a subsistence

of the capitalist and the expansion of the business - And the like rainy day. - Covers the capitalist subsistence, covers a rainy day fund, covers the means of production. So the means of subsistence, the means of production, the capitalist's own means of subsistence is all covered by the workers' work. So you can see why it needs more than just what they need to survive themselves. If you had an association of free laborers who eat, everyone was laboring, everyone produced their own subsistence, you would not have a capital system. This is the more is necessary from the capitalist perspective for their own survival and the survival of their business. Let me give you two reasons why you need more and more. One is contingencies. So in the reproduction of the business for the next year, you always need extra over the year before because you don't know what's gonna come up and you prepare for eventualities like crop failures and the other is competition, which is another contingency in which someone else might suddenly be making a thing more cheaply and you might have to invest more capital so that you can keep up with them. That's the main engine. That's one main engine You can see another engine of infinite accumulation is finance, investment, right, 'cause investment goes where the rates of return are higher and if you need capital to prepare for an eventuality that someone will have a machine that makes the things twice as fast as you do, you need to have that in reserve. Otherwise you go under at every change of technology. You need to get that from a financier, from a bank who will invest where the rates of return are gonna be even higher. So again, this is coming in Volume 3. Those are the pressures from the whole system, require each capitalist to be pushing towards infinite accumulation. Other questions? Okay, let's work on rate and amount of surplus value. I only wanna give you a sense, this is Chapter 9, "Working Day is Law. " Here he is beginning on a topic that becomes very important later, the relationship between constant capital and variable capital. To remind you what they are, constant capital is the investment in means of production that only transfers its value to the commodities. It's constant because it doesn't add anything. Variable capital we know is only labor in Marx's account and it is the amount a capitalist has to spend on labor power whose return is greater than the investment. It's the only place the more comes from according to Marx. Whereas constant capital is the amount a capitalist has to spend on the means of production where the return is equal to the advance. No capitalist would continue if they only got back what they put in. So the difference between variable capital and constant capital matters. It's not the place where you can ratchet up the lever to get more out of it, that we're gonna see in the later chapter is between surplus value and the value of labor power. But later, the relationship between constant and variable capital is gonna become very important because in very capital heavy industries, they have a lower rate of profit overall than in other industries because you can only get more out of the labor. That becomes important later. That's called the organic composition of capital. Thomas, and then- - The constant capital, is that equivalent to the economic term fixed capital? - Not exactly. Constant capital has to do with the rate of return. Fixed like how long it lasts. Fixed capital is compared to the raw materials. Fixed capital is like machinery, but constant capital includes the materials. These are fine distinctions. Samuel. - Does Marx know for times when variable capital returns less than it's investing? Like everyone gets sick. - Yeah. Yeah, variable capital labor often returns less than you invest in and then you either have to push harder in the next quarter or you go outta business eventually

if it keeps going that way. In any individual capital situation, in a business, let's say, these things fluctuate as they fluctuate. Labor is like, I don't know, everyone gets wiped out by COVID for six weeks and you're in trouble and in another business, in another part of the world, same industry, they don't. This is part of the averaging of the way these things work. We're dealing now hypothetically with individual capitals. Volume 1 deals with individual capitals. But, of course, you have to understand that these things are spread out and averaged over a whole economic system, over whole industries, in sectors and between sectors. Okay. So we know that variable capital just to say, now we've got this other V which is not value, but variable capital. There is a number of limits. We know there's a limit of 24 hours. We know there's an individual worker's limit of their capacities, but you also notice that the surplus value in relation to an individual's capacities is indeterminate. Someone's capacities are not known until you work them hard enough so that they show you where their limits are. It's very different than the extension of a working day. There is a expandable limit, which is the number of workers that you can hire and out of these limited situations, the capitalist has to be able to ascertain and increase where needed the surplus value that's returned, that comes out of it. So I like to think of these as the capitalists' tools. The capitalist is a kind of worker and the machine that they work are the laborers and this machine has levers that they can move up and down. This, we talked about the length of the day is one lever. You can move up and down, you can move it up slightly, but it has an absolute limit. The intensity of labor, the number of workers is another labor and the ratio of the value of labor power to surplus value. This, we're moving towards in relative surplus value. Relative surplus value, I would say, is the main lesson of this book. That's the thing that makes life for workers under capital and for capitalists so dicey 'cause you have to be constantly innovating new ways to get more out of your labor. That's no fun. That's, well, clearly why I'm clearly not a capitalist, let's say, 'cause that doesn't sound fun to me. What we learn in this chapter is that the rate and amount of surplus value are not the same thing. So in general, when you have an individual worker, the rate and amount of surplus value are the same. I say, you're working half the day surplus labor, half the day necessary labor. It's 100% rate of surplus value. Does this make sense? Just to go back to that. This would look like, just imagine that those are exactly the same. This would be 100% surplus value and in this case, if it's 10 here and 10 here, the amount and rate are the same. If you hire many, many more workers and they work the same ratio of necessary to surplus labor time, you have a much higher amount of surplus value and the same rate. This is the impetus to collectivize, cooperatize to make a group subject out of labor. This is one of the impetuses. With one worker in your business, you can never make the amount higher than the rate. And, of course, capitalists are most interested in the amount, the absolute amount of surplus value that comes back because they have an absolute amount of things they have to cover, loans they have to pay back, future contingencies they have to plan for. AJ. - Under collectivized labor, is there also that same impetus in creating relative surplus value? Or is that only a feature of capitalism?

- You mean under previous kinds of group labor? - Sure. - No, there is no relative surplus value. There's no need to increase it under other systems. Only here, Samuel. - If capitalists were really interested in having this more to cover (indistinct) sense and being better, wouldn't we, like, I feel like we've gone beyond that in the sense that expanding a business also calls smart. So the amount you're getting is more, but you're gonna have to put more of that into your slush fund and you're gonna have to put, sorry, into your rainy day fund and you're gonna have to- - Well, and also when you increase, that's a good point. So Samuel's point is that when you increase from one worker to 100 workers, you don't only, you have to have a lot more capital. And that's where we're getting to this in the cooperation chapter. You have to pay that much more wages upfront. You have to have that money in an absolute terms and you have to put that much more means of production into movement. So you have to have more tools and more raw materials. No question. That's why the capitalists are few and the workers are many. Capital has to concentrate to put more laborers to work. We're getting to that in the cooperation chapter. That's a good intuition. Yeah. Oh, sorry, there were two of you raised your hands, David. - Going back to the idea that how capitalist logic essentially forces capitalists to constantly drive for growth. I'm wondering if you talk a bit about post-moderate of something like the degrowth? Yeah. - Degrowth, the question is whether degrowth, I think your question is maybe slightly suspicious question. I don't know. I'm suspicious of whether degrowth can actually have an effect on the capital system. Marx thinks at this point that the only way to stop the growth impetus is to overcome capital, the capital system. The rest of that question, which is exploring the different degrowth movements and talking about Kohei Saito's book on degrowth is for a different class. - I'm just trying to understand, you said here the rate was equal to the amount of surplus value. - Yeah. - Where the- - For one worth, for one worker. - Is 10? - Yeah. - So what do you mean by like 100% rate is equal to amount of 10? - What do I mean? That it's not that the two are equal, it's that the amount doesn't change. The amount will only change if the rate goes up. Here, with 100 workers, the absolute amount changes without the rate going up. So hiring more workers, having a collectivized, this is just one benefit of having a troop. Marx uses military metaphors in the cooperation chapter. Having a troop of laborers is beneficial in absolute terms because the rate can stay the same. So you don't have to exhaust anybody, but you're getting much more of an absolute amount of surplus value out it if you can afford that. Yeah. - I just, I had a follow up on the other question about expanding your business, and I'm sure that this will come up again later, but how much of the constant capital can go towards buying new machinery or does that all come from like the investing surplus value back into the business? - Constant capital is an important topic. It will become more important as we go on here. Again, he's working with a simple schema first where you have a difference between constant and variable capital, how much you have to invest in constant capital, how much of your surplus value has to go into, let's say, new constant capital is an issue. And that's another thing that drives capitalists towards growth rather than stagnation or stasis. Because as you'll see in the cooperation chapter and the concept of relative surplus value, when a technical revolution happens

you have to get on board or else you're dead. And so in full fledged capital system where technical revolutions change the rate and amount of surplus value like that, suddenly people are using weaving machines. You can't afford to pay your weavers because they're selling for a quarter of what you sell for or they're making that much more product and can keep investing in machinery, can spread their machinery out, can improve their machinery. You have to get on board or you die. All right, there's lots of questions. I'm afraid we're not gonna move on, Samuel. - So this is a quick question and it might be kind of silly. So Marx says describing a system where capitalists act on their amount, the absolute amount of surplus value they get by exploiting the labor basically, like by having them work is surplus kind. - Yeah. - And why does this analysis not include what I feel is also happens a lot, which is like price gouge, right, where capitalists create monopoly, which was happening in the 19th century where- - Sure, monopoly is a- - And other and cartels and whatever, where capitalists can extort the buyer. - Uh-huh. The question is about monopoly, price gouging, cartels, collusion, price fixing, all sorts of ways in which you get more out of the buyer. Marx is concentrating here. Are you okay? - Yeah, I swallowed wrong. - Okay. Marx does that to you. Marx is isolating certain features of capital which have not been isolated. That is here the production process, those are on the merchant side and on the exchange side, and that is dealt with in Volume 2. But it turns out that those things in the end are much weaker than the forces of production, the creation of surplus value. If I overcharge because I have a monopoly, very soon someone is going to break that monopoly. This is Marx's idea at the very least. And Ricardo's idea, monopolies get broken either by laws or by innovative new technologies, which render the whole industry obsolete. So the movement of capital he thinks is towards things selling at their value. That's the tendency. Aiden, you have a question. - What is it about the characterization of labor that allows you to expand your margins whereas the individual worker sees the same? - I mean, it's purely mathematical. You have, well, you're just making more surplus value. You have, so here, if you have 100 workers, you're making 1,000 in surplus value and you have 1,000 that you have to lay out, right? You're making that back too, of course, right? So your absolute amount goes way up. It's a preparation. It's a bit of an abstraction. It's a preparation for understanding how rate and amount have a different effect on how much the capitalist gets back. Just keep that in mind. Okay, let's go on. Now we get to the center of the book, Section 4. How are we doing for time? Oh, we have hardly any time. "The Production of Relative Surplus Value," this is the place where capitalists really shine. In this chapter, we'll come back to it on Wednesday and spend some time with it. There are three crucial issues. One is that the lever capitalists use more than anything in fully developed capitalism to increase the rate and amount of surplus value is increase in productivity. The rest of part four is about how they do that. The second crucial issue in this chapter is that the only revolution possible under capital that isn't against capital is technical revolutions that happen constantly because it's one way to increase productivity and it spreads like wildfire and it can't be stopped. If you wonder why we're captured by machines, it's not because we love them

or 'cause we're innovative, it's because they took over and someone had the great idea that they should be for consumption as well. But, of course, for consumption means that all of your personal stuff now becomes work. The other crucial issue that comes up in this chapter is the disadvantage of productivity increases. Because in general, when you increase productivity, the value of the products drops. Increase in productivity is inversely proportional to value. So what to do, it looks like you can never get ahead because if I make more of the same in the same amount of time, since we know socially necessary average abstract labor time, SNALT, is what determines value. If I can make it faster, if the social average for making something is faster, the value drops. What to do? The upshot, which we'll get to next time, is that only certain types of productivity increases, actually increase the capitalist bottom line. Those are increases in the productivity on the means of subsistence on products that go into necessary labor time or the value of labor power. So let's just look at this before you go. The ABCs of capital, this is the center of the book. Since we can't, this is an absolute limit. The limit of the day, we have to change the ratio of the value of labor power to surplus value. That's the only way that they can increase their take, is by driving the value of labor down. So Marx shows you that if you can move B to B prime, then relatively speaking, the amount of surplus value is more in relation to the value of labor power. That's why this is called relative surplus value. All of capital's efforts are concentrated in moving from B to B prime in modern, full fledged competitive industrial and hyper-industrial capital, including in finance capital. All focused on that gap. One version of the focus on that gap is Taylorism, making you more efficient on the workflow, where they're timing you on your bathroom breaks and every little activity. One version is (indistinct) making you do just a part of something because it's much more efficient if you only polish one side of a thing while someone else is polishing the other side of a thing. You do it at the same time, then it's done. So long as that thing reduces the cost of the means of subsistence. That could include utilizing better, utilizing more completely the machines that make your means of subsistence. What's a means of subsistence? Healthcare, housing, nourishment. What else? Clothing, so shirts is his example. If you have a machine that is making shirts for workers and you're using that machine only during the day, if you start to use it at night, you are increasing your absolute surplus value on that and you're decreasing the cost of labor because it's cheaper for them to get shirts. If that means you need to get shirts for 1 cent an hour of labor from Bangladesh or Vietnam or wherever you get it temporarily, that decreases the cost of labor where you are and increases the surplus value. So the completeness of the use of machines is one important lever for them. The size of the workforce is a lever. The interstitial increases where you're not taking that many breaks and you get to work on time or early. The intensiveness of agricultural work, you have to pick so and so more stuff in an hour, use up more of your energy, use up workers more quickly, and that will decrease the cost of labor power. Like a marathon. Hasan. - Would it be appropriate to say the capitalists are not actually should be interested in increase in production, but decrease the value? - Yeah, the capitalist interest is to decrease the value of labor power.

That's, you know, that's beyond good and evil. It's a fact of the system. See you next time. (upbeat music)