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Exploitation and Equality: Labour Power as a Non-Commodity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
The theory of surplus value contrasts ‘pay for labour power’ (for proletarians) and ‘pay for labour services’ (for independent, self-employed ‘professionals’). Unlike labour services (living labour, living labour, i.e., work itself) but like all commodities, labour power has a specific economic value (it contains a specific amount of embodied labour) and it exchanges at this value. Unlike that of other commodities, the consumption of labour power results in the creation of more value than the commodity itself contains. Surplus value arises from the gap between the labour needed to sustain a day’s work, to keep the worker going for a day, and the labour performed in that same time. By the labour theory of value, the amount of labour needed to sustain a day’s work (necessary labour) confers one value on the means of subsistence the worker requires, and thereby on the labour power the worker sells to her employer, whereas the day’s work itself (necessary and surplus labour) confers another larger value on the product marketed by the employer.
- Type
- III Marxian Exploitation
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 15: Analyzing Marxism , 1989 , pp. 375 - 389
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 1992
References
1 This work’s motivation stems from a belief that not all problems with Marx’s views on justice are problems concerning justice in itself; some are rooted in the surplus value theory. Numbers in brackets are to Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage 1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1976).
2 ‘We began with the assumption that labour power is bought and sold at its value’ (340).
‘... both buyer and seller... of labour power... contract as free persons... and they exchange equivalent for equivalent’ (280).
‘... the purchase of labour power... conforms to the laws of commodity exchange’ (729).
3 ‘What was really decisive for [the capitalist] was the specific use value which [labour power] possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself ‘ (301, italics mine).
4 Much criticism of surplus value takes issue with the labour theory of value. I do not. But it will I think be evident that surplus value theory as here developed depends on what G. A. Cohen calls the ‘popular doctrine’ of the labour theory of value, as opposed to the ‘strict doctrine’; see his excellent ‘The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 8, 4 (Summer 1979).
5 The capacity for labour (at any rate, the capacity for untrained labour, to which for Marx all labour power can be ‘reduced’) is no more a product of labour than is the human body itself. Rather, it is a gift of nature, much like the powers of sight and hearing and the capacity for locomotion (all of which it might be supposed to include). Marx asks:
how does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material and the means of subsistence, all of them save land in its crude state products of labour, and on the other hand a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labour power, their working arms and brains’. (‘Wages, Price and Profit’ in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works [New York: International Publishers 1985], Vol. 20, 128).
Apart from the seeming obviousness of the point that ‘working arms and brains’ are not products of labour, Marx here explicitly contrasts labour power with products of labour.
6 The value of labour power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article. In so far as it has value, it represents no more than a definite quantity of the average social labour objectified in it. Labour power exists only as a capacity of the living individual. Its production consequently presupposes his existence. Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour time necessary for the production of labour power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words the value of labour power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner. (274, my italics)
7 Wages, Price and Profit, 128
8 ‘The money-owner... must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it... these are the conditions of the problem. Hie Rhodus, hie salta!’ (269). Marx makes it clear, in a footnote to this statement, that he does not suppose price to correspond with value in the real world, but that surplus value must be possible even if, counterfactually, that correspondence is supposed to obtain.
9 The only person to notice this ‘non-transfer’ seems to be R. P. Wolff in his Understanding Marx (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984) 104, n.20. Relegating it to a footnote, Wolff does not seem to think the point important and casually recommends —what I shall argue would be theoretically disastrous-that Marx ought to regard the value of labour power as transmitted to the product.
10 So far as accounting for the magnitude of value of the total finished product (or the surplus product) goes, it makes no difference whether labour power is supposed to embody the value of the already consumed means of subsistence or to be valueless. Capitalists are obliged to provide money for workers’ means of subsistence; whether this money is regarded as representing ‘the value of labour power’ is immaterial. Whether what capitalists get has value or not is irrelevant so far as they are concerned if any value it may have cannot be transmitted to the product.
11 The worker’s consumption is of two kinds. While producing he consumes the means of production with his labour, and converts them into products with a higher value than that of the capital advanced. This is his productive consumption. It is at the same time consumption of his labour power by the capitalist who bought it. On the other hand the worker uses the money paid to him for his labour power to buy the means of subsistence; this is his individual consumption. The worker’s productive consumption and his individual consumption are therefore totally distinct. (717)
12 He writes e.g. that ‘the individual consumption of the working class is ... the production and reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: the worker’ (717-18).
13 Thanks in particular to Arthur Ripstein for his valued comments on an ancestor of the present paper, and to Bob Ware for good suggestions in his capacity as editor.