Capital starts with the commodity form of production, but Marx is not focused on the commodity in his grand work. Instead he is looking at the system which creates this commodity form, where there is a split between those who own the means of production and those who lend their hands in creating the only object that is not diminished by its use – labor power.
Where the young Marx in 1848 would emphasize the importance of class struggle in the productive process, a more mature Marx looks at the system in Capital. He takes this to the point where he is analyzing how the system works in its totality such that he can offer up a general law of capitalist accumulation.
What Marx illustrates in Chapter 25, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” in the capitalist system is a theory of the business cycle, how production ebbs and flows with the size of the labor force. To read Marx you must go through the thick jungle of nineteenth century prose, but you do get some gem phrases like “the juggernaut of capital” (19). And this is Volume One where he had time to edit it. More fire breathing Marx working under a deadline like in the Manifesto gives you more quotable phrases but less developed theses.
In the Marxian system, the worker is not tied to the individual capitalist, but the system itself. In this chapter Marx is looking at the growth of capital in terms of its ratio to labor, how more fixed capital grows and there is relatively less variable capital as the factories grow larger and capital is more centralized. This growth does not free the working class, they are still tied to the system with a “golden chain” (4) even as wages grow. But the system is not defined through a continual process of growth, but this dynamic process in which the amount of surplus labor stolen from the worker changes “If the quantity if unpaid labour supplied by the working-class, and accumulated by the capitalist class, increases so rapidly that its conversion into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labor, then wages rise, and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labor diminishes in proportion” (5). Then the cycle peaks and returns. All the while the capitalistic relation between the classes persists.
This whole process is driven by centralization and accumulation as “larger capitals beat the smaller” (8), but what is really what makes the immiseration of the working classes possible and yoking their lives to the wheel of capital is the army of the unemployed, a “relatively redundant population of laborers” (11). This population in turn through labor and the continued accumulation of capital create their own servitude through their social reproduction rendering themselves redundant, a “disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. The reserve army thus is a “mass of human material always at the ready for exploitation” (12) which can be set in motion in times of growth and then discarded to the dung heaps as soon as there is a general glut. Capitalism is not possible without this army. Further, the quality of the workers changes as there is the capital accumulation. Men are replaced with women and women with children and the exploitation is pushed to its limits, pulling as much surplus value out of the working day as possible (13), becoming the entire “pivot” on how the law of supply and demand works (15). Foe Marx, the growth of wealth is not possible without this scheme, labor and poverty being one side of the coin that includes capital and wealth on the other side (19).
What we have with Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation is a model. And with any model we have necessary simplification that makes it false, but we also have the potential to learn about the world. What we can say is that the Marxian laws were built on an economy that looks a lot different from the one we see in modern America. Manufacturing in this one country has shrunk as a fraction of employment of the potential labor force. What this did not lead to was wide immiseration (though there is still gross inequality) but instead the economy shifted to a service-driven economy. So that on one hand makes it tempting to dismiss the Marxian framework. We have fewer factory workers and are the richest country in the history of the world. We must revisit Marx’s placing of all value creation in the labor power of the manufacturing worker. Many of this nation’s most valuable companies do not produce anything. Their products are replicated with low marginal cost. It is more like the story where a dollar was introduced to a small town and that single dollar was enough for everyone to pay off their debts. Labor might not be the fount of all wealth. This ignores all the goods we consume that are not made or grown in the United States, however. Or it is not possible to lay Marshall’s scissors over an LTV-driven commodity analysis.
While we may not be able to see the manufacturing base working from the bottom up, the more general law of capitalist accumulation feels true as someone who has been both in and out of that reserve army of the unemployed. The structure of society is such that you are defined by your profession. When you are in school you are asked what you want to be when you grow up, and then when you are in college you are asked what your major is, and then when you are an adult you are what you do. I was a contestant on the television quiz show program Jeopardy! in 2011, filming when I did not have a job. They introduce you by two bits of biographical information, where you are from and what you do. My local has always been fraught, but even worse was that I did not have a job at that point. I was trying to figure out what my next job was going to be, but in discussion with the production staff, they would not let me be “unemployed.” I was denied that status even though it was the best reflection of what was going on with my relationship to the workforce. Even in the shadow of the recession, the reserve army existed but it was not mentioned in good company.
The worst thing during that episode of unemployment was that I wanted to be exploited. There is no effective way beyond the system. It makes me think of Edwin Abbott’s “Flatland” where the characters are two-dimensional shapes and they can only conceptualize in their two dimensions or lower, but it is impossible to see in an extended dimension. In Flatland, a sphere is just another circle. That is what Marx is trying to get at. The general law is beyond the class struggle of the Manifesto, in trying to pull away and see the system from above it. I am not sure if he fully realized that (or if as Robinson suggests, the project of Capital was abandoned because all the parts were not reconcilable).
Cited
Marx, K., Engels, F., Mandel, E., & Fowkes, B. (1990). Capital: A critique of political economy. London: Penguin in association with New Left Review.
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