Das Kapital

“The body of the commodity, which serves as the equivalent, always figures as the embodiment of abstract human labour, and is always the product of some specific useful and concrete labour.”

The value of any commodity is determined by the work and the hours of labor put into it. For Marx, any commodity or service is literally just the final expression of work done by at least one human being.

“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

This passage reflects what Marx describes as the “fetishism of the commodity” (163). In other words, Marx is referring to the fact that society assigns a certain value to a thing, regardless of how much labor actually went into making it.

“If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest me, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value.”

Marx argues that the social value of commodities matters much more than the actual characteristics and usage of a commodity. This is important for Marx in explaining why workers are not paid fairly for their services or for the products they produce.

“Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable.”

Under the capitalist mode of production, everything can become a commodity that can be traded on a market. This includes such abstract, personal things like an individual’s conscience (197). This backs Marx’s contention that workers make their own labor a commodity under the capitalist mode of production.

“Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation, emerges from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again.”

Marx views money as simply the means of exchange for commodities in an advanced economy. However, capital takes money one step further: It is money used for money’s sake or, in other words, money that increases itself through investment purely for a capitalist’s profit.

“In order that a man may be able to sell commodities other than his labour-power, he must of course possess means of production, such as raw materials, instruments of labour, etc. No boots can be made without leather.”

This passage illustrates both the reason why very few workers can become capitalists and what distinguishes the capitalist mode of production from other modes in which workers produced and sold their own commodities. The capitalist does not do the actual labor but instead controls the raw materials, tools, and machines required for production.

“[The worker] creates surplus-value, which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing.”

A key point in Marx’s analysis is that the real value that workers contribute to production is “hidden” in some way. This has the consequence of workers’ wages not actually reflecting the value their production or services bring, which reflects The Contradictions of Capitalism.

“But in its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day.”

This one quote expresses two key points for Marx. One, surplus value, derived from unnecessary or surplus labor, is the prime motivation for capitalists. Second, capitalists can only gain surplus value by exploiting the workers by forcing them into more intense labor or by lengthening the working day.

“The driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital to the greatest possible extent, i.e. the greatest possible production of surplus-value, hence the greatest possible exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist.”

Marx makes one of his key points explicit here: The mission of all capitalists is to extract as much surplus value from the labor of workers as possible. The passage reflects Marx’s antagonistic conception of the relationship between capitalists and workers.

“Hence we nowhere find a more shameless squandering of human labour-power for despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery.”

As the only industrialized economy and society in the world, Marx finds the best examples of the abuses of workers he wishes to document and analyze in England. Another important argument of Marx’s is that industrialization allows for greater exploitation of workers.

“Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital's disposal for its own valorization.”

The “economic paradox” Marx describes here is perhaps the most important of The Contradictions of Capitalism: why, with technology making production easier and more efficient, workers are working harder and for longer hours than they had in previous eras. Marx argues that the capitalist greed for the greatest possible profit is what drives capitalists to find new ways to exploit the worker to achieve optimal self-enrichment.

“The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-valorization of capital.”

Marx highlights how under the capitalist mode of production, the goal is not production in and of itself. Instead, it is solely to make surplus value for the capitalist’s own personal use.

“What the worker is selling is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually belongs, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him.”

This passage illustrates what Marx means by “alienation” of the worker (990). Workers do not receive fair compensation for their work, and they also lose ownership of any products that they make to the capitalist.

“Classical political economy stumbles approximately onto the true state of affairs, but without consciously formulating it. It is unable to do this as long as it stays within its bourgeois skin.”

Marx alleges that classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo do not usually express the real situation where capitalists exploit workers and extract profits from unpaid labor. This is because such economists often represent the interests of capitalists.

“[H. Carey's] reasoning is quite worthy of the man who, first of all, declared that capitalist relations of production were eternal laws of nature and reason, whose free and harmonious working was only disturbed by the intervention of the state.”

One important point that comes up across Capital is that the capitalist mode of production is not “natural.” By this, Marx means that capitalism is a product of historical developments and The Relationship Between Base Structure and Superstructure, not something that is intrinsic to human nature or that has existed throughout history.

“Capitalist production therefore reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself.”

In this passage, Marx means that the capitalist mode of production tolerates no alternatives: It generates a society where workers have to sell their labor power to capitalists in order to be able to afford their and their families’ means of subsistence.

“The constant sale and purchase of labour-power is the form; the content is the constant appropriation by the capitalist, without equivalent, of a portion of the labour of others which has already been objectified, and his repeated exchange of this labour for a greater quantity of the living labour of others.”

Marx argues here that labor generates all the value that is appropriated by the capitalist. This produces a system where labor is converted into capital, which the capitalist uses to employ more and increase the size of the working class.

“[The capitalist] is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society's productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.”

The quest for surplus value completely drives the activities of all capitalists.This, incidentally, does spur on the only positive contribution of the capitalist mode of production: that it is more productive and efficient than past modes of production.

“The movement of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capitalism.”

Marx argues that “the despotism of capitalism” is helped along by the existence of a surplus population of workers. This makes it easier for a capitalist to force a worker to accept poor pay and poor working conditions because they can be easily replaced with a worker from the surplus population.

“The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to displace the guild masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, who were in possession of the sources of wealth.”

Marx’s modes of production are defined by not only how labor is organized but also who benefits from the production. In the capitalist mode of production, the dominant class became the bourgeoisie, who replaced guild masters and the feudal nobility.

“Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour.”

Marx argues that the capitalist mode of production is coercive in many ways, including that it eliminates alternatives and that workers are put under extreme pressure to constantly be productive. Here, he adds that capitalism even influences lawmakers to force peasants from their lands to become wage workers.

“Previously a mass of small producers, working on their own account, had found their natural counterpart in a large number of scattered customers; but now these customers are concentrated into one great market provided for by industrial capital.”

This passage explains one of the crucial ways that the emergence of the capitalist mode of production is characterized: Workers no longer produce for themselves and their communities. Instead, they are forced to produce in exchange for wages and to spend their own wages on other commodities produced for the market they themselves are contributing toward.

“The private property of the worker in his means of production is the foundation of small-scale industry, and small-scale industry is a necessary condition for the development of social production and the free individuality of the worker himself […] it flourishes, unleashes the whole of its energy, attains its adequate classical form, only where the worker is the free proprietor of the conditions of his labour, and sets them in motion himself: where the peasant owns the land he cultivates, or the artisan owns the tool with which he is an accomplished performer.”

Marx argues that ownership of what the worker produces is essential to the workers’ freedom. By speaking of workers’ alienation, Marx means that workers are separated not only from the actual monetary value of their labor but also from the more profound sense of ownership over it as well.