Louis, after reading the full "once again..." post on your blog, I take it that what troubles you about the connection of Marx's distinction between formal and real subsumption of labor under capital (SLC) and his more general analysis of labor exploitation is that formal and real SLC seem to apply to very different eras of capitalist production, where formal SLC describes the early capitalist era in which capitalists first asserted direct oversight of artisanal and guild production while real SLC refers to the fully developed capitalist system. The apparent conflict with Marx's more general analysis of capitalist exploitation seems to arise from his assertion, in the "Results" chapter and elsewhere, of a correspondence between forms of SLC and forms of surplus value, such that formal subsumption yields (only) absolute surplus value while the creation of relative surplus value requires real SLC. You see this claim as inconsistent with Marx's description in Capital Vol. I of the process of reaping absolute surplus value in the context of capitalist factory production.
I think that there is no real (or formal, ha) inconsistency here, for two reasons. First, Marx doesn't assert that formal and real SLC describe very different eras in the capitalist mode of production, just that formal SLC must precede real SLC (since capitalists must first have direct control over the production process before they can introduce desired technical changes). Once capitalists have gained direct control of production (formal SLC), real SLC commences just as soon as capitalists realize the productivity gains of the very simple production changes he describes under the heading of "Co-operation" (Capital V. I, Chapter 13), e.g., economies of scale achieved by using common storehouses for raw materials or tools. Marx identifies co-operation as the most basic manifestation of real SLC in his Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, published in English in _Marx-Engels Collected Works_ (Vol. 30, pp. 262-3, 271, 279, also Vol. 34, 108-9). *Full* realization of real SLC doesn't occur until capitalists also introduce systematic division of labor and "machinofacture,", described in Chapters 14 and 15 of Capital Volume I, and obviously these changes come much later than the simple innovations he associates with co-operation in production. The second reason there's no true inconsistency is that Marx sees real SLC as reinforcing the gains from formal SLC, as when the advent of the factory system makes it possible for capitalists to further extend the working day. For example, in Capital Vol I, pp. 645-6 (Fowkes translation), after reasserting that merely formal SLC suffices for the creation of absolute surplus value, Marx writes "But we have seen how methods of producing relative surplus-value are, at the same time, methods of producing absolute surplus-value. Indeed, the unrestricted prolongation of the working day turned out to be a very characteristic product of large-scale industry." For what it's worth-- Gil -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Louis Proyect Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2016 3:30 PM To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <[email protected]>; Progressive Economics <[email protected]> Subject: [Pen-l] Fwd: Once again on the formal/real subsumption question | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist In my post on “Anglocentrism and the real subsumption of labor”, I mistakenly attributed Marx’s discussion of formal and real subsumption to the Grundrisse.. In actually is contained in “The Results of the Direct Production Process”, which is part of a third draft of Capital that Marx wrote between the summer of 1863 and the summer of 1864, and is based on a plan Marx made for the work in December 1862. After reading it, I find myself troubled by how it fits into Marx’s more general analysis of the exploitation of labor in light of his statement: Just as the production of absolute surplus value can be regarded as the material expression of the formal subsumption of labour under capital, so the production of relative surplus value can be regarded as that of the real subsumption of labour under capital. full: http://louisproyect.org/2016/01/24/once-again-on-the-formalreal-subsumption-question/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
