Part 3: Chapter 7

Perhaps Hegel's most marked influence on Marx is stylistic—not in terms of the "difficulty" of their prose, but in the disingenuousness required by the dialectical method. Flipping back in Capital hundreds of pages, the reader comes across many statements which give him pause. A given sentence about the labor process is always from the viewpoint available at that point in our consciousness of it, which is inevitably simplified. For instance, "In a successful product, the role played by past labor in mediating its useful properties has been extinguished" (289). Much later, however, we are to hear that "past labor always disguises itself as capital" (757)! If anyone needs a good example of dialectical thought, here is a perfect example, spread out over half of the book. What appears to be extinguished—objectified in the final product, is not only in fact preserved (as assets), but is also raised up: as the means of production, past labor eventually dominates living labor, "as the rule of the past, dead labor over the living" (988).

Let us say we wanted to embark upon a hackneyed reading-together of the commodity fetish section in Marx and the lordship-bondage section in Hegel's Phenomenology. The only reasonable thing to pursue here would not be analogous details, or parallelism in dialectical language, but the place of these sections in relation to the entire argument (where there is, in fact, a great deal to say).

This is all to say, blogging "as-we-go" in Marx is rather self-defeating. Everything we learn is later exposed to revision; though we were never "mistaken," we don't get to hold fast to the material and definitions we memorized in the introductory chapters.

So, in this chapter, the means of production (objectified "past labor") must be seized upon by living labor, be "awakened from the dead." Later, this will be reversed—the machine (esp. its technological development) will seize upon the laborer and alter him as it sees fit. But at this early stage, Marx presents… what shall we call it? Here we are discussing "the simple elements of the labor process"—thus, as distinguished from animal labor, or from whittling a stick; and foremost as labor embodies value and becomes a use-value.

In the selling of the worker's labor-power, however, the particular use-value produced becomes irrelevant—more important is the product's containing surplus-value. "Use value is certainly not la chose qu'on aime pour lui-même in the production of commodities"… "Value is independent of the particular use-value by which it is borne." As always (I suggest) we must read this talk about commodities with a double-vision, with one eye towards shoes, Bibles, belts, and with the other eye directed towards the sell of labor-power as a commodity. So, Marx discusses the (essential) value embodied in a (contingent) use-value above, but then turns this logic around upon the worker who sells his labor-power and the capitalist who purchases it: "the use-value of labor-power, in other words labor, belongs as little to its seller as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who sold it." With full irony, then, we learn that the worker's having-sold his labor for twice the time necessary to reproduce it is, "a piece of good luck for the buyer!"

It is precisely this "good luck," the worker's having to sell an entire day of his time for the exchange-value necessary to reproduce himself (i.e. live another 24 hours), which creates surplus value. This "trick" "both takes place and does not take place in the sphere of circulation. It takes place through the mediation of circulation because it is conditioned by the purchase of the labor-power in the market; it does not take place in circulation because what happens there is only an introduction to the valorization process, which is entirely confined to the sphere of production. And so 'everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.'"

The separation of these two spheres here functions as an alibi. We should not be surprised if we later see that this phenomenon is anything but a trick, a piece of luck, or if the laws of exchange (here unviolated) turn out to have been a stacked deck.