Part 3: Chapter 8

"Constant capital" is the means of productions, the part of capital which maintains its quantity of value throughout the process of production. Now, crucially this value changes *form* in production, i.e. cotton becomes yarn, or a spindle "transfers" all of its use-value into yarn. Marx calls this transformation "a metempsychosis." Value "deserts the consumed body to occupy the newly create one. But this transmigration takes place, as it were, behind the back of the actual labor in progress."

So much of Capital is about machinery. Sometimes I imagine that the book could have been titled The Conditions of the Working Class in England, but in these chapters on constant capital, I wonder why it wasn't titled The Question Concerning Technology. It is important for us here to distinguish between "past labor" and "the means of production"—i.e. value and its embodiment. What is transferred in production is value, i.e. the value of past labor expressed in embodied-time: in use-values which we call means of production. Machinery contains the labor which made it, and over the course of its mechanical exhaustion, transfers 1/Xth of that labor into the product (having a life of X repetitions). But the raw materials also contain past labor (cotton does not fall out of the sky), and the form of these materials is "destroyed" while their value "reappears" in the new product.

We cannot be more specific than Marx here, so a quote will suffice: "As regards the means of production, what is really consumed is their use-value, and the consumption of this use-value by labor results in the product. There is in fact no consumption of their value and it would therefore be inaccurate to say that it is re-produced. It is rather preserved." What is produced in the product "is a new use-value in which the old exchange-value re-appears." If we are astonished to see exchange-value, our old friend, reappearing here, it shows how easily capital stops looking like capital.

The accumulation of capital, as we recall, follows the formula M-C-M. In other words, exchange-value, use-value, exchange-value. The production of the commodity to be sold consumes the use-value of the means of production purchased by the capitalist (constant capital)—the exchange value which reappears as money when the commodity is sold.

The whole point of this chapter is not only to draw the titular distinction (constant and variable capital), but also to defeat the perception that machinery "creates" value: "Once engaged in this process [of production], the machine cannot transfer more value than it possesses independently of the process."