The production of absolute surplus value

Engels: “Labour begins with the making of tools”

(This was posted to the Introduction to Marxism mailing list, an online class. For more information go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxism_class/.)

Over the next couple of days, I am going to be posting excerpts from Marx’s Capital Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value with some discussion questions. Based on the lack of response to my last posting on Part II, I am surmising that it has not been smooth sailing. I would urge having some patience since we are going to be moving on to more accessible aspects of Marxist thought but I do think that it was important to try to read and understand the bedrock of Marx’s economic analysis. After covering the highlights of Part III, we will take a look at some selected topics in Marxist economics that might seem to have more immediate relevance to the headlines in today’s newspapers since they look at the problem of falling rates of profit, economic crisis, etc.

In considering how to introduce Part III of Capital, Volume One, it dawned on me that it might help to compare the capitalist economy to the economies that preceded it historically. Rather than getting bogged down in the formulas that Marx uses to illustrate the creation of surplus value, which go to the very heart of the exploitation of labor, I thought it might make sense to look at how labor was used in societies that preceded the one that we live in today.

From the very beginning of mankind (I hope that feminists understand that I am using the word not in the sense of male, but simply to denote Homo sapiens), we have used tools to shape nature into usable goods. Arguably, this practice preceded us since Jane Goodall’s field studies of chimpanzees that revealed a kind of tool-making.

One day in October of 1960, Jane Goodall found a chimp that she had named David Greybeard squatting on a termite mound. Not wanting to startle him, she stopped some distance away and could not see clearly what he was doing. He seemed to be poking pieces of grass into the mound, then raising them to his mouth. When he left, she approached the mound. She inserted one of the abandoned grasses into a hole in the mound and found that the termites bit onto it with their jaws. David had been using the stem as a tool to “fish” for insects!

Not much has changed over the past million years or so. Long before Goodall made this discovery, Engels considered the role of labor in the transition from ape to man even though he associates tool-making exclusively with our species:

Labour begins with the making of tools. And what are the most ancient tools that we find – the most ancient judging by the heirlooms of prehistoric man that have been discovered, and by the mode of life of the earliest historical peoples and of the rawest of contemporary savages? They are hunting and fishing implements, the former at the same time serving as weapons. But hunting and fishing presuppose the transition from an exclusively vegetable diet to the concomitant use of meat, and this is another important step in the process of transition from ape to man.

The earliest form of economic activity is what anthropologists call hunting-and-gathering. It was dominant, for example, among indigenous peoples in North America. A tribe collectively went out to hunt for bison and shared the bounty collectively in an arrangement that can be called primitive communism. There was no notion of money, nor of commodity circulation. Collective labor using tools such as bows and arrows produced use values, such as hides and meat. There was very little incentive to produce improvements in technology, such as guns, since nature offered itself in ample supplies. Although there were obvious hardships associated with hunting, the key thing to understand is that labor was only deployed to meet the immediate needs of the tribe. Once food and clothing were stockpiled, leisure time was spent in story-telling, games and other forms of amusement that excluded television and video games of course. This primitive economy was described as “The Original Affluent Society” by Marshall Sahlins in the first chapter of “Stone Age Economics.” He writes:

The hunter, one is tempted to say, is ‘uneconomic man.’ At least as concerns nonsubsistence goods, he is the reverse of that standard caricature immortalized in any General Principles of Economics, page one. His wants are scarce and his means (in relation) plentiful. Consequently he is ‘comparatively free of material pressures,’ has ‘no sense of possession,’ shows ‘an undeveloped sense of property,’ is ‘completely indifferent to any material pressures,’ manifests a ‘lack of interest’ in developing his technological equipment.

In this relation of hunters to worldly goods there is a neat and important point. From the internal perspective of the economy, it seems wrong to say that wants are ‘restricted,’ desires ‘restrained,’ or even that the notion of wealth is ‘limited.’ Such phrasings imply in advance an Economic Man and a struggle of the hunter against his own worse nature, which is finally then subdued by a cultural vow of poverty. The words imply the renunciation of an acquisitiveness that in reality was never developed, a suppression of desires that were never broached. Economic Man is a bourgeois construction-as Marcel Mauss said, ‘not behind us, but before, like the moral man.’ It is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their materialistic ‘impulses’; they simply never made an institution of them. ‘Moreover if it is a great blessing to be free from a great evil, our [Montagnais] Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests,–I mean ambition and avarice . . . as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.’

We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. ‘Their extremely limited material possessions relieve them of all cares with regard to daily necessities and permit them to enjoy life.’

Marx and Engels were intensely interested in primitive communism throughout their careers since it offered a concrete example of how life without commodity production could be enjoyed. In particular, they relied on Lewis Henry Morgan’s field studies of the Iroquois. Marx kept Ethnological Notebooks that included observations on Morgan’s work plus studies of precapitalist societies worldwide. As I understand it, a new edition of the notebooks has been in the works for the past decade or so.

You can, of course, read what Engels wrote on the “stone age economics” of the American Indians in the classic “Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State”, which also relied heavily on Lewis Henry Morgan:

The population is extremely sparse; it is dense only at the tribe’s place of settlement, around which lie in a wide circle first the hunting grounds and then the protective belt of neutral forest, which separates the tribe from others. The division of labor is purely primitive, between the sexes only. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The woman looks after the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. They are each master in their own sphere: the man in the forest, the woman in the house. Each is owner of the instruments which he or she makes and uses: the man of the weapons, the hunting and fishing implements, the woman of the household gear. The housekeeping is communal among several and often many families. What is made and used in common is common property - the house, the garden, the long-boat. Here therefore, and here alone, there still exists in actual fact that “property created by the owner’s labor” which in civilized society is an ideal fiction of the jurists and economists, the last lying legal pretense by which modern capitalist property still bolsters itself up.

The North American Indians essentially lived in a classless society. However, the entire hemisphere was not so egalitarian. Latin America was marked by class divisions fully in accord with the introduction of “civilization” in Europe and Asia. While lacking in some of the advanced technology of the rest of the world (an accident of geography), the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans lived in cities (the word civilization comes from the Roman word for city–civitas) and relied on agriculture to produce the commodities that were circulated in the economy. However, the mode of production was not market-driven. Unlike the capitalist system that would take its place, the tributary system was marked by the extraction of use values from the peasantry and the forced labor on public projects such as pyramid or cathedral building.

It is only with the production of a surplus product in agriculture that class division begins to appear. When grains can be stockpiled, a certain layer of the population can emerge over and above the rest of society and be constituted as a ruling class of priests or kings.

In pre-capitalist societies, a surplus product can be created either through slave labor or feudal obligation. The Roman Empire made widespread use of slave labor while the economies that followed its collapse were characterized mainly by the collection of tribute from serfs, who were nominally free in accordance with Church law.

Under serfdom, exploitation was highly visible. For the peasant, a certain portion of the week was devoted to working on his master’s land and the rest of the week was allocated to his own. In “Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory“, Ernest Mandel writes:

The great domains of the early Middle Ages furnish us with another illustration. The land of these domains was divided into three parts: the communal lands consisting of forest, meadows, swamps, etc.; the land worked by the serf for his own and his family’s subsistence; and finally, the land worked by the serf in order to maintain the feudal lord. The work week during this period was usually six days, not seven. It was divided into two equal parts: the serf worked three days on the land from which the yield belonged to him; the other three days he worked on the feudal lord’s land, without remuneration, supplying free labor to the ruling class.

The products of each of these two very different types of labor can be defined in different terms. When the producer is performing necessary labor, he is producing a necessary product. When he is performing surplus labor, he is producing a social surplus product.

Eventually, the growth of capitalist property relationships collided with this kind of labor exploitation because no matter how cruel it was it was not up to the task of efficient commodity production for the emerging cash marketplace. Ironically, it was the very domination of the Church which sought to preserve feudal class relations in perpetuity that served as a break on economic development, as Michael Perelman points out in his essential “The Invention of Capitalism”:

Although their standard of living may not have been particularly lavish, the people of precapitalistic northern Europe, like most traditional people, enjoyed a great deal of free time. The common people maintained innumerable religious holidays that punctuated the tempo of work. Joan Thirsk estimated that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, about one-third of the working days, including Sundays, were spent in leisure. Karl Kautsky offered a much more extravagant estimate that 204 annual holidays were celebrated in medieval Lower Bavaria.

After the serfs were emancipated, they were now free to enter into a wage relationship with a new ruling class that proclaimed Enlightenment values that were totally opposed to feudal despotism of all sorts. Needless to say, they had a more efficient despotism in mind that created the illusion of freedom in the marketplace while masking within the wage relationship a form of exploitation as cruel as that which had preceded it. More about that to come.