Marx's General Law of Social Production
This short essay outlines Marx’s general law of social production, which is the basic theorem of the politics of global competitiveness. The first thing to remember here is the way that capitalism works really is very simple. Capital accumulation comes from the exploitation of workers by capital. Capitalists pay workers a wage which in principle covers the cost of their daily maintenance so that they can work, eat, sleep, and turn up for work again the next day. In their working day they produce a surplus beyond the value of their wage, and this is appropriated by or belongs to the capitalist. Capitalists consume some of the surplus but invest the rest in more raw materials and more workers, and put them to work. Accumulation continues, on an expanded scale. That’s it, basically.
If capitalists do not invest in machinery and technology, to make the worker more productive, Marx calls the capitalist’s share ‘absolute surplus value’. Such capitalists can only extract more from the workers by making them work longer hours. If they do invest in the process of production, so that the worker produces more in a given time, he calls it relative surplus value, and this is what interests him most. Classical political economist Adam Smith, whom Marx greatly admired, had a perfect practical grasp of this from the point of view of the capitalist, and set it out in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Marx presented his own work as a critique of classical political economy, primarily in Capital, Volume 1, published in 1867, where he laid bare the inner workings, or immanent laws, of what he called the bourgeois or capitalist mode of production, especially in his general law of social production. So we can approach his general law by way of The Wealth of Nations, in which the fundamentals of capitalism for governments are set out in the first three paragraphs of the three-page introduction and plan of the work. This is what they say:
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. According therefore as this produce or what is purchased with it bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniences for which it has occasion. But this proportion must in every nation be regulated by two different circumstances. First by the skill, dexterity and judgement with which its labour is generally applied, and secondly by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. Whatever be the soil, climate or extent of territory of any particular nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must in that particular situation depend upon those two circumstances.
So, all wealth comes from labour, either directly or through the exchange of what is produced for goods produced by other labour elsewhere. The more that is produced per head of the population, the wealthier the nation will be. And how well it will do depends on two things: first, the higher the proportion of the population in work, the better, so states try to get as high a proportion of the population as possible into work; second, they should make those workers as skilled and knowledgeable as possible. As other essays here will discuss in more detail, these two principles are central to the politics of labour in the UK and elsewhere today. Of course, that is not all Smith had to say. He went straight on to discuss the causes of improvement in the productive powers of labour first and foremost among which was the division of labour, the breaking down of the production process into small steps, each of which could be assigned to a single worker who would repeat it, over and over. And he had something to say, though not so much, about improvements through the invention of tools and machines. This was taken up much more by Marx, evidently at a much later stage of the industrial revolution, in Chapter 15 of Capital. Marx associates Smith’s workshop-based ‘detail worker’, for example someone just cutting wire or just making pinheads all day, with manufacture, manus being Latin for ‘hand’. The worker is responsible for only one stage in the production process, repeating it over and over, and still controlling the tool. Even with the introduction of machinery, so long as machines were introduced to carry out each step in production without any change to the existing processes, said Marx, ‘handicraft remains the basis, quote, ‘a technically narrow basis which excludes a really scientific division of the production process into its component parts, since every partial process undergone by the product must be capable of being done by hand and of forming a separate handicraft. In this arrangement, because the skill of the worker continues to be the foundation of the production process, every worker becomes exclusively assigned to a partial function’.
OK. Then comes the decisive change. ‘In machino-facture, or production by machinery, this subjective principle of the division of labour no longer exists. Rather, the total process is examined objectively, viewed in and for itself and analysed into its constitutive phases. The problem of how to execute each particular process to bind the different partial processes together into a whole, is solved by the aid of machines, chemistry, etc’.
Large-scale industry, therefore, according to Marx, continually transforms social production. Here is the crucial passage:
First, its principle, which is to view each process of production in and for itself, and to resolve it into its constituent elements without looking first at the ability of the human hand to perform the new processes brought into existence the whole of the modern science of technology’. And he goes on immediately: ‘The varied, apparently unconnected petrified forms of the social production process were now dissolved into conscious and planned applications of natural science, divided up systematically in accordance with the particular useful effect aimed at in each case.’ Once the process of production takes this course workers lose control of the process of production and become appendages of the machine.
This in turn subjects workers to “variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility in all directions”. It gives rise to a general law of social production, according to which totally developed individuals are under pressure to be absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of them’.
So the universalising tendency of capital not only tends to create the world market, but also subjects workers to increasing discipline, dependence and insecurity. They are placed permanently in a condition of precarity, unable to guarantee themselves the means of survival, precarity being, it is important to note, not merely a recent development, but inherent from the start in the concept of capital itself. Large-scale industry requires a new kind of individual, who can be subjected to, and will willingly accept, the disciplines of capitalist production and competition, and who needs to develop a range of skills and update them continually. To point out what must already be obvious, this new kind of worker, obliged to adapt to variation of labour, fluidity of function, and mobility in all directions is today’s worker, required to be capable of versatility, flexibility and mobility, denied security of employment under a permanent full-time contract, responsible for continually upgrading her skills, saving for her own pension, and facing repeated spells of unemployment.
If capitalists do not invest in machinery and technology, to make the worker more productive, Marx calls the capitalist’s share ‘absolute surplus value’. Such capitalists can only extract more from the workers by making them work longer hours. If they do invest in the process of production, so that the worker produces more in a given time, he calls it relative surplus value, and this is what interests him most. Classical political economist Adam Smith, whom Marx greatly admired, had a perfect practical grasp of this from the point of view of the capitalist, and set it out in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Marx presented his own work as a critique of classical political economy, primarily in Capital, Volume 1, published in 1867, where he laid bare the inner workings, or immanent laws, of what he called the bourgeois or capitalist mode of production, especially in his general law of social production. So we can approach his general law by way of The Wealth of Nations, in which the fundamentals of capitalism for governments are set out in the first three paragraphs of the three-page introduction and plan of the work. This is what they say:
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. According therefore as this produce or what is purchased with it bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniences for which it has occasion. But this proportion must in every nation be regulated by two different circumstances. First by the skill, dexterity and judgement with which its labour is generally applied, and secondly by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. Whatever be the soil, climate or extent of territory of any particular nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must in that particular situation depend upon those two circumstances.
So, all wealth comes from labour, either directly or through the exchange of what is produced for goods produced by other labour elsewhere. The more that is produced per head of the population, the wealthier the nation will be. And how well it will do depends on two things: first, the higher the proportion of the population in work, the better, so states try to get as high a proportion of the population as possible into work; second, they should make those workers as skilled and knowledgeable as possible. As other essays here will discuss in more detail, these two principles are central to the politics of labour in the UK and elsewhere today. Of course, that is not all Smith had to say. He went straight on to discuss the causes of improvement in the productive powers of labour first and foremost among which was the division of labour, the breaking down of the production process into small steps, each of which could be assigned to a single worker who would repeat it, over and over. And he had something to say, though not so much, about improvements through the invention of tools and machines. This was taken up much more by Marx, evidently at a much later stage of the industrial revolution, in Chapter 15 of Capital. Marx associates Smith’s workshop-based ‘detail worker’, for example someone just cutting wire or just making pinheads all day, with manufacture, manus being Latin for ‘hand’. The worker is responsible for only one stage in the production process, repeating it over and over, and still controlling the tool. Even with the introduction of machinery, so long as machines were introduced to carry out each step in production without any change to the existing processes, said Marx, ‘handicraft remains the basis, quote, ‘a technically narrow basis which excludes a really scientific division of the production process into its component parts, since every partial process undergone by the product must be capable of being done by hand and of forming a separate handicraft. In this arrangement, because the skill of the worker continues to be the foundation of the production process, every worker becomes exclusively assigned to a partial function’.
OK. Then comes the decisive change. ‘In machino-facture, or production by machinery, this subjective principle of the division of labour no longer exists. Rather, the total process is examined objectively, viewed in and for itself and analysed into its constitutive phases. The problem of how to execute each particular process to bind the different partial processes together into a whole, is solved by the aid of machines, chemistry, etc’.
Large-scale industry, therefore, according to Marx, continually transforms social production. Here is the crucial passage:
First, its principle, which is to view each process of production in and for itself, and to resolve it into its constituent elements without looking first at the ability of the human hand to perform the new processes brought into existence the whole of the modern science of technology’. And he goes on immediately: ‘The varied, apparently unconnected petrified forms of the social production process were now dissolved into conscious and planned applications of natural science, divided up systematically in accordance with the particular useful effect aimed at in each case.’ Once the process of production takes this course workers lose control of the process of production and become appendages of the machine.
This in turn subjects workers to “variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility in all directions”. It gives rise to a general law of social production, according to which totally developed individuals are under pressure to be absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of them’.
So the universalising tendency of capital not only tends to create the world market, but also subjects workers to increasing discipline, dependence and insecurity. They are placed permanently in a condition of precarity, unable to guarantee themselves the means of survival, precarity being, it is important to note, not merely a recent development, but inherent from the start in the concept of capital itself. Large-scale industry requires a new kind of individual, who can be subjected to, and will willingly accept, the disciplines of capitalist production and competition, and who needs to develop a range of skills and update them continually. To point out what must already be obvious, this new kind of worker, obliged to adapt to variation of labour, fluidity of function, and mobility in all directions is today’s worker, required to be capable of versatility, flexibility and mobility, denied security of employment under a permanent full-time contract, responsible for continually upgrading her skills, saving for her own pension, and facing repeated spells of unemployment.