Labor is a process; it’s transforming something into something else. This transformation extinguishes an existing use-value and creates an alternative. Furthermore, “what on the side of the worker appeared in the form of unrest”—that is, motion—“now appears, on the side of the product, in the form of being … as a fixed, immobile characteristic. The worker has spun, and the product is a spinning” (287). This difference between process and thing is always there.
This is something I always appreciate about Marx’s formulation. As an educator, I am constantly confronted with the process-thing relation. The process of a student’s learning gets judged in the end by performative things, like written papers. But it is sometimes hard, if not impossible, to evaluate the process through the things produced. Students may find the process astonishingly enlightening and learn a lot, but if they produce a lousy paper, they get an F. Then they say, “But I learned so much taking this course!” And I say, “How can you possibly write a paper like that and say you’ve learned anything?” But this is a problem that frequently confronts us all. We can totally screw up in producing the thing, but we learn a fantastic amount in the process.
For Marx, the heart of laboring is the process. In exactly the same way that capital is construed as a process of circulation, so labor is construed as a process of making. But it is a process of making use-values, and under capitalism this means making use-value for someone else in commodity form. Does this use-value have to be of immediate use? Not necessarily, because past labor can be stored up for use in the future (even primitive societies usually maintain a surplus product to tide them over). In our world, a massive amount of past labor is stored up in our fields, cities and physical infrastructure, and some of that came from long ago. The daily activity of laboring is one thing, but the way that laboring gets stored up in products and things also plays a critical role. Furthermore, the labor process often produces different things simultaneously. This is what is known as a “joint products” issue. The raising of cattle produces milk, meat and hides, while sheep raised for their meat produce wool whether you like it or not. This will pose problems under capitalism: how, for example, are these multiple joint products to be separately valued? Then there is the problem of how the products of past labor relate to present activities of laboring. This becomes particularly important in the case of the value of machines: “a machine which is not active in the labour process is useless.” The implication is that
living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour [and this is again Marx coming back to the centrality of labor as process] appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy for the performance of the functions appropriate to their concept and to their vocation in the process, [the machines] are indeed consumed, but to some purpose, as elements in the formation of new use-values, new products, which are capable of entering into individual consumption as means of subsistence or into a new labour process as means of production. (289–90)
It is, therefore, contact with living labor which resuscitates the value of the dead labor congealed in past products. This points to a vital distinction between productive and individual consumption. Productive consumption is past labor that gets consumed in a current labor process to make an entirely new use-value; individual consumption is what gets consumed by people as they reproduce themselves.
“The labour process,” Marx argues in a concluding passage, “is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction … between man and nature” (note again how important this idea of metabolic interaction is in Marx’s analysis), “the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence” (which is what he said back on page 133),
or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. We did not, therefore, have to present the worker in his relationship with other workers; it was enough to present man and his labour on one side, nature and its materials on the other. The taste of porridge does not tell us who grew the oats, and the process we have presented does not reveal the conditions under which it takes place. (290)
What Marx has done in these few pages is to offer universal physical dissections and descriptions of the labor process independent of any social formation, stripped bare of any particular social meaning. I can describe somebody digging a ditch in all its physical detail, including its relation to past labor embodied in the shovel, but I can’t tell from this description whether this is some nutty aristocrat who does it just for exercise, whether it’s a peasant, whether it’s a slave, whether it’s a wage laborer or a convict. So there is a way to look at the labor process as a purely physical process without actually knowing anything whatsoever about the social relations in which it is embedded and without reference to the ideological and mental conceptions that arise within, say, a capitalist mode of production. What remains is to consider how capitalism makes distinctive use of these universal capacities and powers.
The Capitalist Form of the Labor Process
“Let us now return to our would-be capitalist. We left him just after he had purchased, in the open market, all the necessary factors of the labour process; its objective factors”—that is, the means of production—“as well as its personal factor, labour-power.” Two conditions attach, however, to the contract between capital and labor in the buying and selling of labor-power as a commodity. The first is that “the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs” (291). That is, when I enter into contract with a capitalist, the capitalist has the right to direct my work and assign my tasks. Now, there will likely be contestation over this if that work is dangerous to life and limb, but nevertheless, the general principle is that the laborer will get the money to survive and in return the capitalist can direct the laborer to do this or that. Labor-power is a commodity that belongs to the capitalist for the period of the contract. The second condition is that whatever the laborer produces during the period of the contract belongs to the capitalist, not to the laborer. Even though I am the one who makes the commodity and who embeds concrete labor and value in it, it does not belong to me. This is an interesting violation of the Lockean view that those who create value by mixing their labor with the land are entitled to private property in that value. In general, I think you can see that these two conditions amount to the total alienation (though Marx does not use that word here) of the laborer from the creative potential that attaches both to laboring and to the product. “From the instant he steps into the workshop, the use-value of his labour-power and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs to the capitalist. By the purchase of the labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living agent of fermentation”—again we encounter the Grundrisse’s “form-giving fire” of laboring as an activity—“into the lifeless constituents of the product, which also belong to him” (292).
These two conditions, however, permit the capitalist to so organize production as
to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it; namely the means of production and the labour-power he purchased with his good money on the open market. His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-value.
So the capitalist brings together the “labour process and the process of creating value” to create a new kind of unity (293). This is what the capitalist has to do, this is the capitalist’s conscious aim, because the origin of profit lies in surplus-value, and the role of the capitalist is to seek profit.
“Every condition of the problem is satisfied,” says Marx,
while the laws governing the exchange of commodities have not been violated in any way. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. For the capitalist as buyer paid the full value for each commodity, for the cotton, for the spindle and for the labour-power. He then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities: he consumed their use-value.
In so doing, he is enabled to produce commodities with more value than those purchased at the outset, hence the production of surplus-value. “This whole course