Marx' Capital Vol 1

Preface to Critique of Political Economy
In der gesellschaftlichen Produktion ihres Lebens gehen die Menschen bestimmte, notwendige, von ihrem Willen unabhängige Verhältnisse ein, Produktionsverhältnisse, die einer bestimmten Entwicklungsstufe ihrer materiellen Produktivkräfte entsprechen. Die Gesamtheit dieser Produktionsverhältnisse bildet die ökonomische Struktur der Gesellschaft, die reale Basis, worauf sich ein juristischer und politischer Überbau erhebt und welcher bestimmte gesellschaftliche Bewußtseinsformen entsprechen. Die Produktionsweise des materiellen Lebens bedingt den <9> sozialen, politischen und geistigen Lebensprozeß überhaupt. Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewußtsein bestimmt. Auf einer gewissen Stufe ihrer Entwicklung geraten die materiellen Produktivkräfte der Gesellschaft in Widerspruch mit den vorhandenen Produktionsverhältnissen oder, was nur ein juristischer Ausdruck dafür ist, mit den Eigentumsverhältnissen, innerhalb deren sie sich bisher bewegt hatten. Aus Entwicklungsformen der Produktivkräfte schlagen diese Verhältnisse in Fesseln derselben um. Es tritt dann eine Epoche sozialer Revolution ein. Mit der Veränderung der ökonomischen Grundlage wälzt sich der ganze ungeheure Überbau langsamer oder rascher um. In der Betrachtung solcher Umwälzungen muß man stets unterscheiden zwischen der materiellen, naturwissenschaftlich treu zu konstatierenden Umwälzung in den ökonomischen Produktionsbedingungen und den juristischen, politischen, religiösen, künstlerischen oder philosophischen, kurz, ideologischen Formen, worin sich die Menschen dieses Konflikts bewußt werden und ihn ausfechten. Sowenig man das, was ein Individuum ist, nach dem beurteilt, was es sich selbst dünkt, ebensowenig kann man eine solche Umwälzungsepoche aus ihrem Bewußtsein beurteilen, sondern muß vielmehr dies Bewußtsein aus den Widersprüchen des materiellen Lebens, aus dem vorhandenen Konflikt zwischen gesellschaftlichen Produktivkräften und Produktionsverhältnissen erklären. Eine Gesellschaftsformation geht nie unter, bevor alle Produktivkräfte entwickelt sind, für die sie weit genug ist, und neue höhere Produktionsverhältnisse treten nie an die Stelle, bevor die materiellen Existenzbedingungen derselben im Schoß der alten Gesellschaft selbst ausgebrütet worden sind. Daher stellt sich die Menschheit immer nur Aufgaben, die sie lösen kann, denn genauer betrachtet wird sich stets finden, daß die Aufgabe selbst nur entspringt, wo die materiellen Bedingungen ihrer Lösung schon vorhanden oder wenigstens im Prozeß ihres Werdens begriffen sind. In großen Umrissen können asiatische, antike, feudale und modern bürgerliche Produktionsweisen als progressive Epochen der ökonomischen Gesellschaftsformation bezeichnet werden. Die bürgerlichen Produktionsverhältnisse sind die letzte antagonistische Form des gesellschaftlichen Produktionsprozesses, antagonistisch nicht im Sinn von individuellem Antagonismus, sondern eines aus den gesellschaftlichen Lebensbedingungen der Individuen hervorwachsenden Antagonismus, aber die im Schoß der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft sich entwickelnden Produktivkräfte schaffen zugleich die materiellen Bedingungen zur Lösung dieses Antagonismus. Mit dieser Gesellschaftsformation schließt daher die Vorgeschichte der menschlichen Gesellschaft ab.

Summary

 * Marx begins with the unitary concept of the commodity, which embodies the duality of use- and exchange-values. What lies behind exchange-value is the unitary concept of value defined as socially necessary labor-time ("socially necessary" implies someone wants or needs the use-value). Value internalizes a duality of concrete and abstract labor, which conjoin in an act of exchange through which value gets expressed in the duality of relative and equivalent forms of value. From this, a money commodity emerges as the representative of the universality of value, but this disguises the inner meaning of value as a social relation to produce the fetishism of commodities, understood as material relations between persons and social relations between things. In the marketplace, people relate to one another not as people but as buyers and sellers of things. Here Marx assumes, as in liberal theory, private property rights, juridical individuals and perfectly functioning markets. Here Marx assumes, as in liberal theory, private property rights, juridical individuals and perfectly functioning markets. Within that world, money, the representation of value, takes on two distinctive and potentially antagonistic roles, as the measure of value and as the means of circulation. But finally there is only one money, and the tension between the two roles is seemingly resolved by a new money relation, that between debtors and creditors. This shifts the focus from a C-M -C form of circulation to M -C- M, which is, of course, the prototype of the concept of capital defined not as a thing but as a form of circulation of value that produces a surplus-value (profit), M -C-M + i1M. This poses a contradiction between the equivalence supposed in perfect market exchange and the non-equivalence required in the production of surplus-value. This contradiction is resolved by the existence of labor-power as a commodity that can be bought and sold on the market and then used to produce value and therefore surplus-value. And so we arrive, finally, at the grand conception of a class relation between capital and labor.
 * What Marx has done in Volume I of Capital is to take the words and theories of the classical political economists seriously and ask what kind of world would emerge if they got to implement their utopian liberal vision of perfectly functioning markets, personal liberty, private property rights and free trade.

Test yourself

 * What is value and why is it not simply utility?
 * Understand how commodity values get created and produced and with what consequences-social, environmental, political and the like
 * By whom and how is the foundational value structure of our society being determined?
 * What are commodity values and the social necessities that determine them about?
 * What is the conception of time in a capitalist production? How do the perspectives on time differ between classes?
 * How has the conception of time changed up to today? How is our conception of time expressed in different spheres of life?
 * Why does exploitation of labor increase over time?
 * In the creation and circulation of commodities: which values are important for whom at which stage of production?
 * At which point in the production process does competition enter the picture and what is its effect (on capitalists and workers)?
 * How does innovation emerge and what is its effect (on capitalists and workers)?
 * Why can machinery only produce surplus-value and not value
 * How do the interests of the different groups (capitalists, workers, landlords) interact at the various points of capitalist development?
 * How would a class consciousness have changed things in Marx' time? What is class consciousness and how has it changed over time? What are today's classes?
 * Does a capitalist who is employing only machines (no workers anymore) still make surplus value?
 * Why is it not correct that the workers derives an advantage, as consumers, from the introduction of machines (Marx p. 568)
 * Which structures of capitalism have remained and weathered political transformations? Which structures do we still have and in what form?
 * What are the immediate and the long-term consequences of stopping the surplus-extraction?
 * Is innovation without surplus-extraction possible and which form can innovation take on in order not to lead to exploitation?
 * How, by which processes, did we arrive at the concentration of capital in the hands of a few?
 * What are the trajectories of growth in a non-capitalist society vs. in a capitalist society?
 * Describe the different stages of Das Kapital in simple words: commodity, commodity circulation, money, labor-power etc.
 * How to counter-argue the Goldman Sachs view on capitalism after having read Das Kapital
 * What form does primitive accumulation take on in the credit system?

Defining a commodity

 * The production of commodities requires not only the production of use-values "but use-values for others:' Not simply use-values for the lord of the manor, as the serf would do, but use-values that go to others through the market
 * Nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value → You have, in short, to be able to sell it to someone somewhere
 * The commodity has a use-value and an exchange-value. Exchange-values are a representation of something. What is it a representation of? A representation of value, says Marx. And value is socially necessary labor-time. But value doesn't mean anything unless it connects back to use-value. Use-value is socially necessary to value
 * Use-values are incredibly diverse, that exchange-values are accidental and relative and that value has (or appears to have) a "phantom-like objectivity;' which is in any case subjected to perpetual revolutions through technological changes and upheavals in social and natural relations.
 * All labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values.
 * When going to the market to exchange a commodity(i.e. when the commodity is alienated from its owner in exchange for another commodity or gold), it becomes the vearer of value
 * On the market, you exchange one commodity that has no use-value for you (i.e. no utility) for another commodity of the same value that does have use-values for you
 * There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour, between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things
 * The commodity, as a use-value, satisfies a particular need and forms a particular element of material wealth. But the value of a commodity measures the degree of its attractiveness for all other elements of material wealth, and therefore measures the social wealth of its owner
 * The particular physical qualities of a commodity, from which people derived utility, makes the commodity a use-value. The particular physical qualities that rendered a thing useful do not have any definite or systematic connection to the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities
 * If products are produced as commodities, they must be sold after they have been produced, and they can only satisfy the producer's needs after they have been sold. The time necessary for sale must be counted as well as the time of production
 * In order to become a commodity, the product must cease to be produced as the immediate means of subsistence of the producer himself.
 * The appearance of products as commodities requires a level of development of the division of labour within society such that the separation of use-value from exchange-value has already been completed
 * The use of a commodity belongs to its purchaser, and the seller of labour-power, by giving his labour, does no more, in reality, than part with the use-value he has sold
 * The value of a commodity is determined not by the quantity of labour actually objectified in it, but by the quantity of living labour necessary to produce it. A commodity represents, say, 6 working hours. If an invention is made by which it can be produced in 3 hours, the value, even of the commodity already produced, falls by half. It now represents 3 hours of socially necessary labour instead of the 6 formerly required. It is therefore the quantity of labour required to produce it, not the objectified form of that labour, which determines the amount of the value of a commodity.
 * Polanyi: commodity production/exchange has always been there but in capitalism there is now also a market for the three fictitious commodities of labor, money and land; fictitious because they are not produced for sale even though they are exchanged like commodities



Value

 * An excellent explanation of the dialectical/contradictory nature of the commodity (because exchange-value vs. use-value)
 * Value is not inherent in a commodity, but rather constitutes a relation between people expressed as a relation between things
 * What the buyer of an ordinary commodity buys is its use-value, what he pays is its value.
 * Labor as the mediator between human existence and nature; labor as the creator of use-value: useful labor → use-values are combinations of the material provided by nature and labour; thus, we can only change the form of materials
 * A particular labor process embodies useful concrete labor and abstract labor or value (socially necessary labor-time) in a commodity that will be the bearer of exchange value in the market place
 * Value as units of simple abstract human labor
 * In order for our private labor to become social, it must first take the form of value. Unlike other forms of production, in which we labor directly for use, in a capitalist society we labor to produce value
 * Value is a qualitative social relation with a quantitative dimension
 * Value as socially necessary labor-time internalizes a specific capitalist temporality, and a vast field of social struggles on the surface of society ensues, concerning the appropriation of the time of others
 * Value is sensitive to revolutions in technology and in productivity
 * Value is determined amongst other things by the workers' average degree of skill, the level of development of science and its technological application, the social organization of the process of production, the extent and effectiveness of the means of production, and the conditions found in the natural environment
 * A working day of a given length always creates the same amount of value, no matter how the productivity of labour, and, with it, the mass of the product and the price of each single commodity produced may vary. If the value created by a working day of 12 hours is, say, 12€, then, although the mass of the use-values produced varies with the productivity of labour, the value represented by 12€ will simply be spread over a greater or a less number of commodities.
 * The value of labour-power and surplus-value vary in opposite directions. A variation in the productivity of labour, its increase or diminution, causes the value of labour-power to move in the opposite direction, while surplus-value moves in the same direction. However, it by no means follows that they vary in the same proportion. It is true that they increase or diminish by the same quantity: It therefore follows that the proportional increase/diminution in surplus-value resulting from a given change in the productivity of labour depends on the original magnitude of surplus-labor time of the day; the smaller that portion, the greater the proportional change; the greater that portion, the less the proportional change. For example, if productivity rises (i.e. decreasing labor’s value) so that the value of the labour-power falls from 4 shillings to 3, it falls (proportionally speaking) by ¼ or 25 per cent, while the surplus-value rises from 2 shillings to 3, i.e. it rises by ½ or 50 per cent. Thus, if a giving working day is composed of 8h necessary and 4 hours surplus-labor, then a decrease in the necessary part (due to rise in productivity) will yield an increase, in the same quantity, for the surplus-labor (e.g. 1h less necessary labor & 1h more surplus-labor). However, 1h subtracted from 8 is less in proportion, than 1h added to the 4h!!!
 * What we are calling "value" is not a constant, but is subject to perpetual revolutionary transformations
 * Use-value is determined by which concrete qualitative labor was used in the process (the 'how' and the 'what' of labor), value is determined by the (socially necessary) quantity of labor time necessary (the 'how much' labor)
 * However, variations in productivity have no impact whatever on the labour itself represented in value. As productivity is an attribute of labour in its concrete useful form, it naturally ceases to have any bearing on that labour as soon as we abstract from its concrete useful form: The same labour, therefore, performed for the same length of time, always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity → but it provides different quantities of use-values during equal periods of time
 * The same change in productivity which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and therefore the amount of use-values produced by it, also brings about a reduction in the value of this increased total amount
 * In the English language: Labour which creates use-values and is qualitatively determined is called 'work' as opposed to 'labour'; labour which creates value and is only measured quantitatively is called 'labour', as opposed to 'work
 * Wealth: the total use-values at one's command vs Value: the socially necessary labor time these use-values represent.
 * The internal opposition between use-value and (exchange-)value (hidden within the commodity): is represented on the surface by an external opposition, i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value. Hence the simple form of value of a commodity is the simple form of appearance of the opposition between use-value and value which is contained within the commodity
 * Exchange produces a differentiation of the commodity into two elements, commodity and money, an external opposition which expresses the opposition between use-value and value which is inherent in it → commodities as use-values confront money as exchange-value.
 * The values of commodities remaining constant, their prices vary with the value of gold (the material of money)
 * The value of a commodity is expressed in its price before it enters into circulation, and it is therefore a pre-condition of circulation, not its result.
 * Value exists only in use-values, in things, if we leave aside its purely symbolic representation in tokens.
 * If the productivity of labor increases to enable the capitalist to produce twice as many articles per day, the day's labor still creates the same amount of value, which is now however spread among twice as many articles (i.e. each article now embodies only half as much labor-power in it). The real value of a commodity, however, is not its individual, but its social value; that is to say, its value is not measured by the labour-time that the article costs the producer in each individual case, but by the labour-time socially required for its production. Hence, in order to get rid of the product of one working day, the demand must be double what it was, i.e. the market must become twice as extensive. Other things being equal, the capitalist's commodities can only command a more extensive market if their prices are reduced
 * The value of commodities stands in inverse ratio to the productivity of labour. So, too, does the value of labour-power, since it depends on the values of commodities.
 * In the case of supply and demand, Marx concedes that these conditions play a vital surface role in generating price movements for a particular commodity, but when supply and demand are in equilibrium, he argues, supply and demand fail to explain anything. Supply and demand cannot explain why shirts exchange for shoes on average in the ratio that they do. This has to be explained by something totally different, congealed socially necessary labor-time, or value. If demand and supply balance, then demand and supply also cease to explain anything. Thus, the relation between demand and supply explained nothing, with regard to the price of labour or any other commodity, except those changes themselves, i.e. the oscillations of the market price above or below a certain mean
 * The law of the conservation of value is of the utmost importance in grasping Marx's use of the theory of value in analyzing capitalist production
 * Like weight, value is inherently quantitative, but can be measured only by relative comparisons.



Money

 * 1) First, that use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value/use-value as the representation of value
 * 2) Second, that concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour/the particular [concrete] as representation of the universal [abstract]
 * 3) Third, that private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form/the private appropriation of social power
 * Money can be used to circulate commodities, it can be used to measure value, to store wealth and so on. Capital, however, is money used in a certain way
 * The material of gold ranks only as the materialization of value, as money. Gold and silver originally gave physical representation to the immateriality of social labor
 * Money is the shape of the commodity's value.
 * Money is precisely the converted form of commodities, in which their particular use-values have been extinguished. The use-value of money is its exchange-value
 * Money, as the ultimate product of commodity circulation, is the first form of appearance of capital
 * Prices are the money-form of the magnitude of value (of various commodities); more specifically, they are the money-name of the quantity of social labour objectified in it
 * Money is the intermediary of the two metamorphoses of exchange (between two merchants): the conversion of the commodity into money, and the re-conversion of the money into a commodity. The oppositionary nature of this is reconciled in the unity of the two acts: selling in order to buy
 * Three peculiarities about money:
 * And money serves as a means of purchase by realizing the price of the commodity
 * First the price of the commodities varies inversely as the value of the money, and then the quantity of the medium of circulation varies directly as the price of the commodities
 * The quantity of money in circulation fluctuates and is contingent either on the movement of prices (if prices go up, the quantity of money has to increase accordingly - or, alternatively, the turnover of each coin must increase such that one coin is used for several exchanges before it leaves into consumption) or on the amount of commodities in circulation (if more commodities are being produced, the quantity must increase to accommodate this such that there is money for each commodity to be possibly sold)
 * Paper money explained: Paper money is a symbol of gold, a symbol of money. Its relation to the values of commodities consists only in this: they find imaginary expression in certain quantities of gold, and the same quantities are symbolically and physically represented by the paper. Only in so far as paper money represents gold, which like all other commodities has value, is it a symbol of value
 * The money commodity is capable of being replaced in circulation by mere symbols of value
 * A piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only as long as it is actually in circulation
 * Money is a transiently objectified reflection of the prices of commodities, it serves only as a symbol of itself, and can therefore be replaced by another symbol
 * However: the symbol of money must have its own objective social validity - paper acquires this by its forced currency
 * Money is the commodity which functions as a measure of value and therefore also as the medium of circulation, either in its own body or through a representative
 * The various forms of money (money as the mere equivalent of commodities, money as means of circulation, money as means of payment, money as hoard, or money as world currency) indicate very different levels of the process of social production, according to the extent and relative preponderance of one function or the other.
 * The path C-M-C proceeds from the extreme constituted by one commodity, and ends with the extreme constituted by another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of needs, in short use-value, is therefore its final goal. In the circulation C-M-C, the money is in the end converted into a commodity which serves as a use-value; it has therefore been spent once and for all.
 * The path M-C-M, however, proceeds from the extreme of money and finally returns to that same extreme. Its driving and motivating force, its determining purpose, is therefore exchange-value. The simple circulation of commodities - selling in order to buy - is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. Money therefore is not spent, it is merely advanced. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.
 * The process M-C-M does not therefore owe its content to any qualitative difference between its extremes, for they are both money, but solely to quantitative changes.
 * The first distinction between money as money and money as capital is nothing more than a difference in their form of circulation.
 * Productive forces and social relations cannot exist without expression and representation in the political and legal superstructure. Money, for example, is a representation of value surrounded by all manner of institutional and legal arrangements
 * There is a permanent temptation to hold on to money, and the more people do this, the greater the check to the continuity of circulation.So there are very good reasons why people want to hang on to money, particularly in the face of uncertainty. Releasing it into circulation in order to get more social power takes an act of faith, or the creation of safe and trustworthy institutions where you can save your personal money while someone else puts it back into circulation to make more money (which is, of course, what banks are supposed to do). Faith in the system is fundamental, and loss of confidence, as happened in 2008, can be fatal.
 * The ramifications of this problem spread far and wide into the field of representations, where loss of confidence in the symbols of money (the power of the state to guarantee their stability) or in the quality of money (inflation) butt up against more directly quantitative considerations such as "monetary famine" and the freezing up of the means of payment of the sort that occurred in the fall of 2008.
 * The bourgeois [read Wall Street], drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. 'Commodities alone are money: he said. But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world; only money is a commodity. As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction.
 * Money as form of social value which can be appropriated by private persons

Circulation of commodities/exchange

 * The original transformation of a sum of values into capital was achieved in complete accordance with the laws of exchange. One party to the contract sells his labour-power, the other buys it. The former receives the value of his commodity, whose use-value - labour - is thereby alienated to the buyer. Means of production which already belong to the latter are then transformed by him, with the aid of labour equally belonging to him, into a new product which is likewise lawfully his. The value of this product includes: first, the value of the means of production which have been used up. The value of the new product includes, further, the equivalent of the value of the labour-power together with a surplus-value (because the value of the labour-power is less than the value created by its use during a day)
 * The law of exchange requires equality only between the exchange-values of the commodities given in exchange for one another.
 * The commodity itself is here subject to contradictory determinations;' being at once a non-use-value from the standpoint of its owner and, as a purchase, a use-value to the buyer
 * Exchange, as we have seen, "produces a differentiation of the commodity into two elements, commodity and money
 * The circulation of commodities-is increasingly mediated by money
 * Exchange is a transaction in which value undergoes a change of form.
 * The two metamorphoses of C-M-C are different and asymmetrical because the transformation from C into M (from the peculiar to the universal) is complicated in large part by supply and demand conditions that exist in the market at a particular time
 * In the process of exchange, value in effect moves from one state (that of the commodity) into another (that of money) and back again
 * The roles of the participants in the exchange change: from seller to buyer
 * Whereas a purchased commodity, being a use-value to its consumer, might "fall out of circulation;' the money does not drop out and disappear
 * In the first phase of its circulation the commodity changes places with the money. Thereupon the commodity, in its shape as an object of utility, falls out of circulation into consumption
 * Money circulates commodities, which in and for themselves lack the power of movement, and transfers them from hands in which they are non-use- values into hands in which they are use-values
 * Although the movement of money is merely the expression of the circulation of commodities, the situation appears to be the reverse of this, namely the circulation of commodities seems to be the result of the movement of money
 * Outside circulation, the commodity-owner only stands in a relation to his own commodity. As far as the value of that commodity is concerned, the relation is limited to this, that the commodity contains a quantity of his own labour which is measured according to definite social laws. This quantity of labour is expressed by the agnitude of the value of his commodity, and since the value is reckoned in money of account, this quantity is also expressed by the price, £10 for instance.
 * The commodity market is, theoretically speaking, a sphere of exchange of equivalents. No one gets cheated, no one gets exploited in the exchange in capitalism. What the market does is redistribute value from one party to another. It's not, in Marxism, a sphere of exploitation. Exploitation happens elsewhere. However, the market is a condition of existence for capitalism to be possible (and thus, for exploitation to be possible)

Labor(-power)

 * If labor does not produce a use value that somebody wants, needs or desires, then it is not socially necessary labor
 * There are two kinds of labor: productive (of surplus) and unproductive (not productive of surplus)
 * Only in capitalism people are only able to reproduce themselves by selling their labor power
 * Labour-power is bought and sold at its value. Its value, like that of all other commodities, is determined by the labour-time necessary to produce it (i.e. the labor-time taken to produce those commodities needed to reproduce the laborer at a given standard of living). The value of labour-power, thus, is the amount of the necessary labour-time. If it takes 6 hours to produce the average daily means of subsistence of the worker, he must work an average of 6 hours a day to produce his daily labour-power, or to reproduce the value received as a result of its sale.
 * The value of labour-power is determined by the value of a certain quantity of means of subsistence. It is the value and not the mass of these means of subsistence that varies with the productivity of labour. That is, if productivity is low and the value of labor-power thereby high, then the value of the means of subsistence is also high (since the value labor-power is just that, the value of its means of subsistence)
 * When workers sell their labor power, they receive its value in exchange (wage), but they're getting rid of the use-value of it. Only the buyer of labor-power gets its use-value. And the bought labor-power has the capacity to produce more value than the buyer paid for in the exchange on the market. Labor-power, then, is the only commodity for which you pay only so much in exchange but get a greater use-value out of it than what you paid for. Selling labor-power means alienating oneself from the use-value and focusing on the exchange-value of the labor-power. The seller of the commodity only has interest in the exchange-value of his commodity (i.e. the private relationship to the commodity, namely its use-value, gets displaced by a social relationship to the commodity, i.e. that part of the commodity which is common to all commodities). Communism means that workers don't alienate themselves of the use-value of their labor-power. As a collective, they can re-buy their labor-power and enjoy it's use-value. Thus, workers also get the surplus
 * The value of labor is a fetish concept that disguises the idea of the value of labor-power and thereby conveniently evades the crucial question as to how labor-power became a commodity.
 * The capitalist has bought the labour-power at its daily value. The use-value of the labour-power belongs to him throughout one working day
 * Labor is process. It extinguishes an existing use-value and creates an alternative
 * Labour-power can appear on the market as a commodity only if, and in so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale or sells it as a commodity. For this, he must have it as his disposal, he must be the free proprietor of his own labor-capacity (i.e. of his person)
 * That labor is the universal value-creating element, and thus possesses a property by virtue of which it differs from all other commodities, is something which falls outside the frame of reference of the everyday consciousness
 * By selling his labor power, the laborer is able to alienate his labor-power while at the same time being able to avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it
 * The exchange-value of labour is less than the exchange-value of its product
 * All the capitalist owns is the capacity to labor and to produce value for a certain period of time.
 * Laborers are not in a position to work for themselves (i.e. dispossessed of the means of production)
 * The money-owner and the labor-owner enter into relation as owners of commodities. For this relation to continue, the proprietor of labour-power must always sell it for a limited period only, for if he were to sell it in a lump, once and for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity.
 * In order that a man may be able to sell commodities other than his labour-power, he must of course possess means of production. He requires also the means of subsistence.
 * Capital (or the capitalist mode of production) arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power
 * The laborer, remember, is always in the C-M-C circuit, while the capitalist works in the M-C-M' circuit. There will therefore be different rules for how they think about their respective situations.
 * For the transformation of money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must find the free worker available on the commodity-market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is free of the objects needed for the realization [Verwirklichung] of his labour-power (i.e. dispossessed)
 * Yes, indeed, individual laborers will have rights over their own body and individual legal rights in the labor market. In principle they have the right to sell their labor-power to whomsoever they choose and the right to buy whatever they want in the marketplace with the wages they receive. Creating such a world is what the capitalist form of imperial politics has been about for the past two hundred years.
 * Since it is hard to protest against universal ideals of freedom, we are easily persuaded to go along with the fiction that the good freedoms (like those of market choice) far outweigh the bad freedoms (such as the freedom of capitalists to exploit the labor of others).
 * The capitalist epoch is therefore characterized by the fact that labour-power, in the eyes of the worker himself, takes on the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently takes on the form of wage-labour.
 * Labour-power exists only as a capacity of the living individual. Its production consequently presupposes his existence. Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.
 * In contrast with the case of other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element (since the needs of subsistence vary according to climate, country, and the habits of the workers). The notion of an acceptable standard of living for the laborer varies according to natural, social, political and historical circumstances.
 * Power as a commodity does not in reality pass straight away into the hands of the buyer on the conclusion of the contract between buyer and seller. Its value, like that of every other commodity, is already determined before it enters into circulation, for a definite quantity of social labour has been spent on the production of the labour-power. But its use-value consists in the subsequent exercise of that power
 * The worker advances the use-value of his labour-power to the capitalist. He lets the buyer consume it before he receives payment of the price. Everywhere the worker allows credit to the capitalist.
 * The labour-power is sold, although it is paid for only at a later period (wages only at the end of week/month). Thus, the laborer oftentimes needs to lend money (e.g. from the capitalist himself) in order to be able to subside during the week. The capitalist enters the marketplace and has to pay for all the commodities (raw materials, machinery, etc.) before putting them to work, but with labor-power the capitalist hires the labor-power and pays its providers only after they have done the work.
 * The use-value which the money-owner gets in exchange manifests itself only in the actual utilization, in the process of the consumption of the labour-power (i.e. in the production of commodities)
 * The process of the consumption of labour-power is at the same time the production process of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the market or the sphere of circulation.
 * The process of the consumption of labour-power is at the same time the production process of commodities and or-surplus-value.
 * In the sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, both parties are free (i.e. both determined by free will), equal (i.e. each enters into relation with the other and they exchange equivalents), property-owners (i.e. each disposes only of what is his own) and utilitarian (i.e. each looks only to his own advantage)
 * He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker
 * Labor-power is the unique creator of value at the same time as a historical and moral element enters into the determination of its value.
 * Plainly, the value of labor-power is sensitive to changes in the value of the commodities needed to support them. Cheap imports will reduce that value; the Wal-Mart phenomenon has thus had a significant impact on the value of labor-power in the United States. The hyperexploitation of labor-power in China keeps the value of labor-power down in the United States through cheap imports. This also explains the resistance, in many quarters of the capitalist class, to putting barriers to entry or tariffs on Chinese goods, because to do so would be to raise the cost of living in the US, leading to a demand from workers for higher wages.
 * The use of labour-power is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes in actuality what previously he only was potentially, namely labour-power in action, a worker.
 * The use of a commodity (e.g. labor) belongs to its purchaser, and the seller of labour-power, by giving his labour, does no more, in reality, than part with the use-value he has sold
 * From his point of view, the labour process is nothing more than the consumption of the commodity purchased, i.e. of labour-power; but he can consume this labour-power only by adding the means of production to it. The labour process is a process between things the capitalist has purchased, things which belong to him.
 * Human labor-power, as opposed to animal labor-power, is utopian (i.e. has an idea in mind), is purposeful, and is conscious of the purpose
 * The nature of commodity exchange itself imposes no limit to the working day, no limit to surplus labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible, and, where possible, to make two working days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to a particular normal length. There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class.
 * Class strategies (sometimes achieved throught the state-apparatus) to reduce/hold constant the value of labor-power:The reluctance to block cheap imports in the United States today derives from the need to keep the value of labor-power stable. Protectionist tariffs, while they might help keep jobs in the United States, would result in price increases which would create pressures for higher wages. On occasion, the industrial bourgeoisie has supported rent control, cheap (social) housing and subsidized rents and agricultural products because that, too, keeps the value of labor-power down
 * The concept of a productive worker therefore implies not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect, between the worker and the product of his work, but also a specifically social relation of production, a relation with a historical origin which stamps the worker as capital's direct means of valorization. To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune
 * Capitalist production therefore reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself. It is no longer a mere accident that capitalist and worker confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.
 * Distinction between productive and unproductive labor (Vol 1 Appendix p. 1038): Labour remains productive as long as it objectifies itself in commodities, as the unity of exchange-value and use-value. But the labour process is merely a means for the self-valorization of capital. The worker who performs productive work is productive and the work he performs is productive if it directly creates surplus-value, i.e. if it valorizes capital. Every productive worker is a wage-labourer, but not every wage-labourer is a productive worker. Whenever labour is purchased to be consumed as a use-value, as a service and not to replace the value of variable capital with its own vitality and be incorporated into the capitalist process of production - whenever that happens, labour is not productive and the wage-labourer is no productive worker. His work is consumed for its use-value, not as creating exchange-value; it is consumed unproductively, not productively. Hence the capitalist does not encounter it in his role of capitalist, a representative of capital. The money that he pays for it is revenue, not capital. Its consumption is to be formulated not as M-C-M, but as C-M-C (the last being the labour or service itself). The money  functions here only as a means of circulation, not as capital.
 * Marx provides some criteria for productive labor: that it realizes itself in a commodity; that it directly valorizes capital (i.e. creating surplus-value); that it is wage-labor; that it is consumed not for its use-value but for creating exchange-value. Money that is spent on unproductive labor is money as a means of circulation or revenue (C-M-C) and not capital (M-C-M). This applies to services bought by the capitalists, too.
 * Different conrete labors are equated (in their exchange value) through abstract socially necessary labor
 * In any post-capitalist order in which social labour – the labour we do for others – is almost certain to remain a central feature.

Capital
production and circulation, whose number depends on the longevity of machinery and buildings.
 * Capital refers to a money's successful self-expansion of value by means of M-C-M
 * Capital as an organic whole, sustained by the internally differentiated circulatory flows of value that absorb from capital’s milieu the energies of human labor as well as the raw materials to be found in capital’s social and natural environment. The organic whole of which he speaks is not a well-defined and bounded entity like the human body. Capital is more like an evolving ecosystem. It is constituted by what Henri Lefebvre pictured as ‘an ensemble’ or Deleuze and Guattari as an ‘assemblage’ of activities and ‘moments’ in interaction with each other. These ever expanding and proliferating activities and ‘moments’ are bound together within capital’s ecosystem by flows of value.
 * The production and expansion of surplus value—accumulation for accumulation’s sake and production for production’s sake—is both the aim and object of capital’s endeavour within the ecosystem it constructs. The continuity of flows of value, Marx makes clear, is a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. Any blockage threatens a crisis.
 * In the colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing: the wage-labourer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things
 * Who or what belongs to capital may be determined by its main form of income. Capital interests result from income dependence on returns on invested capital; capital income is residual income that owners or managers of capital obtain by seeking to maximize the yield from the invested capital at their disposal. In this sense, ‘profit-dependent’ interests stand face to face with the interests of the ‘wage-dependent’ who, disposing of labour-power rather than capital, supply it to owners of the latter at a contractually agreed price.
 * Capital, while constituted by humans, becomes detached of the control of their will
 * The means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They only become capital under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation of, and domination over, the worker. So long, therefore, as the worker can accumulate for himself - and this he can do so long as he remains in possession of his means of production - capitalist accumulation and the capitalist mode of production are impossible
 * Capital, as opposed to commodities (which have as their final goal the consumption of use-value, i.e. out of circulation), is only alive and remains so when it is in flow, circulation, in process. Capital lives by its valorization.
 * As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour.
 * The simple circulation of commodities - selling in order to buy - is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. The repetition or renewal of the act of selling in order to buy finds its measure and its goal (as does the process itself) in a final purpose which lies outside it, namely consumption, the satisfaction of definite needs.
 * Capital is divided into the original capital and profit - the increment of capital although in practice profit is immediately lumped together with capital and set into motion with it'
 * The value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains intact while in circulation, but increases its magnitude, adds to itself a surplus-value, or is valorized [verwertet sich]. And this movement converts it into capital.
 * Commodities' (here used in the sense of use-values) 'are not the terminating object of the trading capitalist, money is his terminating object'
 * It is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist
 * The value originally advanced not only remains intact while in circulation, but increases its magnitude, adds to itself a surplus-value, or is valorized. And this movement converts it into capital. Capital is not a thing, but a process-a process, specifically, of the circulation of values. These values are congealed in different things at various points in the M-C-M process: in the first instance, as money, and then as commodity before turning back into the money-form.
 * Money, thus, is the form in which capital oftentimes appears, but what is capital in itself?
 * The tautology of standard economics: the monetary value of Kin physical asset-form is determined by what it is supposed to explain, namely the value of the commodities produced
 * Use-values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist. That is, the capitalist produces use-values only in order to gain exchange-value.
 * Capital is, therefore, value in motion. But it is value-in-motion that appears in different forms.
 * For capital, money and commodities are mere forms
 * Capital, conceived as a process, enters into a private relationship with itself
 * Capital "comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation, emerges from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again'
 * Merchants’ capital (e.g. the securities trader buying cheap in order to sell dear) is quite different from the industrialist’s capital (e.g. investment) vs. interest-bearing capital all of which have the M-C-M + ΔM form of circulation
 * The money-owner, who is as yet only a capitalist in larval form, must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at the beginning
 * Constant capital (machines, tools etc): means of production never transfer more value to the product than they themselves lose during the labour process by the destruction of their own use-value. The wear of the machine is the consumption of its use-value and during the labor-process the use-value is used up by the means of production to the product. In the course of this, the exchange-value of the means of production are transferred to the product.
 * Nassau Senior had no concept that the worker might be transferring the values already congealed in commodities and took the ludicrous view that the worker had to actively reproduce those values.
 * The ratio of constant to variable capital, c/v. This ratio is a measure of the productivity of labor, the value of means of production that a single value unit of labor-power can transform. The higher the ratio, the more productive the labor.
 * The reason why means of production do not lose their value at the same time as they lose their use-value is that they lose in the labour process the original form of their use-value only to assume in the product the form of a new use-value
 * The means of production transfer value to the new product only when during the labour process they lose value in the shape of their old use-value.
 * The machine’s value is determined not by the labour process into which it enters as a means of production, but by that out of which it has issued as a product.
 * Productive labour is changing the means of production into constituent elements of a new product,
 * The excess of the total value of the product (i.e. the surplus-value included) over the sum of the values of its constituent elements (i.e. its production costs) is the excess of the capital which has been valorized over the value of the capital originally advanced
 * That part of capital, therefore, which is turned into means of production (i.e. raw material & instruments of labour) does not undergo any quantitative alteration of value in the process of production thus “constant capital”. On the other hand, that part of capital which is turned into labour-power does undergo an alteration of value in the process of production. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value and produces an excess, a surplus-value. This part of capital is continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude.  thus “variable capital”
 * If, as a result of a new invention, machinery of a particular kind can be produced with a lessened expenditure of labour, the old machinery undergoes a certain amount of depreciation, and therefore transfers proportionately less value to the product. But here too the change in value originates outside the process in which the machine is acting as a means of production  thus, constant and not variable capital because once engaged in this process the machine cannot transfer more value than it possesses independently of the process
 * If a new expensive machine replaces the 9 workers and 1 worker suffices: we have an enormous increase in the constant capital, i.e. the total value of the means of production employed, and at the same time a great reduction in the variable part of the capital, which has been laid out in labour-power. This change however alters only the quantitative relation between the constant and the variable capital, or the proportion in which the total capital is split up into its constant and variable constituents
 * Marx's important distinction between circulating capital and fixed capital is based exclusively on the amount of time required for each of these two parts of money capital to revert to its original form. Circulating capital (spent on raw materials and wages) is recovered by the capitalist firm after each production cycle and circulation cycle of commodities. Fixed capital, however, is recovered in its entirety only after n cycles of
 * The value of additional means of production has no influence on the valorization process performed by the labour-powers which set the means of production in motion
 * Unemployed capital is lost capital, and capital, recall, is not a machine or a sum of money, but value in motion
 * Capital, while constituted by humans, becomes disconnected of the control of their will
 * Capital abhors limits of any sort, precisely because the accumulation of money power is in principle limitless. Capitalism perpetually strives, therefore, to transcend all limits (environmental, social, political and geographical) and to convert them into barriers that can be bypassed or circumvented
 * The general and necessary tendencies of capital must be distinguished from their forms of appearance
 * Flexibility in the work-force by deregulation etc. in reality means flexibility in capital accumulation
 * A scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses
 * Capital has an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour, in order to cheapen commodities and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself. Thus, the interest of capital requires, that corn and all provisions should be as cheap as possible; for whatever makes them dear, must make labour dear also
 * Competition does not establish the laws of motion of capitalism but is rather their executor. Unlimited competition is therefore not the presupposition for the truth of the economic laws, but rather the consequence-the form of appearance in which their necessity realizes itself. Competition therefore does not explain these laws; rather it lets them be seen, but does not produce them.
 * The directing function of capital (in a co-operative production) is to recognize that moments are the elements of profit and to squeeze as much labor-time out of the laborer as possible
 * Capitalist love the planned organization of production within their factory but abhor the idea of any kind of social planning of production in society. The ideological complaint that planning is a bad thing, and in particular for capitalists to attack it on the grounds that it would remake the world in the image of their own awful factories, is revealing
 * Since Darwin's theory drew its guiding metaphors from capitalism and was inspired by the social theory of Malthus, it was hardly surprising to see capitalism confirmed as wholly consistent with supposedly natural processes of competition, struggle for survival and, of course, survival of the fittest (without paying attention to Kropotkins mutual aid). Natural scientists, because they failed to understand their historical moment and were barred by their methodological commitments from integrating human history into their models of the world, frequently ended up with at best partial and at worst serious misinterpretations of that world. At worst, they concealed their historical and political assumptions under a supposedly neutral and objective science. The importation into science of social metaphors about gender, sexuality or social hierarchies leads to all kinds of misreadings of what the natural world is actually about, even as it is understood that without metaphors scientific inquiry would go nowhere.
 * Capital is by its nature a leveller, since it insists upon equality in the conditions of exploitation of labour in every sphere of production as its own innate right
 * Capital seeks to create a geographical landscape (of physical and social infrastructures) appropriate to its dynamic at one time only to have to destroy it and re-create yet another geographical landscape at a later point.
 * Capital's tendency, as soon as a prolongation of the hours of labour is once for all forbidden, is to compensate for this by systematically raising the intensity of labour, and converting every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means for soaking up labour-power.
 * Capital can probably continue to function indefinitely but in a manner that will provoke progressive degradation on the land and mass impoverishment, dramatically increasing social class inequality, along with dehumanisation of most of humanity, which will be held down by an increasingly repressive and autocratic denial of the potential for individual human flourishing (in other words, an intensification of the totalitarian police-state surveillance and militarised control system and the totalitarian democracy we are now largely experiencing).
 * Capital is not only about the production and circulation of value. It is also about the destruction or devaluation of capital. A certain proportion of capital is destroyed in the normal course of capital circulation as new and cheaper machinery and fixed capital become available. Major crises are often characterised by creative destruction, which means mass devaluations of commodities, of hitherto productive plant and equipment, of money and of labour.
 * Capital has systematically shortened the turnover time of consumer goods by producing commodities that do not last, pushing hard towards planned and sometimes instantaneous obsolescence, by the rapid creation of new product lines (for example, as in electronics in recent times), accelerating turnover by mobilising fashion and the powers of advertising to emphasise the value of newness and the dowdiness of the old.
 * The relation between capital and consumers is no longer mediated by things but by information images, messaging and the proliferation and marketing of symbolic forms that relate to and work on the political subjectivity of whole populations.
 * Summarizing, the potential barriers are as follows:
 * (1) inability to mass together enough original capital to get production under way ("barriers to entry» problems)
 * (2) scarcities of labor or recalcitrant forms of labor organization that can produce profit squeezes
 * (3) disproportionalities and uneven development between sectors within the division of labor
 * (4) environmental crises arising out of resource depletion and land and environmental degradation
 * (5) imbalances and premature obsolescence due to uneven or excessively rapid technological changes driven by the coercive laws of competition and resisted by labor
 * (6) worker recalcitrance or resistance within a labor process that operates under the command and control of capital
 * (7) underconsumption and insufficient effective demand
 * (8) monetary and financial crises (liquidity traps) inflation or deflation) that arise within a credit system that depends on sophisticated credit instruments and organized state powers alongside a climate of faith and trust
 * Capital, we argue (Nitzan & Bichler, 2001), is neither a material entity, nor a productive process, but rather the very ability of absentee owners to control, shape and restructure society more broadly. Although capital is by no means the only form of power, it has gradually become the most effective, flexible, and potentially most encompassing form of power. As an abstract financial magnitude, capital stands for the discounted value of future earning capacity. Such earnings are the consequence not of productivity as such, but of the control of productivity, which is in turn based not only on business arrangements, but on the entire spectrum of power institutions. To study accumulation therefore is to study the commodification of power

Surplus-value

 * In the midst of our Western European society the worker can only purchase the right to work for his own existence by performing surplus-labour for others
 * Surplus-value is the determining purpose of capitalist production
 * Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by its very essence, the production of surplus-value.
 * The absolute value of a commodity is, in itself, of no interest to the capitalist who produces it. All that interests him is the surplus-value present in it, which can be realized by sale.
 * Call the portion of the working day during which this reproduction takes place necessary labour-time, and the labour expended during that time necessary labour ; necessary for the worker, because independent of the particular social form of his labour; necessary for capital and the capitalist world, because the continued existence of the worker is the basis of that world.
 * During the second period of the labour process, the laborer creates surplus-value for the capitalist
 * Conceive of surplus-value as merely a congealed quantity of surplus labour-time, as nothing but objectified surplus labour
 * Class as the organisation of surplus
 * What distinguishes the various economic formations of society - the distinction between for example a society based on slave-labour and a society based on wage-labour - is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker.
 * The rate of surplus-value $$\frac{s}{v}$$ is expressed by the more of labor-power that is being expended after the necessary labor. Thus, the rate of surplus-value is $$\frac{surplus-labor}{necessary-labor}$$
 * The rate of profit, which is the ratio of the surplus-value to the total value used/capital advanced (constant plus variable capital) or s/(c + v). On the other hand, the rate of surplus-value is the ratio of the surplus-value to the variable part of that capital (s/v). The rate of profit is thus different from the rate of exploitation. The rate of profit is always lower than the rate of exploitation because in the formula of the rate of profit, the denominator is always bigger (since it includes not only v but c as well) than in the formula of the rate of surplus (in which case the denominator is only v)
 * The same rate of surplus-value may be expressed in the most diverse rates of profit,
 * If you complain about a high rate of exploitation, then the capitalists may show you their books to prove that their rate of profit is low. So you then are supposed to feel sorry for the capitalist and forget the high rate of exploitation! The more constant capital employed, the lower the rate of profit (with everything else held equal). A low rate of profit can accompany a high rate of exploitation.
 * The rate of surplus-value is an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist. The sum total of surplus-value produced, on the other hand, is determined by the rate of surplus value multiplied by the amount of variable capital advanced (i.e. the number of workers employed)
 * * The number of workers exploited is determined by the amount of the variable capital advanced. With a given rate of surplus-value, and a given value of labour-power, therefore, the masses of surplus-value produced vary directly as the amounts of the variable capitals advanced.
 * Although the rate of surplus-value is an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power, it is in no sense an expression for the absolute magnitude of the exploitation. 5 hours of necessary labor + 5 hours of surplus labor is a 100% degree of exploitation and 6+6 is the same degree absolutely speaking more exploitation. Thus, the rate of surplus-value alone would not give us the extentof the working day. If this rate were 100%, the working day might be of 8, 10, 12 or more hours. It would indicate that the two constituent parts of the working day, necessary labour-time and surplus labour-time, were equal in extent, but not how long each of these two constituent parts was. The working day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity. One of its parts, certainly, is determined by the labour-time required for the reproduction of the labour-power of the worker himself. But its total amount varies with the duration of the surplus labour.
 * What appears on the capitalist’s side as the valorization of capital is on the worker’s side an excess expenditure of labour-power
 * The rate of surplus-value is determined by its relation, not to the sum total of the capital, but to its variable part. Thus, the ratio of surplus-value to variable capital is s/v. This measures the rate of exploitation of labor-power.
 * In the same way, the relative amount of the surplus product is determined by its ratio, not to the remaining part of the total product, but to that part of it in which necessary labour is incorporated
 * The size of a given quantity of wealth must be measured, not by the absolute quantity produced, but by the relative magnitude of the surplus product
 * Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker - free or unfree - must add to the labour-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of labour-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production. However, because this appropriation occurs in a society characterized by wage labor, laborers are not going to experience their surplus-value production in the same way that serfs and slaves experience surplus labor (the fetishism of market exchange hides it)
 * A decrease in the variable capital (e.g. due to innovation) may be compensated for by a proportionate rise in the degree of exploitation of labour-power, or a decrease in the number of workers employed by a proportionate extension of the working day. That is, if there are less workers to be exploited (due to less variable capital caused by innovation), then the fewer workers remaining have to be exploited more. This is so because the workers are the only part in the equation out of which surplus can be extracted. In other words, a fall in the rate of surplus-value leaves the mass of surplus-value which has been produced unaltered, if the amount of the variable capital, i.e. the number of workers employed, increases in the same proportion. Nevertheless there are limits, which cannot be overcome, to the compensation for a decrease in the number of workers employed, i.e. a decrease in the amount of variable capital advanced, provided by a rise in the rate of surplus-value, i.e. the lengthening of the working day.
 * The classical political economists always made the production of surplus-value the distinguishing characteristic of the productive worker
 * Favourable natural conditions can provide in themselves only the possibility (because the worker has free time available, not having to work all day for necessary labor), never the reality of surplus labour. The result of differences in the natural conditions of labour is this: the same quantity of labour satisfies a different mass of requirements. In different countries, and consequently under otherwise analogous circumstances, the quantity of necessary labour-time is different. These conditions affect surplus labour only as natural limits, i.e. by determining the point at which labour for others can begin.
 * Before the laborer spends leisure time in surplus labour for others, compulsion is necessary
 * With increases in productivity, you have increases in material wealth that are greater than the increases in surplus value. But surplus value, within the framework of the theory, remains central to the system

Relative surplus value
length of the working day, the rate of surplus-value is determined by the relative duration of the necessary labour and the surplus labour performed in the course of a working day.
 * The rate of surplus-value accurately discloses to us, by means of its equivalent expression the relation between the two necessary parts of the working day
 * Increase or diminution in surplus-value is always the consequence, and never the cause, of the corresponding diminution or increase in the value of labour-power.
 * Relative surplus-value presupposes that the working day is already divided into two parts, necessary labour and surplus labour. In order to prolong the surplus labour, the necessary labour is shortened by methods for producing the equivalent of the wage of labour in a shorter time. The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively on the length of the working day, whereas the production of relative surplus-value completely revolutionizes the technical processes of labour and the groupings into which society is divided.
 * Relative surplus-value is absolute, because it requires the absolute prolongation of the working day beyond the labour-time necessary to the existence of the worker himself. Absolute surplus-value is relative, because it requires a development of the productivity of labour which will allow the necessary labour-time to be restricted to a portion of the working day.
 * Every change in the relation between the magnitude of surplus-value and the value of labour-power arises from a change in the absolute magnitude of the surplus labour, and consequently of the surplus-value
 * On the one hand, if the productivity of labour and its normal degree of intensity is given, the rate of surplus-value can be raised only by prolonging the working day in absolute terms; on the other hand, if the length of the working day is given, the rate of surplus-value can be raised only by a change in the relative magnitudes of the components of the working day, i.e. necessary labour and surplus labour, and if wages are not to fall below the value of labour-power, this change presupposes a change in either the productivity or the intensity of the labour
 * Relative surplus-value is produced by raising the productivity of the worker, and thereby enabling him to produce more in a given time with the same expenditure oflabour. The same amount of labour-time adds the same value as before to the total product, but this unchanged amount of exchange-value is spread over more use-values. Hence the value of each single commodity falls
 * It is the individual capitalist's search, operating under the coercive laws of competition, for the ephemeral form of relative surplus-value that truly drives the technological dynamism that produces relative surplus-value of the aggregate sort.
 * If you want to increase the relative size of the surplus-producing part of the day, you either have to extend the working hours (i.e. prolong the working day → increase the absolute surplus-value) or shorten the necessary-labor part of the day (i.e. change the day's division into necessary and surplus labor-time → relative surplus-value)
 * If the capitalist simply pays less wage than the labor is worth (i.e. less wage than necessary for reproduction), the achieved increase in surplus labour would in this case be prolonged only by transgressing its normal limits; its domain would be extended only by a usurpation of part of the domain of necessary labour-time. The only way to increase the relative part of the surplus labor-time (given the 24h-limit) is to increase productivity
 * When surplus-value has to be produced by the conversion of necessary labour into surplus labour, it by no means suffices for capital to take over the labour process in its given or historically transmitted shape, and then simply to prolong its duration. The technical and social conditions of the process and consequently the mode of production itself must be revolutionized before the productivity of labour can be increased. Then, with the increase in the productivity of labour, the value of labour-power will fall, and the portion of the working day necessary for the reproduction of that value will be shortened
 * In order to make the value of labour-power go down, the rise in the productivity of labour must seize upon those branches of industry whose products determine the value of labour-power, and consequently either belong to the category of normal means of subsistence, or are capable of replacing them
 * If capitalists have to lay out less for variable capital, then even if the length of the working day is fixed, the ratio s/v, or the rate of exploitation, rises.
 * Since the value of a commodity is not only determined by the labor during the production process but also by the labor congealed in it of former production processes (i.e. the means of production), you can also decrease the value of labor-power by a cheapening (brought about by increase in productivity) of the commodities which supply the instruments of labour and the material for labour, i.e. the physical elements of constant capital → thus, only an increase in the productivity of labour in those branches of industry which supply either the necessary means of subsistence or the means by which they are produced will depress the value of labor-power!
 * The total sum of the necessary means of subsistence consists of various commodities, each the product of a distinct industry; and the value of each of those commodities enters as a component part into the value of labour-power
 * In short, labor-power's value decreases with the decrease of the labour-time necessary for its reproduction. The total decrease of necessary labour-time is equal to the sum of all the different reductions in labour-time which have occurred in those various distinct branches of production (even though it might be an individual capitalist's unintended consequence to decreases labor-power's value through this)
 * If the capitalist wants to increase his relative surplus-value (by increasing labor-power's productivity), he will produce more commodities as before. However, to realize this increase in production in sales, the demand must increase in proportion to the number of additional products!! Other things being equal, the capitalist's commodities can only command a more extensive market if their prices are reduced. Thus, once the absolute surplus-value (i.e. the working day) is exhausted, the pursuit of surplus requires growth of demand
 * The capitalist who applies the improved method of production appropriates and devotes to surplus labour a greater portion of the working day than the other capitalists in the same business. On the other hand, however, this extra surplus-value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalized (i.e. as soon as he cannot sell his goods under their social value anymore), for then the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes.
 * Now, since relative surplus-value increases in direct proportion to the development of the productivity of labour, while the value of commodities stands in precisely the opposite relation to the growth of productivity; since the same process both cheapens commodities and augments the surplus-value contained in them, we have here the solution of the following riddle: Why does the capitalist, whose sole concern is to produce exchange-value, continually strive to bring down the exchange-value of commodities?
 * Surplus-value does not arise from the labour-power that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power actually employed in working with the machinery. Surplus-value arises only from the variable part of capital, and we saw that the amount of surplus-value depends on two factors, namely the rate of surplus-value and the number of workers simultaneously employed. Given the
 * The relative magnitudes of surplus-value and of price of labour-power are determined by three circumstances:
 * 1) the length of the working day, or the extensive magnitude of labour
 * 2) the normal intensity of labour, or its intensive magnitude, whereby a given quantity of labour is expended in a given time
 * 3) the productivity of labour, whereby the same quantity of labour yields, in a given time, a greater or a smaller quantity of the product, depending on the degree of development attained by the conditions of production.

Accumulation of capital

 * There is a division of the surplus-value between interest, profit of merchant's capital, rent and taxes
 * The whole thing still remains the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has stolen from them
 * Accumulation of capital = the employment of surplus-value as capital/ its reconversion into capital; the employment of a portion of revenue as capital
 * Accumulation requires the transformation of a portion of the surplus product into capital.
 * Labour-power is not purchased under this system for the purpose of satisfying the personal needs of the buyer, either by its service or through its product. The aim of the buyer is the valorization of his capital, the production of commodities which contain more labour than he paid for, and therefore contain a portion of value which costs him nothing and is nevertheless realized [realisiert] through the sale of those commodities. Labour-power can be sold only to the extent that it preserves and maintains the means of production as capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and provides a source of additional capital in the shape of unpaid labour.
 * The capitalist who produces surplus-value, i.e. who extracts unpaid labour directly from the workers and fixes it in commodities, is admittedly the first appropriator of this surplus-value, but he is by no means its ultimate proprietor.
 * The capitalist class is constantly giving to the working class drafts, in the form of money, on a portion of the product produced by the latter and appropriated by the former. The workers give these drafts back just as constantly to the capitalists, and thereby withdraw from the latter their allotted share of their own product. The transaction is veiled by the commodity-form of the product and the money-form of the commodity.
 * Workers receive money for the labor-power they sell to the capitalists and then spend that money to buy back a portion of the commodities they collectively produced. This company-store relation is veiled by the wages system and is not readily discernible when the analysis focuses only on the individual worker
 * The worker is in a continuous version of the C-M -C process. But instead of seeing this as a simple linear relation, we now have to think of it as continuous and circular. A portion of the capital flows along as workers congeal value in commodities, receive their money wages, spend the money on commodities, reproduce themselves and come back to work to congeal more value in commodities the next day. Workers stay alive by circulating variable capital in this way.
 * Even if the capitalist had a right to that thousand pounds at the beginning, however he or she came by it, after five years of producing two hundred pounds of surplus-value every year, the capitalist has surely forfeited the right to the original capital (since the workers have now produced 5 x 200₤, i.e. the original 1000₤). → The thousand pounds now belongs by right to the workers, given the Lockean principle that property rights accrue to those who create value by mixing their labor with the land.
 * The worker's product is not only constantly converted into commodities, but also into capital, i.e. into value that sucks up the worker's value-creating power
 * View capital accumulation as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal
 * When we know that a given value is surplus-value, we know how its owner came by it; but that does not alter the nature either of value or of money
 * Labour creates capital before capital employs labou
 * The constant sale and purchase of labour-power is the form; the content is the constant appropriation by the capitalist, without equivalent, of a portion of the labour of others which has already been objectified, and his repeated exchange of this labour for a greater quantity of the living labour of others.
 * In so far as he is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchange-values. What appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog
 * Necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation.
 * While the capitalist of the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function, as 'abstinence' from accumulating, the modernized capitalist is capable of viewing accumulation as 'renunciation' of pleasure
 * For accumulation to happen requires that capital must first produce the conditions for its own expansion.
 * Additional labour, arising from a greater exertion of labour-power (working longer), can augment the surplus product and surplus-value, which is the substance of accumulation, without a proportional augmentation in the constant part of capital. To increase the surplus-value, the capitalist doesn’t necessarily need to hire more workers (and thus advance more variable + constant capital) → he can simply prolong the working day so the existing means of production are just used up more quickly
 * Accumulation requires the transformation of a portion of the surplus product into capital. Capital must produce the conditions for its own expansion.
 * Accumulation only works if the surplus is transformed into means of production and means of subsistence. In a word, surplus value can be transformed into capital only because the surplus product, already comprises the material components of a new quantity of capital. The new means of subsistence and of production have to be produced and organized in advance. Then and only then the cycle of simple reproduction alters its form and changes into a spiral
 * The capital which is exchanged for labour-power (i.e. the variable capital with its source in the surplus extraction of past labor) is itself merely a portion of the product of the labour of others which has been appropriated without an equivalent.
 * The constant sale and purchase of labour-power is the form; the content is the constant appropriation by the capitalist, without equivalent, of a portion of the labour of others which has already been objectified, and his repeated exchange of this labour for a greater quantity of the living labour of others.
 * Property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product.
 * This is how equivalent exchange can produce a non-equivalent, i.e., surplus-value, and how the original notion of property rights gets inverted into being a right of appropriation of the labor of others.
 * Freedom, equality, property and Bentham prevail in the marketplace, rendering invisible the production of surplus-value in the labor process
 * In capitalism, when social wealth becomes to an ever-increasing degree the property of those who are in a position to appropriate the unpaid labour of others over and over again. This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free sale, by the worker himself, of labour-power as a commodity. Bourgeois freedoms and rights mask exploitation and alienation. The property laws of commodity production must undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become laws of capitalist appropriation
 * There is a superstructural adjustment to legitimate and legalize the appropriation of surplus-value by appeal to concepts of the rights of private property.
 * Bourgeois conceptions of right and justice provide the socially necessary legal, ideological and institutional cover for the production of capital on a progressively increasing scale.
 * As capital personified, the capitalist’s psychology is so focused on the augmentation of exchange-value, on the accumulation of social power in limitless money-form, that money accumulation becomes the fetish focus of their deepest desires.
 * If, in the eyes of classical economics, the proletarian is merely a machine for the production of surplus-value, the capitalist too is merely a machine for the transformation of this surplus-value into surplus capital.
 * Accumulation can be expanded by all these different means without resort to the capitalization of surplus-value: "something provided by nature free of charge; changing the productivity of social labor through other means (motivation and organization) is also free of charge; the mobilization of past assets (e.g., built environments) for new purposes; science and technology → all these factors equip capital with elastic powers, allowing it, within certain limits, a field of action independent of its own magnitude (i.e. how much capital I have)
 * Capital is not a fixed magnitude! ! Always remember this, and appreciate that there is a great deal of flexibility and fluidity in the system. The left opposition to capitalism has too often underestimated this. If capitalists cannot accumulate this way, then they will do it another way. If they cannot use science and technology to their own advantage, they will raid nature or give recipes to the working class. There are innumerable strategies open to them, and they have a record of sophistication in their use.
 * There are three kinds of capitalist: finance (expand M by interest so that M'>M), merchant (buy low at wholesale prices and sell dear at retail prices, e.g. Wal-Mart), and industrial capitalists (appropriate the surplus)

The general law of capitalist accumulation

 * The composition of capital is to be understood in a twofold sense:
 * the value-composition or organic composition (because it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter): as value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and variable capital, or the value of labour-power, the sum total of wages
 * the technical composition: as material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. This latter composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other.
 * → Why the two don't necessarily coincide: with the increasing productivity of labour, the mass of the means of production consumed by labour increases, but their value in comparison with their mass diminishes. The increase of the difference between constant and variable capital is therefore much less than that of the difference between the mass of the means of production into which the constant capital, and the mass of the labour-power into which the variable capital, is converted.
 * Since in each year more workers are employed than in the preceding year, sooner or later a point must be reached at which the requirements of accumulation begin to outgrow the customary supply of labour, and a rise of wages therefore takes place.
 * As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e. the presence of capitalists on the one side, and wage-labourers on the other side, so reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. accumulation, reproduces the capital-relation on an expanded scale, with more capitalists, or bigger capitalists, at one pole, and more wage-labourers at the other pole.
 * Persons of independent fortune owe their superior advantages by no means to any superior abilities of their own, but almost entirely to the industry of others. It is not the possession of land, or of money, but the command of labour which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of the community
 * If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working class and accumulated by the capitalist class increases so rapidly that its transformation into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labour, then wages rise and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labour diminishes in proportion → in short, if the rate of accumulation is high (and thus the requirement for additional paid labor/variable capital increases), wages rise, and the unpaid labor diminishes in proportion → voilà the explanation why people think capitalists create employment and bring prosperity/i.e. higher wages to everyone. In reality, though, the capitalist is interested in continuing to employ new workers only as long as he still has dormant capital that is unmatched by the number of laborers. In fact, he uses the surplus the (paid) laborers produce (i.e. the unpaid labor) and transforms it into capital for which he now needs new (paid) laborers again. And since now there is a demand for paid labor, the laborers' negotiation power improves and they can ask for higher wages. The rise of wages is therefore confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalist system, but also secure its reproduction on an increasing scale. It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing values for valorization, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker's own need for development.
 * Tendency of the rate of profit to fall: it is the internal dynamics of technological change within capitalism, the search for relative surplus-value, that increases the organic (value?) composition of capital, elv, which in the long run will lead to a falling rate of profit (sl [c + v]) under the assumption of a limit on the rate of exploitation (s/v). Put differently, labor-saving innovations remove the active value producer from the labor process and so make it more difficult (other things being equal) to produce surplus-value.
 * This law of the progressive growth of the constant part of capital in comparison with the variable part bears on prices: the relative magnitude of the part of the price which represents the value of the means of production, or the constant part of the capital, is in direct proportion to the progress of accumulation. Thus, the c in the price becomes bigger, the v smaller.
 * All methods for raising the social productivity of labour that grow up on this basis are at the same time methods for the increased production of surplus-value or surplus product, which is in its turn the formative element of accumulation. They are, therefore, also methods for the production of capital by capital, or methods for its accelerated accumulation.
 * Monopoly explained: with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, all other circumstances remaining the same, on the productivity of labour, and this depends in tum on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller.
 * Accumulation of capital, assuming constant productivity, increases demand for labor. Whether or not this leads to a rise in wages depends on the available population. But as more and more of the available population are brought into employment, wages will go up, which diminishes the rate of exploitation. But the mass of surplus-value can continue to rise because more laborers are employed. Wages rise, accumulation slackens, wages fall back, profits and accumulation revive. Marx here describes an automatic adjustment system between the demand and supply of labor and the dynamics of accumulation
 * The accumulation of capital requires the prior existence of not only an available population but an available population that is sufficiently impoverished, is sufficiently ignorant, is sufficiently oppressed and desperate, that it can be recruited as low-wage labor into the capitalist system at the drop of the proverbial hat.
 * The progress of accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the variable part of capital this by no means thereby excludes the possibility of a rise in its absolute magnitude (i.e. more laborers to counteract the falling rate of surplus)
 * Two of the most powerful levers of centralization - competition and credit. Rapid centralization overtakes the slower processes of concentration through compound growth as the main vehicle for achieving the enormous financial scale required to implement entirely new rounds of productivity increase.
 * Even if the market economy begins with small-scale, highly competitive firms, it is almost certainly going to be rapidly transformed through centralization of capital and end up in a state of oligopoly or monopoly. The result of competition is always, ultimately, monopoly
 * Once accumulation gets under way, the progress of increasing productivity also depends on processes of concentration and centralization of capital. Only in this way can all possible economies of scale be realized. Growth occurs at a compound rate, and the concentration of wealth and power accelerates, though in a way that is limited by the rate of surplus-value and the number of laborers employed.
 * The accumulation of capital, which originally appeared only as its quantitative extension, comes to fruition through a progressive qualitative change in its composition, i.e. through a continuing increase of its constant component at the expense of its variable component.
 * The demand for labour is determined not by the extent of the total capital but by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the growth of the total capital (that is, even if the variable part might increase in absolute terms, from 100 to 200 workers, its relative size decreases because the constant part is growing at a higher rate)
 * The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous. The same cause which may increase the net revenue of the country may at the same time render the population redundant → here you have the explanation for why an increase in capital (e.g. measured by GDP) might coincide with a decrease in employment!
 * With the progress of accumulation a larger variable capital sets more labour in motion without enlisting more workers; on the other, a variable capital of the same magnitude sets in motion more labour with the same mass of labour-power; and, finally, a greater number of inferior labour-powers is set in motion by the displacement of more skilled labour-powers.
 * An explanation of why we willingly work too much: In proportion as the productivity of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for workers. The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other part, and vice versa, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists. Capital acts on both sides at once. If its accumulation on the one hand increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of workers by 'setting them free', while at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour to a certain extent independent of the supply of workers.
 * The general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and this in turn corresponds to the periodic alternations of the industrial cycle.
 * The industrial reserve army of labour has a dual function: both as regulator of wages (assuring that the rate of surplus-value remains above a certain level) and as material precondition of expanded reproduction, should not be overlooked.
 * The capitalist class interest is to manage the labor supply in such a way as to create and perpetuate a reserve army (some combination of floating and latent) to keep wages down, threaten the employed laborers with being laid off, disrupt labor organization and increase the intensity of labor for those employed.
 * The survival of capitalism requires the maintenance of the coercive laws of competition in order to keep the expansion of surplus-value production tomorrow on track as a means to absorb the surpluses produced yesterday.

Primitive/original accumulation

 * Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power
 * The accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalist production; capitalist production presupposes the availability of considerable masses of capital and labour-power in the hands of commodity producers.
 * Right and' labour' were from the beginning of time the sole means of enrichment, 'this year' of course always excepted.
 * The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour.
 * The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers.
 * Primitive accumulation is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.
 * The historical movement which changes the producers into wage-labourers appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements.
 * The starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker. The advance made consisted in a change in the form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation.
 * It is about the violent dispossession of a whole class of people from control over the means of production, at first through illegal acts, but ultimately, as in the enclosure legislation in Britain, through actions of the state. Smith, along with most other classical political economists, preferred to ignore the role of the state in primitive accumulation.
 * The last great process of expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called 'clearing of estates', i.e. the sweeping of human beings off them. All the English methods hitherto considered culminated in 'clearing
 * For the new nobility, money was the power of all powers. Marx there writes of how money dissolves the traditional community, and in dissolving the traditional community, money becomes the community. So we move from a world in which "community" is defined in terms of structures of interpersonal social relations to a world where the community of money prevails. Money used as social power leads to the creation of large landed estates, large sheep-farming enterprises and the like, at the same time as commodity exchange proliferates
 * There is a formation of a bourgeoisie made up of landed capitalists, merchant capitalists, finance capitalists and manufacturing capitalists in broad alliance. They bend the state apparatus to their collective will
 * Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour
 * The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, in more or less chronological order.
 * Today, industrial supremacy brings with it commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture it is the reverse: commercial supremacy produces industrial predominance.

Credit
profit when the recovery came.
 * Hence, quite consistently with this, the modem doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, lack of faith in the national debt takes the place of the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness. The national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to speculation: in a word, it has given rise to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy
 * The Bank of England began by lending its money to the government at 8 per cent; at the same time it was empowered by Parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it a second time to the public in the form of bank-notes. It was allowed to use these notes for discounting bills, making advances on commodities and buying the precious metals. It was not long before this credit-money, created by the bank itself, became the coin in which the latter made its loans to the state, and paid, on behalf of the state, the interest on the public debt
 * An international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian system of robbery formed one of the secret foundations of Holland's wealth in capital, for Venice in her years of decadence lent large sums of money to Holland.
 * As the national debt is backed by the revenues of the state, which must cover the annual interest payments etc., the modern system of taxation was the necessary complement of the system of national loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses without the taxpayers feeling it immediately, but they still make increased taxes necessary as a consequence. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused by the accumulation of debts contracted one after another compels the government always to have recourse to new loans for new extraordinary expenses. The modern fiscal system, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary means of subsistence (and therefore by increases in their price), thus contains within itself the germ of automatic progression. Over-taxation is not an accidental occurrence, but rather a principle.
 * Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of largescale industry.
 * National debt and the public credit system as means whereby money power can start to control the power of the state
 * The colonial system allowed the treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder to flow "back to the mother-country and be turned into capital there while the public debt became one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation
 * If it is the further expansion of capitalism that creates the demand for yesterday's surplus product, then this means that the realization problem cannot be solved, particularly under today's conditions of globalized capitalist development, without the construction of a vibrant and extensive credit system to bridge the gap between yesterday's surplus product and tomorrow's absorption of that surplus product. This absorption can occur either through the further expansion of surplus-value production (reinvestment) or through the capitalist consumption of revenues
 * At the heart of the credit system there exists a range of technical and legal aspects (many of which can fail or badly distort simply by virtue of their rules of operation) coupled with subjective expectations and anticipations. And to the degree that capitalism continues to expand, so the role of the credit system as a kind of central nervous system for directing and controlling the global dynamics of capital accumulation becomes more prominent. The implication is that the control over the means of credit becomes critical for the functioning of capitalism-a positionality that Marx and Engels had recognized in the Communist Manifesto by making the centralization of the means of credit in the hands of the state one of their key demands (presuming, of course, control over the state by the working class). Some sort of fusion of state and financial powers appears inevitable. This contradictory fusion was established by the formation of state-controlled central banks with unlimited reserve powers over the disbursement of the means of credit to private appropriators.
 * In the same way that capital can operate on both sides of the demand and supply of labor-power (see chapter 10), so it can operate through the credit system on both sides of the production-realization relation.
 * The credit system is well positioned to target and extract wealth from the assets held by vulnerable populations. Predatory lending practices-a form of accumulation by dispossession-eventually resulted in foreclosures, which allowed assets to be acquired at low cost and transferred wholesale to boost the long-run wealth of capitalist class interests.
 * This second moment of "accumulation by dispossession" via the credit system is of great consequence to the dynamics of capitalism. It facilitated an immense transfer of wealth from East and Southeast Asia to Wall Street in the crisis of 1997-8, for example, as a liquidity freeze forced all manner of viable firms into bankruptcy so that they could be bought up cheaply by foreign investors and then sold back at an immense

Exploitation of labor

 * The exchange-value of labour is less than the exchange-value of its product
 * All surplus-value is in substance the materialization of unpaid labour-time. The secret of the self-valorization of capital resolves itself into the fact that it has at its disposal a definite quantity of the unpaid labour of other people
 * One possible result, which Marx unfortunately neglects to emphasize, is that the physical standard of living of workers can rise, as measured by the material goods (use-values) they can afford, at the same time as the rate of exploitation, s/v, increases.
 * By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production, which is essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus labour, not only produces a deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself.
 * The wage-form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid labour and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. Even surplus labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. In the one case, the property-relation conceals the slave's labour for himself; in the other case the money-relation conceals the uncompensated labour of the wage-labourer.
 * The conditions of its (labor-power) sale, include the necessity of its constant re-sale. Wages, as we have seen, imply by their very nature that the worker will always provide a certain quantity of unpaid labour.
 * If this worker were in possession of his own means of production, and were satisfied to live as a worker, he could make do with the amount of labour-time necessary to reproduce his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day. In addition to this, he would only need means of production sufficient for 8 working hours. The capitalist, on the other hand, who makes him do, besides these 8 hours, say 4 hours of surplus labour, requires an additional sum of money for furnishing the additional means of production. The capitalist would have to employ not one but two workers in order to live, on the surplus-value appropriated daily, as well as and no better than a worker, i.e. in order to be able to satisfy his needs. In this case the mere maintenance of life would be the purpose of his production, not the increase of wealth. But capitalist production presupposes the increase of wealth. To live only twice as well as an ordinary worker and, as well as that, turn half of the surplus-value produced into capital, he would have to multiply the number of workers and the minimum of the capital advanced by eight.
 * A certain stage of capitalist production necessitates that the capitalist be able to devote the whole of the time during which he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified, to the appropriation and therefore the control of the labour of others [fremde Arbeit], and to the sale of the products of that labour. The guild system of the Middle Ages therefore tried forcibly to prevent the transformation of the master of a craft into a capitalist, by limiting the number of workers a single master could employ to a very low maximum.
 * For capital, it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital [i.e., the production of surplus-value] . Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of vital forces of his body and his mind, even the rest time of Sunday . . . what foolishness! But in its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over the meal-times, where possible incorporating them into the production process itself.
 * Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. It extends the worker's production-time within a given period by shortening his life
 * An increase in wages means only a quantitative reduction in the amount of unpaid labour. This reduction can never go so far as to threaten the system itself
 * Capitalists are primarily interested in the mass of profit, and the mass depends on the number of laborers employed, the rate of exploitation and the intensity.
 * Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so
 * But looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him
 * Of course, the pretensions of capital in its embryonic state, in its state of becoming, when it cannot yet use the sheer force of economic relations to secure its right to absorb a sufficient quantity of surplus labour, but must be aided by the power of the state
 * Of course, the pretensions of capital in its embryonic state, in its state of becoming, when it cannot yet use the sheer force of economic relations to secure its right to absorb a sufficient quantity of surplus labour, but must be aided by the power of the state - its pretensions in this situation appear very modest in comparison with the concessions it has to make, complainingly and unwillingly, in its adult condition. Centuries are required before the 'free' worker, owing to the greater development of the capitalist mode of production, makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage
 * Both workers and capitalists take their positions according to the laws of exchange. Marx is not, as you might expect from a revolutionary thinker, advocating abolition of the wages system, but has both the workers and the capitalists agree to abide by the laws of market exchange, equivalent for equivalent. The only issue concerns how much use-value (the capacity for congealing values in commodities) the laborer is going to give up to the capitalist.
 * The capitalist maintains his right as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible; and the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to a particular normal length. There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class
 * The problem, however, is that individual capitalists in competition with one another cannot stop pushing toward the over-exploitation of their fundamental resource bases, labor and the land. The potential exists for a conflict between the class interest of capitalists in a "sustainable" labor force and the short-term individual behaviors of capitalists faced with competition.
 * The British Factory Acts were imposed by the state and designed for both economic and political/military reasons, to limit the exploitation of living labor and prevent its excessive degradation
 * A surplus population affects whether the capitalist has to care about the health, well-being and life expectancy of the labor force. As individual human beings, capitalists may care. But forced to maximize profit come what may under conditions of competition, individual capitalists have no choice. Looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him. Capitalists are forced by competition to engage in the same labor practices as their competitors
 * The problem of how to create and sustain worker discipline is still with us, of course. Then there is the problem of what to do with people who don't conform and are therefore dubbed odd or even deviant. And this is Foucault's as well as Marx's point: they are called mad or antisocial and incarcerated in insane asylums or prisons. To be a "normal" person, therefore, is to accept a certain kind of spatiotemporal discipline convenient to a capitalist mode of production.
 * In the 1820S in Britain, the landed aristocracy still dominated political power. It had Parliament, it had the House of Lords, it had the monarchy and dominated the military and the judiciary. But there was also a rising bourgeoisie, partly constituted by traditional mercantile and financial interests but now supplemented by an increasingly powerful industrial interest centered on cotton manufacturers in the Manchester region. The latter became powerful advocates for a particular version of economic theory that was dominated by freedom of the market and free trade. Although increasingly wealthy, the industrial capitalists were politically disempowered relative to the landed aristocracy. They therefore sought to reform the parliamentary system in such a way as to gain greater power within the state apparatus. In this they had to fight a serious battle against the landed aristocracy. And in fighting that battle, they looked for support from the mass of the people, particularly the professional middle classes and an articulate, self-educated, artisanal working class (distinct from the mass of uneducated laborers). The industrial bourgeoisie, in short,sought an alliance with artisanal working -class movements against the landed aristocracy. The Reform Act of 1832 (with promises made to workers) was soon dubbed "the great betrayal" by the workers.
 * Eventually there were Corn Law reforms (the aristocracy opposed free imports) in the 1840s which reduced tariffs on wheat in ways that seriously impacted the wealth of the landed aristocracy. But when bread became cheaper, the industrial bourgeoisie reduced wages. In Marx's terms, since the value oflabor-power is determined in part by the price of bread, cheaper imports of wheat lead to lower bread prices which lead in turn (other things being equal) to a fall in the value of labor-power.
 * In 1848, there erupted one of those periodic crises of capitalism, a major crisis of overaccumulation of capital, a huge crisis of unemployment across much of Europe that sparked intense revolutionary movements in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere; at the same time, Chartist (i.e. the workers movement opposing bourgeois industrialists) agitation in Britain peaked. In Paris, in June of 1848, there was a violent repression of working-class movements that had asserted power, followed by the establishment of an authoritarian regime which became the Second Empire, led by Louis Bonaparte in 1852.
 * Capitalists get pushed into a reform which is not necessarily against their class interest. In other words, the dynamics of class struggle can just as easily help equilibrate the system as disrupt it. Capitalists, when they finally succumbed after fifty years of struggle to the idea of regulating the working day, found it worked for them just as well as it did for the workers. If the laborers organize as a class, and thereby force the capitalists to modify their behavior, then the collective power of the workers helps save the capitalists from their own individual stupidity and short-sightedness, thus forcing them to recognize their class interest. If workers are completely powerless, then the system goes awry because Apres rnai Ie deluge! is no way to run a stable capitalist economy. Clearly, the coercive laws of competition that drive the capitalists down such a self-destructive path need to be contained. In this view, class struggle merely equilibrates the capital-labor relation. Class struggle can all too easily be internalized within the capitalist dynamic as a positive force that sustains the capitalist mode of production.
 * Thus, a certain empowerment of the workers' movement is socially necessary for capitalism to function effectively, and that the sooner the capitalists recognize this and submit to it, the better off they will be. There is plenty of historical evidence to support this conclusion, even to the point where the state, as happened in the United States during the New Deal, deliberately empowered the trade-union movement in order not to overthrow capitalism but to help stabilize it. The question here is, at what point does reform go too far and actually challenge the very basis of capitalism?
 * If the benefits from technological dynamism (raised living standards) are spread around, then opposition to that technological dynamism becomes muted even as capitalists are cheerfully raising the rate of exploitation
 * The only thing that interests the capitalist is the difference between the price of labour-power and the value which its function creates. He never comes to see that if such a thing as the value of labour really existed, and he really paid this value, no capital would exist, and his money would never be transformed into capital
 * The capitalist does not know that the normal price of labour also includes a definite quantity of unpaid labour, and that this very unpaid labour is the normal source of his profits. The category of surplus labour-time does not exist at all for him, since it is included in the normal working day, which he thinks he has paid for in the day's wages.
 * The lower the price of labour, the greater must be the quantity of labour, or the longer must be the working day, for the worker to secure even a miserable average wage. The low level of the price of labour acts here as a stimulus to the extension of the labour-time. However, the extension of the period of labour produces in its turn a fall in the price of labour, and with this a fall in the daily or the weekly wage. A mere prolongation of the working day lowers the price of labour, if no compensatory factor enters
 * If one man does the work of 2 men, the supply of labour increases, although the supply of labour-power on the market remains constant. The competition thus created between the workers allows the capitalist to force down the price of labour, while the fall in the price of labour allows him, on the other hand, to force up the hours of work still further.
 * The unpaid labour of the men was made the source whereby the competition was carried on, and continues so to this day. The competition among the capitalists is the cause of the difficulty in getting rid of e.g. night-work. An underseller, who sells his bread below the cost-price according to the price of flour, must make it up by getting more out of the labour of the men
 * Piece-wages become, from this point of view, the most fruitful source of reductions in wages, and of frauds committed by the capitalists. This is because they provide an exact measure of the intensity of labour. Since the quality and intensity of the work are here controlled by the very form of the wage, superintendence of labour becomes to a great extent superfluous.
 * Piecewages make it easier for parasites to interpose themselves between the capitalist and the wage-labourer, thus giving rise to the subletting of labour'. The profits of these middlemen come entirely from the difference between the price of labour which the capitalist pays, and the part of that price they actually allow the worker to receive. It is when work passes through several hands, each of which is to take its share of profits, while only the last does the work, that the pay which reaches the work-woman is miserably disproportioned. On the other hand, piece wages allow the capitalist to make a contract for so much per piece with the most important worker - in manufacture, with the chief of some group, in mines with the extractor of the coal, in the factory with the actual machine-worker - at a price for which this man himself undertakes the enlisting and the payment of his assistants. Here the exploitation of the worker by capital takes place through the medium of the exploitation of one worker by another.
 * Given the system of piece-wages, it is naturally in the personal interest of the worker that he should strain his labour-power as intensely as possible; this in turn enables the capitalist to raise the normal degree of intensity of labour more easily.
 * The wider scope that piece-wages give to individuality tends to develop both that individuality, and with it the worker's sense of liberty, independence and self-control, and also the competition of workers with each other. The piece-wage therefore has a tendency, while raising the wages of individuals above the average, to lower this average itself.
 * Both the capitalist and his ideologist, the political economist, consider only that part of the worker's individual consumption to be productive which is required for the perpetuation of the working class, and which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist may have labour-power to consume. The fact that the worker performs acts of individual consumption in his own interest, and not to please the capitalist, is something entirely irrelevant to the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary aspect of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats
 * The Roman slave was held by chains; the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of a contract
 * The worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him. The worker produces the instrument of his or her own domination!
 * The fact that the worker is in reality very much un-free, belonging in fact to capital, is concealed by his constant change of employers. The alleged freedom becomes apparent in the form of "choice" of employer, as if the worker was free because he is not bound to one specific capitalist. What the worker doesn't realize, though, is that is merely wandering around between various detention camps of capital. Capital's form of appearance, thus, is the capitalist whom one is "free" to subscribe to or not. The essence - capital itself - is an unavoidable gravitation field in one's quest for a new employer. The apparent bondage, on the one hand, is a legal one (i.e. the worker is "free"), the essential bondage, on the other hand, is the economic one because only through this bondage the worker is able to secure his means of subsistence. You can't buy food by virtue of being a free man.
 * The capitalist produces and reproduces the worker as the active but alienated subject capable of producing value. And this is the fundamental socially necessary condition for the survival and maintenance of a capitalist mode of production
 * All means for the development of production undergo become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process, they deform the conditions under which he works; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of those methods.
 * Once the proletariat is formed, then the silent compulsion of economic relations does its job and the overt violence can fade into the background, because people have been socialized into their situation as wage laborers, as bearers of the commodity labor-power.
 * The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the 'natural laws of production', i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them
 * Finding spaces where regulation and union organization are lacking continues to be a significant aspect of the geographical and locational dynamic of capitalism.
 * Opposition to capital has historically been subsumed within capital itself
 * Exploitation in capitalism is non-overt (you don't have a landlord forcing you to give up 50% of your crop)

Expropriation & accumulation through dispossession

 * Political economy confuses, on principle, two different kinds of private property, one of which rests on the labour of the producer himself, and the other on the exploitation of the labour of others.
 * The transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated means of production (i.e. from feudalism to capitalism), the transformation, therefore, of the dwarf-like property of the many into the giant property of the few, and the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence and from the instruments of labour, this terrible and rduously accomplished expropriation of the mass of the people forms the pre-history of capital
 * Private property which is personally earned, i.e. which is based, as it were, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent working individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free labour.
 * In this society, we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour
 * It is not the direct transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according to whether these private individuals are workers or non-workers, private property has a different character.
 * The expropriation of one capitalist through another (i.e. monopolization) is achieved through the immanent laws of capitalist production: centralization. This centralization goes hand in hand with the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime
 * For the political economist, the development of the social productivity of labour, co-operation, division of labour, application of machinery on a large scale, and so on, are impossible without the expropriation of the workers and the corresponding transformation of their means of production into capital.
 * The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this, that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-labourer as a wage-labourer, but also always produces a relative surplus population of wage-labourers in proportion to the accumulation of capital. Thus the law of supply and demand as applied to labour is kept on the right lines, the oscillation of wages is confined within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured.
 * Let the government set an artificial price on the virgin soil, a price independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land and turn himself into an independent farmer.
 * Accumulation through dispossession:
 * Intellectual property rights, e.g. on certain strands of genome material
 * Taking away the rights to the commons/retrenchment of rights (e.g. Social Security, national parks, pensions, Commodification of education, healthcare)
 * Taking of land through eminent domain in order to create “special economic zones” or to build the infrastructure necessary for big capital to expand
 * Using the credit system to force someone off his land/out of his house (i.e. foreclosure)
 * Asset stripping through private equity funds

Production, manufacture & productivity

 * Productivity: shortening the working time needed to produce a commodity, thereby shortening the necessary labor time and extending the surplus labor time
 * The ratio of c/v indicates the productivity of labor-power because the bigger the ratio, e.g. the smaller the variable part of capital in proportion to the constant part, the more productive one single worker is (i.e. the more machinery he has at his disposal). Thus, the ratio of constant to variable capital is an index of technological change
 * Machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working day (dormant fixed capital using use-value if not animated by labor!!)
 * Innovation occurs where labor is expensive and there is a strong incentive to develop labor-saving innovations. This is the case, whenever labor is in possession of its means of production and doesn't have to submit to wage-labor in order to secure its reproduction.
 * Capitalist reorganizations and reconfigurations of tasks tend to produce deskilling, as tasks that were once complicated become simplified into component parts. This also has the effect of reducing the value of labor-power employed because everything that shortens the necessary labour-time required (i.e. shortening the apprenticeship) for the reproduction of labour-power, extends the domain of surplus labour.
 * With increases in productivity, you have increases in material wealth that are greater than the increases in surplus value. But surplus value, within the framework of the theory, remains central to the system
 * Capital developed within the production process until it acquired command over labour, i.e. over self-activating labour-power, in other words the worker himself. The capitalist, who is capital personified, now takes care that the worker does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity
 * At first capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions within which labour has been carried on up to that point in history. It does not therefore directly change the mode of production. The production of surplus-value in the form we have so far considered, by means of simple extension of the working day, appeared therefore independently of any change in the mode of production itself. It was no less effective in the old-fashioned bakeries than in the modern cotton factories.
 * When we view the production process as a process of valorization then the means of production are changed into "means for the absorption of the labour of others. It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as selfvalorizing value.
 * The objective of the development of the productivity of labour within the context of capitalist production is the shortening of that part of the working day in which the worker must work for himself, and the lengthening, thereby, of the other part of the day, in which he is free to work for nothing for the capitalist.
 * While machines are not a source of value, they can be a source of relative surplus-value to the individual capitalist. This produces a peculiar result: machines cannot be a source of value, but they can be a source of surplus-value. Since capitalists are interested in the mass of surplus-value, and since they would generally prefer to gain relative surplus-value rather than confront class struggles over absolute surplus-value, then the fetish belief in a "technological fix" as an answer to their ambitions is all too understandable.
 * One possible result, which Marx unfortunately neglects to emphasize, is that the physical standard of living of workers can rise, as measured by the material goods (use-values) they can afford, at the same time as the rate of exploitation, s/v, increases.
 * In the society where the capitalist mode of production prevails, anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour mutually condition each other
 * Manufacture is co-operation based on the division of labour
 * Two fundamental forms of manufacture: heterogeneous (bringing together many skills, as in carriage making) and organic (continuous, like nail making)
 * The guild organization, however much it may have contributed to creating the material conditions for the existence of manufacture by separating, isolating and perfecting the handicrafts, excluded the kind of division of labour characteristic of manufacture. The worker and his means of production remained closely united. The principal basis of manufacture was absent, namely the autonomy of the means of production, as capital, vis-à-vis the worker
 * While the division of labour in society at large, whether mediated through the exchange of commodities or not, can exist in the most diverse economic formations of society, the division of labour in the workshop, as practised by manufacture, is an entirely specific creation of the capitalist mode of production.
 * The minimum number that any given capitalist is bound to employ is prescribed by the previously established division of labour. Hence, it is a law, springing from the technical character of manufacture, that the minimum amount of capital which the capitalist must possess has to go on increasing. The more the division increases, the more does the constant employment of a given number of workers require a greater outlay of capital in tools, raw material
 * Manufacture, through its division of labor and specialized functions, makes of man a mere fragment of his own body
 * Unfitted by nature to make anything independently, the manufacturing worker develops his productive activity only as an appendage of that workshop
 * The reorganization of the division of labor, both within the labor process and in society at large, is the hallmark of the "manufacturing period" in capitalism's history.
 * Capital seizes upon production itself and transforms it. First you get manufacturing (Adam Smith's pin factory), then you get industrial production and then you get exactly this form of accumulation, where the growth of scientific knowledge is much greater
 * Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations → technology reveals how man relates to nature. It reveals by which processes man produces his own life, and since man’s life is inherently social, technology also reveals how social relations are produced. From this - technology as revealing the production of social relations – we can then deduce the mental conceptions that flow from the production of social relations. All these attributes of technology’s effects on man are processual, and through this, guide the processes of human evolution. Thus, technology reveals and discloses the relation to nature. Technologies and organizational forms internalize a certain relation to nature as well as to mental conceptions and social relations, daily life and labor processes. By virtue of this internalization, the study of technologies and organizational forms is bound to "reveal" or "disclose" a great deal about all the other elements. A detailed study of daily life under capitalism will reveal a great deal about our relation to nature, technologies, social relations, mental conceptions and the labor processes of production. Similarly, the study of our contemporary relation to nature cannot go very far without examining the nature of our social relations, our production systems, our mental conceptions of the world, the technologies deployed and how daily life is conducted. All these elements constitute a totality, and we have to understand how the mutual interactions between them work.
 * With the compulsory shortening of the hours of labour. This gives an immense impetus to the development of productivity and the more economical use of the conditions of production. It imposes on the worker an increased expenditure of labour within a time which remains constant, a heightened tension oflabour-power, and a closer filling-up of the pores of the working day, i.e. a condensation of labour, to a degree which can only be attained within the limits of the shortened working day.
 * A stimulus to technological change arises out of the desire on the part of capital to have weapons to deploy against labor. The more laborers become mere appendages of the machine, and the more their monopolizable skills get undermined by machine technologies, the more vulnerable they become to the arbitrary authority of capital
 * The huge amount of goods produced is the not indicative of social wealth, it's apparent social wealth

Co-operation

 * Increase in productivity depends on organizational forms (cooperation and divisions of labor), as well as on machinery and automation (technology). Marx's theory of technology/productive forces is machinery plus organizational form (e.g. subcontracting, just-in -time systems, corporate decentralization)
 * Innovations in the organizational forms – division of labor & co-operation – have been integral to the acquisition of relative surplus-value throughout the history of capitalism. These positive potentialities are seized on by capital to its own particular advantage and thereby turned into something negative for the laborer.
 * The combined working day produces a greater quantity of use-values than an equal sum of isolated working days, and consequently diminishes the labour-time necessary for the production of a given useful effect.
 * The whole (co-operative workforce) is more than the sum of its parts (total number of individual workers) because the co-operativeness either: heightens the mechanical force of labour (lifting sth. heavy); extends its sphere of action over a greater space; contracts the field of production relatively to the scale of production; at the critical moment sets large masses of labour to work (e.g. harvesting); excites rivalry between individuals and raises their animal spirits; performs different operations simultaneously; economizes the means of production by use in common; average out deviations in the individual worker’s productivity to become average social labour
 * Concentration of large masses of the means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is a material condition for the co-operation of wage-labourers, and the extent of co-operation, or the scale of production, depends on the extent of this concentration.
 * Through the co-operation of numerous wage-labourers, the command of capital develops into a requirement for carrying on the labour process itself, into a real condition of production.
 * The work of directing, superintending and adjusting becomes one of the functions of capital, from the moment that the labour under capital's control becomes co-operative.
 * The driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital to the greatest possible extent, i.e. the greatest possible production of surplus-value, hence the greatest possible exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist. As the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and, necessarily, the pressure put on by capital to overcome this resistance
 * The capitalist is relieved from actual labour as soon as his capital has reached that minimum amount with which capitalist production first begins
 * As the means of production extend, the necessity increases for some effective control over the proper application of them
 * The co-operation of wage-labourers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them. Hence the interconnection between their various labours confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose.
 * It is not because he is leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an attribute of capital, just as in feudal times the functions of general and judge were attributes of landed property
 * The capitalist does not pay for the combined labour-power of the 100. Being independent of each other, the workers are isolated. They enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with each other. Their co-operation only begins with the labour process, but by then they have ceased to belong to themselves. On entering the labour process they are incorporated into capital. As co-operators, as members of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital. Hence the productive power developed by the worker socially is the productive power of capital. The socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital which places them under these conditions. Because this power costs capital nothing, while on the other hand it is not developed by the worker until his labour itself belongs to capital, it appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature - a productive power inherent in capital. Workers lose their personhood and become mere variable capital: the real subsumption of the laborer under capital
 * This power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings (building pyramids etc.) has in modern society been transferred to the capitalist, whether he appears as an isolated individual or, as in the case of joint-stock companies, in combination with others.
 * Co-operation remains the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production
 * An inherent power of labor, the social power of cooperation, is appropriated by capital and made to appear as a power of capital over the workers.
 * Cooperation under the despotism of capitalists: they organize and direct a supervisory authority and fragment the working class into distinctive hierarchical groupings.
 * In the labour process mental and physical labour are united. Later on they become separate; and this separation develops into a hostile antagonism. The product is transformed from the direct product of the individual producer into a social product, the joint product of a collective labourer, i.e. a combination of workers, each of whom stands at a different distance from the actual manipulation of the object of labour.
 * Technological advance as a strategy to reduce the value of labor-power

Machinery & large-scale industry

 * Machines are used to produce surplus-value, not to lighten the load of labor
 * Machinery produces relative surplus-value, not only by directly reducing the value of labour-power, and indirectly cheapening it by cheapening the commodities that enter into its reproduction, but also, when it is first introduced sporadically into an industry, by converting the labour employed by the owner of that machinery into labour of a higher degree, by raising the social value of the article produced above its individual value, and thus enabling the capitalist to replace the value of a day's labour-power by a smaller portion of the value of a day's product. During this transitional period, while the use of machinery remains a sort of monopoly, profits are exceptional, and the capitalist endeavours to exploit thoroughly 'the sunny time of this his first love' by prolonging the working day as far as possible.
 * Machinery are not only a means of producing commodities, but also a means of producing a redundant population (because many workers have been supplanted by machines)
 * Machines are dead labor (constant capital) and cannot produce value. Yet they can, however, be a source of surplus-value.
 * It's a dubious proposition that capitalist technology "in itself" can lay the basis for alternative forms of social organization without any major adjustment. Lightening the toil of human beings was never the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism. Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value.
 * Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations
 * In manufacture, it is the workers who, either singly or in groups, must carry on each particular process with their manual implements. The worker has been appropriated by the process; but the process had previously to be adapted to the worker. This subjective principle of the division of labour no longer exists in production by machinery. Here 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, and to bind the different partial processes together into a whole, is solved by the aid of machines, chemistry, etc.
 * Social relations are being transformed alongside the technical relations
 * The analysis of the production process into its constitutive phases entails a mental transformation which brings a science (such as chemistry) to bear on technology
 * Large-scale industry therefore had to take over the machine itself, its own characteristic instrument of production, and to produce machines by means of machines. It was not till it did this that it could create for itself an adequate technical foundation, and stand on its own feet.
 * The capacity to produce machines with the aid of machines is the technical foundation of a fully fledged, dynamic capitalist mode of production. In other words, the growth of engineering and the machinetool industry is the ultimate phase of a revolution that created the adequate technical foundation for the capitalist mode of production in general → the instrument of labour assumes a material mode of existence which necessitates the replacement of human force by natural forces, and the replacement of the rule of thumb by the conscious application of natural science
 * Large-scale industry confronts the worker as a pre-existing material condition of production, as opposed to manufacture's subjective organization of the social labour process
 * The synergistic spread of revolutions in technology both rests on and provokes transformations in social relations, mental conceptions and modes of production, as well as in spatial and natural relations.
 * How much variable capital gets saved depends on the value of labor-power. Thus, only if labor is expensive (i.e. wages high), does it make sense for the (rational) capitalist to employ machines. That's why machines are frequently exported to countries where the cost of labor is high because there the machines can displace the labor. Instead of employing one very expensive machine with twenty laborers in the United States, you employ two thousand laborers in China using hand tools. This example counters the idea that capitalism inevitably marches onward toward ever-greater mechanization and technological sophistication.
 * The value of labour-power was determined, not only by the labour-time necessary to maintain the individual adult worker, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of that family onto the labour-market, spreads the value of the man's labour-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates it. To purchase the labour-power of a family of four workers may perhaps cost more than it formerly did to purchase the labour-power of the head of the family, but, in return, four days' labour takes the place of one day's, and the price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus labour of four over the surplus labour of one.
 * Mothers who have to work, can't nurse in the house anymore. The diminished expenditure of labour in the house is accompanied by an increased expenditure of money outside for substitudes. Machinery, by this excessive addition of women and children to the working personnel, at last breaks the resistance which the male workers had continued to oppose to the despotism of capital throughout the period of manufacture
 * In machinery the motion and the activity of the instrument of labour asserts its independence vis-a-vis the worker. The instrument oflabour now becomes an industrial form of perpetual motion
 * The productivity of machinery is, as we saw, inversely proportional to the value transferred by it to the product. The longer the period during which it functions, the greater is the mass of the products over which the value transmitted by the machine is spread, and the smaller is the portion of that value added to each single commodity.
 * A machine loses both use-value(wear and tear by rusting etc.) and exchange-value, either because machines of the same sort are being produced more cheaply than it was, or because better machines are entering into competition with it; it loses value whenever it is deprived of contact with living labour → the increased and continuous use of macinery makes a constantly increased prolongation of the working day 'desirable' (dormant fixed capital brings no profit). It is therefore in the early days of a machine's life that this special incentive to the prolongation of the working day makes itself felt most acutely
 * The depreciating value of the machine should be less than the value of the labor replaced by it. This creates the possibility for uneven geographical development. If labor costs are high in the United States relative to Britain, then the incentive to employ machinery in the United States is greater. Trade-union power in West Germany from the mid-1970S on sustained high wage rates,which produced a strong incentive for technological innovation. The West German economy then gained relative surplus-value vis-a-vis the rest of the world through technological advantage, but the labor-saving innovations produced structural unemployment.
 * There is an immanent contradiction in the application of machinery to the production of surplus-value, since the rate of surplus-value can only be increased by reducing the number of workers
 * Machine technologies effectively destroyed the skill basis that existed in the handicraft period. It then became much easier to employ unskilled women and children. It became possible to substitute the family wage for the individual wage. In the United States since the 1970S, individual wages have either declined or remained fairly constant in real terms, but family wages have tended to rise as more women have gone to work. What the capitalists class gets is two laborers for close to the price of one. "The economy (i.e. the capitalist class) is doing very well but the people are doing very badly"
 * The motion of the whole factory proceeds not from the worker but from the machinery: and for that reason the working personnel can continually be replaced without any interruption in the labour process
 * In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content. The conditions of work employ the worker.
 * The constant aim and the tendency of every improvement in machinery is, in fact, to do away entirely with the labour of man, or to lessen its price by substituting the labour of women and children for that of grown-up men, or of unskilled for that of skilled workmen
 * Capitalists consciously construct new technologies as instruments of class struggle. These technologies not only serve to discipline the laborer within the labor process but also help to create a labor surplus which will depress wages and worker aspirations
 * Strong technological changes and incredible increases in productivity have generated unemployment and job insecurity and made it much easier to discipline labor politically
 * Machinery sets the workers free from their means of subsistence
 * The machine always has to be seen in relation to the capitalist use of it:Machinery in itself shortens the hours of labour, but when employed by capital it lengthens them; in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital it heightens its intensity; in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of nature but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces; in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital it makes them into paupers
 * "Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only consider! Where would agriculture and trade be without the knife? Is it not as salutary in surgery, as it is skilled in anatomy? And a willing assistant at the festive table? If you abolish the knife - you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism."
 * The extraordinary increase in the productivity of largescale industry, accompanied as it is by both a more intensive and a more extensive exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production, permits a larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively.
 * The principle of machine production is the division of the production process into its constituent phases, and the solution of the problems arising from this by the application of mechanics, chemistry and the whole range of the natural sciences
 * The revolution in the social mode of production is the necessary product of the revolution in the means of production
 * Competition between different labor systems (domestic labor systems, handicraft systems, manufacturing systems & factory systems) becomes a weapon to be used by capital against labor
 * The revival of sweatshop and family labor systems, putting-out systems, subcontracting systems and the like has been a marked feature of global neoliberal capitalism over the past forty years in the struggle to procure surplus-value. Workers, brought together in a large factory, can become all too aware of their common interests and become a potentially powerful collective political force. Industrialization in South Korea after 1960 or so produced a large-scale factory labor system, and one result was a strong trade-union movement that became a politically potent force until disciplined in the crisis of 1997-8 → the availability of a choice of labor systems to capitalists is an important weapon of capital in the dynamics of class struggle over surplus
 * Regulatory capture: Big capital consequently often supports the rigorous enforcement of all kinds of regulatory regimes on, for example, occupational safety and health, particularly if small businesses can't afford them, leaving the whole field to the large corporations; put differently, corporations capture the regulatory apparatus and use it to eliminate competition.
 * The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
 * Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. Modern industry is continually transforming the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionizes the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another. Thus large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions
 * The possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice. That monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve, in misery, for the changing requirements of capitalist exploitation, must be replaced by the individual man who is absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of him; the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn.
 * The expansion of capitalist production creates, on the one hand, the social need, and on the other hand, the technical means, for those immense industrial undertakings which require a previous centralization of capital for their accomplishment.

Growth

 * There are always different trajectories of growth in modern society
 * The capitalist imperative to continually grow is over-determined by various factors. This is not about growth but about compounded growth: capitalism needs to increase the rate of surplus, accelerate the acceleration!
 * The pace of technological change is impelled onward by the coercive laws of competition as capitalists compete for the ephemeral form of relative surplus-value that accrues to those working at higher productivity. Technological innovation will continue up until the point where wage rates fall low enough to make buying the machine no longer worthwhile.
 * In the capitalist's struggle to keep the rate of surplus constant, they will constantly face other capitalists who capitalize on the ephermal period in which they gain more surplus than the other capitalists due to their new innovation. As soon as the innovation beocmes socially established, the rate of surplus equilibriates again. However, this means that at any given point in time there is probably a capitalist who just innovated and you will (as a capitalist) have to catch up - i.e. growth as caused by the spatiotemporally dispersed tendency towards innovation and catching-up
 * Capitalists necessarily end up with more of something, a surplus, at the end of the day, and then they've got the problem of what do they do with that surplus the next day. If they can't find anything to do with it, they are in trouble (e.g. consume more luxury goods or invest in long-term projects/government bonds)
 * Population growth makes it necessary to increase productivity to accomodate the increased need for food etc. However, this means (in the Ricardian sense) that less fertile land will have to be cultivated, and capitalists will have to compensate for this by new innovations (e.g. fertilizers)
 * To keep people employed, you have to grow: If a new machine is introduced, it will replace labor. The newly acquired level of productivity produces more surplus, which has to be put to use in order for it to valorize itself. The capitalist thus expands his business/extends production since he now has more constant capital to employ. He therefore buys new machines etc. for which he will an increased number of people. Thus, the previously laid-off are now re-employed, but only because the capitalist re-invested his surplus in expansion of his business. While in this new situation, the number of workers has in fact increased (absolute), their relative number (i.e. in proportion to the constant capital) has decreased since under the old system this new sum of money (that the capitalist has due to increased productivity) would have employed way more workers than it does now under the new system
 * Productive labor, in Marx terms, means that yesterday's surplus product has to be put to creating more surplus product and surplus-value today. Classical political economy focused exclusively on the extra labor and therefore extra variable capital (increase in wage outlays) that was called for. Classical political economy tended to forget entirely about the necessity to procure new means of production (constant capital) with each round of accumulation (which entailed transformations in the relation to nature through raw-material extractions)
 * Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking
 * To this imperative attaches a fetish belief, a whole ideology, centered on the virtues of growth. Growth is inevitable, growth is good. Not to grow is to be in crisis. But endless growth means production for production's sake, which also means consumption for consumption's sake. Anything that gets in the way of growth is bad. Barriers and limits to growth have to be dissolved. Environmental problems? Too bad! The relation to nature must be transformed. Social and political problems? Too bad! Repress critics and send recalcitrants to jail. Geopolitical barriers? Break them down with violence if necessary. Everything has to dance to the tune of "accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production

Time

 * Moments are the elements of profit
 * Not only must capitalists command the labor process, the product and the time of the laborer, but they must also strive to command the social nature of temporality itself. Command over time is a central vector of struggle within a capitalist mode of production.
 * In capitalist society, free time is produced for one class by the conversion of the whole lifetime of the masses into labour-time
 * The struggle to command the worker's time lies at the origin of profit, which is exactly what Marx's theory of surplus-value posits
 * This social manipulation of time and temporality is a fundamental feature of capitalism also. As soon as the extraction of surplus labor-time becomes fundamental to the replication of class relations, then the question of what time is, who measures it, and how temporality is to be understood moves to the forefront of analysis.
 * Capitalists have to make sure every moment of those twelve hours is used at maximum intensity. This is a corollary of the fact that value is socially necessary labor-time.
 * As capital, therefore, it is animated by the drive to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man, that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier (alluding to the intensification of labor)
 * As a consequence of the relay/shift system, there is no such thing as a "natural working day:' only various constructions of it in relation to the capitalist requirement to maintain a continuity of flow at all costs.
 * In medieval times, a disciplinary apparatus was created to socialize the population into the role of wage laborers. A good day's labor was defined as a workday of twelve hours in the first such statutes, which date from 1349. This was how labor discipline was imposed in Britain. Colonial authorities in the 19. century would report that '...the problem in India or Africa is that you can't get the indigenous population to work a "normal" working day, let alone a "normal" working week.'
 * The hour was largely an invention of the thirteenth century, that the minute and the second became common measures only as late as the seventeenth century and that it is only in recent times that terms like "nanoseconds" have been invented
 * When Foucault talks about the rise of governmentality, what he is really talking about is that moment when people started to internalize a sense of temporal discipline and to learn to live by it almost without thinking
 * Temporality arises in relationship to the emergence of value as socially necessary labor-time
 * The spatial organization of capitalism neatly matches the temporal organization in the rise of a disciplinary capitalism: workers have to be socialized and disciplined to accept the spatiotemporal logic of the capitalist labor process
 * Labor is the economic time of society. Capital has as its boundary of increase the extent of economic time employed (i.e. the length of working day)
 * Faced with the two limits (i.e. rate of surplus limited by 24h-day & number of workers limited by size of available labor force), capital tries to increase the degree of intensity
 * Even though Marx is not economic deterministic, one imperative seems to prevail and dictate a lot in capitalism: There is always such a deep concern over the appropriation of the time of others that the issue never goes away. It is a perpetual point of contestation "between equal rights" within capitalism that can never arrive at some ultimate solution. Struggles over time are fundamental to the capitalist mode of production. This is what the deep theory tells us, and no matter what happens in the superstructure, that imperative cannot be overcome without overthrowing capitalism
 * The revolution in the modes of production of industry and agriculture made necessary a revolution in the general conditions of the social process of production, i.e. in the means of communication and transport → the annihilation of space by time
 * Massive centralization of money power endows many privileged capitalists with the capacity to wait because their sheer money power gives them control over time in ways that small producers and wage laborers are often denied.

Social relations

 * For you, my social labor exists in the form of the commodities in which it is embodied, that is, only as a value.
 * There can also be intra-class conflict (e.g. when the unproductive labor demands higher wages that have to be financed from the productive labor's surplus). Or, if Wal-Mart wants to get lower wholesale prices to make more profits (which are the prices at which the industrial capitalist sells though), then ultimately the industrial capitalist will have to squeeze out more surplus
 * An individual's consciousness, how one makes sense of the world and defines one's interests, is conditioned by one's class position within the mode of production. Moreover, the structural relationship between the superstructure and the base ensures that the dominant economic class will control not only society's means of material production, but also the production of ideas
 * A change in property relations is premised on a change in social relations
 * Commodity fetishism: the reduction of relations between people to relations between people and things, i.e. people interact with people only through things
 * Consumers don't know anything about the social relations that stand behind his product. Water flows out of the tap, but value flows the other way, from direct producers to a hierarchy of rent, dividend etc.
 * Fetishism about labor and fetishism about revenue
 * Commodities do not reveal which environmental degradation went into it nor whether it was child labor that produced it

Profit & investment

 * Marxists see profits as the unpaid labor of workers, not the earned income of capital.
 * Marxists also see no reason why the law of diminishing returns and reversion to the mean should be the norm under capitalism. On the contrary, the more the share of profit rises — i.e. the more capital exploits labor — the better off capitalism is (just not workers, of course). Why? Because capitalism isn’t a system geared toward producing the things and services people need; it’s a system designed to make money. Providing things and services is just a (necessary) byproduct.
 * Marx argued that the value of the means of production relative to the value of wages (for the system as a whole) has a propensity to increase over time. This then tends to lower the rate of profit, which can only be boosted by increasing the rate of surplus value (or exploitation) — in other words, pushing workers to work harder and produce more.
 * But this push to intensify exploitation has physical and social limits: workers can’t toil for more than twenty-four hours a day, and labor laws set an additional ceiling. Eventually the rate of profit will start to fall, followed by total profits. And this generates regular and recurring slumps in investment and output.
 * A drop-off in profits usually heralds a decline in business investment, which, if sustained, eventually leads to a new economic recession (a fall in output, employment, and income). Indeed, the movement in investment is initially driven by movements in profit — not vice versa.
 * There have been five economic recessions or slumps since 1963: 1974–75, 1980–82, 1990–92, 2001, and 2008–9. In each case, the rate of profit peaked at least one year — and on most occasions, up to three years — before the downturn officially began. With the exception of the very mild 2001 recession, a fall in the total level of profit preceded or coincided with a slump.

Important insights
→ Understand simple reproduction to see how the class relations and the technical basis of society are reproduced, and understnad expanded reproduction grasp how accumulation of capital is possible on this basis.

→ The bourgeois will never read it or, if they read it, they will never want to comprehend it, and if they comprehend it they will never say anything about it; this work being nothing other than a sentence of death, scientifically motivated and irrevocably pronounced, not against them as individuals, but against their class

→ Never ignore the impact of the historical context on your theorizing!

→ Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

→ Marx never passed a moral judgement on the capitalists, he doesn't need any conspiracy of capitalist conspiracy. The capitalist's claim to the surplus grows naturally from the system

→ There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals

→ The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

→ To the extent that people don't perceive or simply accept that they are being exploited, on the grounds of the palatable residual effects of the capitalists' crumbs, any interest in resistance or revolution must necessarily diminish

→ Nach der Methodologie des Marxismus fallen Wesen und Erscheinung einer Sache nicht zusammen; sonst wäre nämlich eine wissenschaftliche Erklärung nicht erforderlich. Hernach erfüllt die vulgärökonomische fast nur noch die Funktion der Apologetik der jeweils bestehenden Verhältnisse

→ Marx's way of moving by descent: you start with the surface appearance, then dive deep down beneath the fetishisms to uncover a theoretical conceptual apparatus that can capture the underlying motion of social processes. That theoretical apparatus is then brought step by step back to the surface to interpret the dynamics of daily life in new ways.

→ Marx’s view is that “…each particular mode of production, and the relations of production corresponding to it at each given moment, in short 'the economic structure of society: is 'the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness' [mental conceptions, if you like], and that 'the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life.” Only in the superstructure do we become conscious of political issues and fight them out. There is an economic base on which there arise frameworks of thought as well as a political and legal superstructure that collectively define how we become conscious of problems and fight them out.

→ Marx' analysis extends far beyond the traditional critique of bourgeois relations of distribution, that is the market and private property; it is not only a critique of exploitation and unequal distribution of wealth and power. Rather it grasp modern industrial society itself as capitalist and analyzes capitalism primarily in terms of abstract structures of domination, increasing fragmentation of individual labor and individual existence. It treats the working class as an element of capital rather than the embodiment of its negation and conceptualizes socialism as the abolition (rather than domination) of the proletariat

→ Marx theory is not one of actually existing capitalism, it's a theory of capital. it's not an empirical nor historical treatise of capital; it's a reading of the classical political economists and a critical theory built upon this

→ Machinery in itself shortens the hours of labour, but when employed by capital it lengthens them; in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital it heightens its intensity; in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of nature but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces; in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital it makes them into paupers

→ Forms of appearance are reproduced directly and spontaneously, as current and usual modes of thought

→ Capitalism periodically remakes itself in moments of historical rupture, in part by recuperating strands of critique directed against it. In such moments, elements of anti-capitalist critique are resignified to legitimate an emergent new form of capitalism, which thereby becomes endowed with the higher, moral significance needed to motivate new generations to shoulder the inherently meaningless work of endless accumulation.

→ Think twice, which one is it? The law as a product of the material relations of production or rather the reverse: the relations of production as products of the law.

→ The superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it views the expansion and contraction of credit as the cause of the periodic alternations in the industrial cycle, whereas it is a mere symptom of them.

→ Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things

→ "Dialectic" is not a method, it's a feature of the contradictory form of the commodity

→ This, then, is capitalism's defining feature, differentiating it from a simple commodity-producing society: capitalism exists when, in a commodity-producing society, one small class of people (capitalists) have monopolized the means of production, and where the great majority of the direct producers (workers) can not produce independently because they have no means of production.

→ The universalizing drive of capital should not be assumed to homogenize power relations, or the social landscape more generally. In fact, capitalism is not only consistent with great heterogeneity and hierarchy, but systematically generates them. Capitalism is perfectly compatible with a highly diverse set of political and cultural formations.

Yet to include somewhere
value between the two parties. Similarly, if the exchange took place below the value of the commodity, then the buyer's gain would be identical to the seller's loss. Again, the transaction would create no net increase in surplus value. The conclusion was clear: "Turn and twist then as we may, the fact remains unaltered. If equivalents are exchanged, no surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, still no surplus-value results . Before going into the details of the book it might be helpful to first give a very general overview of what Karl Marx is about to do his major work The Capital and how he does it. Contrary to what you might expect, The Capital is not a blueprint for a future communist society. Actually the word communism does not even figure in Capital and his concern with possible future societies is left to other works. What Marx does in The Capital is to analyze capitalism not only as an economic system but as a societal system then underpins how we relate to each other and to nature. Furthermore, in his analysis he accepts all the fundamental assumptions which classical economists have taken as a given ever since. This means, for example, that Marx does not criticize what happens when market mechanisms don't work because the classical assumption is that they do work. He does not criticize individual people for misbehaving because the assumption in classical (or neoclassical as it is called nowadays) economics is that people don’t misbehave or act irrationally. Marx quite simply shows and explains the trajectory a capitalist society will take when it functions without disruptions (i.e. according to the economic laws of free market exchange). In short, instead of taking an outsider position who is naggingly throwing stones at the glasshouse of neoclassical economics, he enters the glasshouse itself, willingly assuming that it is a very solid building, takes a look around and shows us the cracks in the glass from the inside of the house. In Marx’ words, capitalism is a system in which wealth appears as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Thus, Capital starts with an exploration of the commodity.
 * The central question to Marx was if the essential feature of capitalism that gave rise to surplus value, the excess of M' over M could be found within the sphere of circulation Exchange of a commodity could take place at its value, above its value, or below its value. If the exchange took place at the value of the commodity, then equivalents would be exchanged and obviously no surplus value would arise. If the commodity was exchanged above its value, then the seller would gain exchange value but the buyer would lose an equal amount of exchange value. Obviously, there would be no net gain in surplus
 * Labor power, then, was the capacity to work, or potential labor. When labor-power was sold as a commodity, its use value was simply the performance of work-the actualizing of the potential labor. When the work was performed it became embodied in a commodity, thus giving the commodity value.
 * Labour-power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if the individual offers it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity. In order that he may be able to do this he . . . must be the untrammeled owner of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his person . . . . The owner of the labourpower . . . [must] sell it only for a definite period, for if he were to sell it rump and stump, once and for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity ..
 * For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realization of his labour-power
 * The difference between labor and labor power was clearly the source of surplus value.
 * Marx belonged to the school of science that sees a distinction between the immediately given, empirically manifested appearance of a social phenomenon and the deeper, less visible, but more important substance or essence that underlies this appearance. Studied in this tradition, scientific explanation consists of identifying the essence of a phenomenon and then showing how that essence is manifested in the phenomenon's appearance

Further material

 * Stephen Resnick lecture series on Marx
 * Harve's lecture series on Capital
 * Quotes Marx
 * Communism Wiki
 * Capital Proletariat wiki
 * Das Kapital extensive summary
 * Summary Das Kapital
 * How to understand Das Kapital
 * Super Zusammenfassung von Das Kapital