Part Three — The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value Chapters 7–11. The labour process and valorization, constant and variable capital, the rate of surplus-value, the working day, and the rate and mass of surplus-value.

Part Two ended at the threshold of the hidden abode with a promise: the secret of profit-making would be laid bare. Part Three keeps it. Chapter 7 crosses into production and shows exactly how surplus-value is produced — not by cheating in exchange but by the gap between what labour-power costs and what it can do. Chapters 8 and 9 build the accounting apparatus that measures this: the distinction between constant and variable capital, and the rate of surplus-value as the true index of exploitation. Chapter 10, the longest chapter in the volume, turns from the concept to the history and shows absolute surplus-value being produced in fact, through the century-long struggle over the length of the working day. Chapter 11 closes the Part with the laws relating the rate and the mass of surplus-value.

The through-line is the production of absolute surplus-value — surplus-value produced by lengthening the working day beyond the point at which the worker has reproduced the value of his own labour-power. Chapter 7 supplies the mechanism, Chapters 8 and 9 the measure, Chapter 10 the historical reality and the class struggle it provokes, Chapter 11 the quantitative laws. The working-day material in Chapter 10 is caught here in full.

1 · The Labour Process

Before analysing capitalist production, Marx analyses the labour process in general — production considered independently of any social form, "the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence." The point of the trans-historical detour is to isolate what capital adds to it. Labour is first defined as the metabolic exchange between humanity and nature, in which the worker changes external nature and his own nature at once.

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.

Marx, Capital I, page 283.

What makes this labour specifically human is that its result is present ideally, as a purpose, before it is realized materially. This is the passage — architect and bee — that separates purposive human labour from instinctive animal activity, and it carries a corollary about attention and enjoyment that matters wherever work is unfree.

But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.

Marx, Capital I, page 284.

The less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be.

Marx, Capital I, page 284.

The labour process has three simple elements — purposeful activity, the object of labour, and the instruments of labour — and Marx makes the instruments the diagnostic of historical epochs. The whole general analysis then folds back into its trans-historical result: the labour process is common to every human society, independent of any particular social form.

It is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work.

Marx, Capital I, page 286.

The labour process, as we have just presented it in its simple and abstract elements, is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live.

Marx, Capital I, page 290.

Under capital, two features are added that do not touch the general character of the process but determine its social form: the worker labours under the capitalist's control, and the product belongs to the capitalist, not the worker who made it.

By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living agent of fermentation, into the lifeless constituents of the product, which also belong to him. 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. … Thus the product of this process belongs to him just as much as the wine which is the product of the process of fermentation going on in his cellar.

Marx, Capital I, page 292. The ellipsis drops the sentence restating that the labour process is a process between things the capitalist has bought.

2 · The Valorization Process

The capitalist does not want use-values for their own sake; he wants value, and specifically more value than he laid out. The production process is therefore a unity of the labour process and the process of creating value, and the aim is a threefold ascent.

His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-value.

Marx, Capital I, page 293.

Marx works the famous yarn example. If the spinner works only long enough to reproduce the value of his own labour-power — six hours — the value of the product exactly equals the value of the capital advanced. No surplus, because value is only conserved and transferred, not created from nothing.

The swollen value of the yarn is of no avail, for it is merely the sum of the values formerly existing in the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power: out of such a simple addition of existing values, no surplus-value can possibly arise.

Marx, Capital I, page 298.

The resolution turns on a single distinction, the one the whole of Part Two was reaching for: what the capitalist pays for labour-power (its value, the labour needed to reproduce it) and what labour-power does (the labour it performs while being used) are two different magnitudes. The first is the exchange-value of labour-power; the second is its use-value. Half a day's labour maintains the worker; nothing stops him from working a full day.

But the past labour embodied in the labour-power and the living labour it can perform, and the daily cost of maintaining labour-power and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter is its use-value. The fact that half a day's labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes [verwertet] in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power.

Marx, Capital I, page 300.

What was really decisive for him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. … On the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day's labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller.

Marx, Capital I, page 301. The ellipsis drops the sentence naming this the specific service the capitalist expects, in accordance with the laws of commodity exchange.

Extend the working day to twelve hours and the surplus appears: 27 shillings of advanced value become 30, and no law of exchange has been broken, because every commodity — cotton, spindle, labour-power — was bought and sold at its value. This is the exact resolution of Chapter 5's double result.

This whole course of events, the transformation of money into capital, both takes place and does not take place in the sphere of circulation. It takes place through the mediation of circulation because it is conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; it does not take place in circulation because what happens there is only an introduction to the valorization process, which is entirely confined to the sphere of production.

Marx, Capital I, page 302.

Finally Marx defines valorization precisely, as the extension of value-creation past the break-even point — the point where the worker has replaced the value of his own labour-power.

If we now compare the process of creating value with the process of valorization, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point. If the process is not carried beyond the point where the value paid by the capitalist for the labour-power is replaced by an exact equivalent, it is simply a process of creating value; but if it is continued beyond that point, it becomes a process of valorization.

Marx, Capital I, page 302.