Some Notes on Marx’s Theory of the Exploitation of the Working Class
I have found this useful to get students grasping more about Marx’s analysis of exploitation. It does not directly address the exploitation of unwaged labour which is also crucial to examine.
For Marx, human labour power becomes a commodity in capitalist social relations. Since workers have been separated from the means of production (mostly the land) in order to survive they have no alternative but to sell their capacity to labour so they can purchase the commodities they need for the survival of themselves and their families. A human capacity therefore becomes commodified. Human labour power is a very unique commodity since it is not simply a thing or an object but is a human social capacity — the capacity to engage in creative mental and manual labour. Labour power is the unique commodity that can produce in the process of production an extra surplus value above and beyond its own costs of production and reproduction. To put it another way, the use value for capitalists of labour power is that it can produce a value than is greater than its own costs of production and reproduction. The exchange-value of labour power for the worker is that she/he will get a wage that allows the worker to purchase commodities that allow for his/her survival and that of his/her family.
One way of describing this is to look at what can be called the drama of the working day. This is an attempt to look at how this theory plays out on a local interactional level. Clearly Marx’s theory also operates on a much broader social level than this.
Let us say that you enter into an arrangement with a capitalist to sell your capacity to labour to him/her for 10 hours. This is just one example — there are many others. What Marx suggests is that during the first 5 hours (just one example) you produce a value that is equal to what you will get paid as a wage for the 10 hours of labour. Marx refers to this as necessary labour. But since the worker has sold their capacity to labour for a full ten hours and cannot usually fully see what is going on aside from an almost gut level feeling that they are being ripped off they continue to work for the remaining 5 hours. During this time they are producing through their labour a value that is above and beyond the value they will be paid as a wage. They continue to work with the dead labour (already expended labour) embodied in the raw materials and machinery they are working with transferring some of its value through their living labour power into the commodities they are producing. During these 5 hours the workers are engaging in what Marx describes as surplus labour. At the end of the 10 hour working day (again this is just one possible example) the worker will be paid a wage that is equal to the value they created in the first 5 hours of labour. The capitalist ends up owning all the commodities that the worker has produced through these 10 hours of labour including all the value produced during the surplus labour time which Marx refers to as surplus value.
This is what Marx describes as a relation of exploitation. For Marx, this is not a moral term but a description of a social relation. The extra surplus value that workers produce is appropriated by the capitalist. This is also alienated labour in which workers lose control over the values and things that they produce. This surplus value becomes the basis for profit if the capitalist can sell all the commodities that have been produced at their full value since then the capitalist has the equivalent of the value produced during both the necessary and the surplus labour time as well as the ways in which the living labour power of the worker has transferred the value of the dead (or already expended labour power) from the raw materials and machinery they are working with into the commodities they have produced. The capitalist realizes the surplus value embodied in these commodities as their own profit. The very capacity of workers to engage in creative activity becomes the basis for the profit and power over of the capitalist. The wealth and power of the capitalists is actually produced by the workers but is appropriated from them.
This is an important theoretical way of making sense of the gut level feelings many of us have of being ripped off or being exploited when we sell our capacity to labour.
This is also an important basis for class struggle since workers want to expand the amount of the wage they are paid for – their necessary labour – and limit the exploitation and alienation they face (they do this by going on strike, forming unions, engaging in protests etc) while the capitalist wishes to expand the amount of surplus value they can exploit from workers through minimizing the amount of wages they have to pay to workers. Class struggle is therefore an internal contradiction within capitalist social relations and is not an external contradiction that comes from somewhere else.
This is also an important social theory about how capitalist relations are organized. Profit does not come from a thing magically producing more value in some mystical or mysterious way but comes from people’s social practices and is based on the exploitation of surplus value from workers. This is an example of an anti-reification theory — a way of theorizing that refuses to transform social relations between people into relations between things and that tries to make human social practices as visible as possible.
In solidarity,