Marx Tweets
Chapter 1.
The usefulness of an object is not reflected by the price/cost. (exchange value) of an object
Objects contain, or reflect the human time and effort (labour) that a human puts into making them.
Chapter 2.
People trade and swap their objects in the marketplace.
Chapter 3.
They do this using money as a universal mediator of exchange.
Chapter 4.
Usually objects are exchanged for money, which is then used to exchange for another object (commodity --> money --> commodity)
This is called “pure” commodity exchange, which is not the same as a capitalist exchange.
Thus, money is used differently under capitalism society than it does in traditional society
Capitalists use money to buy objects, not to use them, but in order to sell them to make more money (profit) (money --> commodity --> money + profit)
Chapter 5.
When an object is exchanged in an unbalanced (capitalist) manner, one person receives the hard work (embodied labour value) in return for that embodied in the commodity he sells.
Chapter 6.
Money is transformed into capital though the capacity to do work (labour power).
Labor-power's value comes from the amount of labor-time needed to produce and reproduce itself.
Labor gets 'objectified'
The capitalist owns both the factories and tools (means of production) and the workers (labor-power):
The worker is controlled by the capitalist, to whom they sell their labor.
The product of worker's labor (the use- value of his labor-power) is owned by the capitalist (not by the worker).
Creation of value: the capitalist wants to swap an objet for more than it has cost them to produce it - They want 'surplus value'.
Value of an object is determined by the amount of labor used to make it.
total value of the product is equal to the total amount of labor put into it. This result would seem to suggest that there is no surplus value, because the value of the end-product is equal to the values of the inputs.
or
Capitalists buy labour-power from workers and “consume” labour-power by making workers produce commodities as use values
Thus labour-power is a commodity.
Elements of labour include: the activity, objects that we do things to, and the tools we use. (2) and (3) =
the means of production.
the process of production and process of labour are under the control of the capitalist, who owns the output commodity
If workers were paid the full value of their labour, then capitalists would receive no profit, so that capitalists must pay workers for less than their total daily labour
For a capitalist, the use-value of labour-power is that it is the only commodity that creates surplus value.
Chapter 8 constant & variable capital
things that are not produced by human labour have no real labour value (e.g., air, uncultivated soil, natural meadows) and only fetch an “imaginary” money price
it is living labour that adds new value to products
surplus value arises only from variable capital, or that part of the capital converted into labour-power (Marx 1990: 322). e.g. machines cannot create surplus value
rate of surplus value is s / v but s/C is the rate of profit and is distinct from the rate of surplus value
“Necessary labour-time” is the part of the working day that the worker needs to work to pay for his own reproduction, the rest is surplus labour-time.
the worker is not paid for his “surplus labour-time” during which he creates surplus value for the capitalist
"The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave labour, and one based on wage labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.” (Marx 1906: 240–241).
Rate of surplus value (surplus labour / necessary labour) is a metric of exploitation of labour-power by capital/ of the labourer by the capitalist.
Chapter 10.
surplus labour time can vary in accordance with the length of the working day
Chapter 11.
Chapter 12. by increasing the length of the working day, you can increase the surplus that workers produce (relative surplus-value)
Chapter 13.
Even when the laborer has been exploited as an individual acting as part of a group, capitalist forces will urge them to collaborate, and as a group they can produce more than the sum of their parts, and thus there is extra surplus to be extracted by the capitalist.
There is a tension between the fact that capitalism urges individual worked to act as group, to cooperate to generate even greater surplus, and the fact that on discovering the group, the worker has more power to resist capitalist forces.
Chapter 14.
Chapter 15. machinery reduces the amount of human work, and beget the creation of other machines.
machines reduces the usefulness of any one person, so that a family which had one earner, now all need to work to earn enough to get by.
Glossary
commodity: a thing humans use
surplus value is profit
relative surplus value is relative profit (increased by reducing wages or reducing the cost of living)