William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
Preserved and Created Value
The labor-process is not unified. Living labor adds fresh value, but in so doing, the values of the means of production which it uses are preserved, or, rather, are seen as parts of the total value of the finished product. For example, the cotton and the allocated use of the spindle reappear as parts of the final value of cotton yarn. Their value is preserved by their being transferred to the finished product.
But the laborer does not do two operations at once, one to add new value and the other to transfer old value (that in the cotton and spindle) into yarn. The very act of adding values preserves former values. But as these are distinct results in one operation, the twofold nature of these results must point to a twofold nature of labor, one to increase, the other to transfer, value.
In the labor-process, one use-value disappears so as to give rise to another. Raw cotton ceases to have use-value, as such, but reappears in a new use-value, yarn. Hence value is transferred by labor, by virtue of the particular, useful character of that labor, concrete labor. It is the specific quality of labor, then, that raises inert means of production from the dead and makes them part of the living labor-process.
For example, it is the specific task of spinning that enables the worker to convert cotton into yarn. But if the spinner were a carpenter he could still add value but it would be to another material, wood.
Hence the addition of value can be performed by labor in the abstract—either spinning or carpentering, in the examples above—but it is concrete labor that transfers the particular means of production into a new product. By the simple addition of quantity of labor, value is increased; by the special quality of labor, the value of the means of production is conserved.
To illustrate: Suppose a spinner, owing to a new invention, can accomplish in six hours what formerly took him thirty-six. He can spin thirty-six pounds of cotton where he spun six pounds before. The value added to each pound is a sixth of the labor-time, a sixth of former value. But the value of the raw material preserved by this process is six times as much, although the new labor added is but a sixth of that of the former process, since the time of labor was cut five-sixths.
The longer the time required to spin cotton, the greater is the new value added. But, on the contrary, the less the time required to spin, the more value is preserved, since more cotton is brought into the labor-process in a given time. The two processes, creation of new value and preservation of old, though contained in the one operation, can be opposed.
The Relation of Means of Production to Value
But let us suppose that the spinner takes the same time but that cotton is produced (a) in a sixth the time, or (b) in six times the former time. In one hour in (a) he transfers six times the amount of value to the new product, or in (b) one-sixth the value, although the new value he adds is constant, because his time is constant.
But while raw materials lose their shape in entering into another product, machines and tools retain their shape and appear to be independent of the new product. But these must be studied on an actuarial basis. If a spindle lasts ten years, then its value enters into ten years of yarn production, since by that time it is fully consumed and it was being consumed steadily as a means of production of yarn. Its value is incorporated into the value of yarn by being transferred thereto by the spinning. It adds no value to the yarn. Labor adds value. It simply transfers dead value, in installments, by means of the agency of concrete labor.
Means of Production without Value
It does not follow that all means of production, though, are products of labor. Virgin forests, land, wind, waterfalls, metals in the earth, are examples of means of production into which no past labor has been embodied. They have no value to be transferred into the product. They are fashioned by labor, they are helps in creating use-values, but since they are not preserved as value, for they had no value, they are not incorporated into exchange value, but limited merely to use-value.
Special Forms of Transferred Value
Another exception: A machine wears out in one thousand days. It transfers a thousandth of its value each day into the product. But at the same time the whole machine is a totality, in its contribution to production, albeit with declining efficiency. The entire machine enters the labor-process constantly as a use-value, but as regards its own value, if every day 1⁄1000 of it is used up, then its own value is transferred piecemeal to each day’s value of the new product.
Still another curiosity: Sometimes the waste that is necessary in production requires that a part of raw materials must always be lost in the labor-process. Still it is the entire value of raw materials that is preserved in value, despite the fact that a section of it is physically not transformed into a new use-value, but lost.
Since means of production never can transfer any more labor than they contain, and all new value is added by living labor, it is useless to look for surplus-value (and its subdivisions, as we shall see later, rent, interest, or merchant profit) from the technical services of those means of production. Surplus-value can never come from dead value, only from the new activity of labor.
Still another peculiarity: Although the capacity of labor for preserving the value of means of production costs labor nothing, since it is part of one and the same operation as adding new value, yet to the capitalist it is a real advantage, as it preserves his existing capital.
So long as production is in full swing, the capitalist never notices this service of labor. But let trade decline and production cease, and the depreciation of raw material and plant investment are the principal worries of the capitalist.
Constant and Variable Capital Separated
Now Marx makes his celebrated classification of constant and variable capital, a distinction since taken over by journalists as a phrase, without any idea of its special content, which is the distinction between preserved and new value.1
That part of capital consisting of means of production, raw material, and instruments of labor that does not, in the production process, undergo any quantitative change in value, is CONSTANT CAPITAL.
That part of capital represented by labor-power, which in production undergoes an alteration in value, reproducing its own value and a surplus-value and being transformed from a constant to a variable quantity, is VARIABLE CAPITAL.
It is the same as the difference between objective and subjective factors of production.
Constant Capital Value Unchanged in Production Process
This does not mean that constant capital cannot itself change in value, but that in the production process it cannot. If cotton, for example, becomes six times as cheap as the cotton used in the production of yarn, then the value of this part of the constant capital is reduced. But in the spinning process, in manufacture, it never changes its value from what that value was when it entered the process.
The same is true of machinery. A new invention may scrap old machinery, but here too the change in the value of the machinery is outside of and prior to the process of production.
As to the proportions between constant and variable capital, that would not affect the essential difference. If a machine were invented to produce yarn ten times as speedily, with the same labor, it would follow that the alteration in value by the intervention of labor would be reduced to a tenth, while the constant capital was greater by reason of the increased raw materials, etc., to be treated. But though the variable capital, labor-power, falls to a small proportion the economic difference is still that between constant capital and variable capital, the additions to value made by variable capital simply being less important.
1. Its transformation in the sententious bulletins of the Cleveland Trust Company was quite piquant but not illuminating.