Ensayos

Capital Volume 1
by Karl Marx


Part Three
The Production of Absolute Surplus Value


Chapter 7 The Labour Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value

1. The Labour Process or the Production of Use-Values

The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and
labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of
labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of itto work. By
working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was
potentially, labour-power in action, a labourer. In order that
his labour may reappear in a commodity, he must, before all
things, expend it on something useful, on something capable of
satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the capitalist sets
the labourer to produce, is a particular use-value, a specifiedarticle. The fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is
carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf,
does not alter the general character of that production. We
shall, therefore, in the first place, have to consider the
labour-process independently of the particular form it assumes
under given social conditions.
Labour is, in the first place, a process in whichboth man
and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord
starts, regulates, and Controls the material re-actions between
himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her
own forces, setting in motion arms and leg, head and hands, the
natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's
productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on
theexternal world and changing it, he at the same time changes
his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels
them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with
those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the
mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state
of things in which a man bring his labour-power to market for
sale as acommodity, from that state in which human labour was
still in its first instinctive stage. We presuppose labour in a
form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts
operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to
shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But
what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is
this, that the architect raises hisstructure in imagination
before he erects it in reality. At the end of every
labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the
imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only
effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but
he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his
modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And
thissubordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion
of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole
operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his
purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by
the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on,
and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives
play to hisbodily and mental powers, the more close his
attention is forced to be.
The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the
personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of
that work, and 3, its instruments.
The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in
the virgin state in which it supplies(1*) man with necessaries or
the means of subsistence readyto hand, exists independently of
him, and is the universal subject of human labour. All those
things which labour merely separates from immediate connection
with their environment, are subjects of labour spontaneously
provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch and take from
their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest,
and ores which we extract from their veins....