Marx, Capital Ch. 6 The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power

Questions 

1. Necessary requirements to satisfy the worker depends on the degree of civilization. Can we explain this (especially in relation to the picture in EPM)? (p. 275)

2. Relations of equality in the market and law (p. 271) and the critique of liberal equality (p. 280). Is equality the necessary condition of labor-capitalist relation or an ideological expression of the means of production?

3. What are the historical and especially the moral elements in the valuation of the worker as a commodity? (p. 275)

4. Is the mode of production a synonym for an economic formation of society? Are there different modes of production in succession or is there a co-existence of modes of production? (p. 273)

5. Why does natural history play no role in historical development of capitalist mode of production? (p. 273)

6. In relation to the "second essential condition," how is the compulsion to sell one's labour-power an essential condition for the existence of the market? (p. 272)

Discussion 

• Difference between "equality" as a legitimate condition or as obfuscation (Q2)
• It is first presented as a necessary condition to the capitalist mode of production: 
• "He and the owner of money meet in the market, and enter into relations with each other on a footing of equality as owners of commodities, with the sole difference that one is a buyer, the other a seller ; both are therefore equal in the eyes of the law." (p. 271)
• But the reference to equality later appears sarcastically: 
• "It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equaiity, Property and Bentham. Freedom, be cause both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage." (p. 280)
• Is the original formulation an assumption? Is there actually a condition of legal equality in Marx? 
• Some might criticize him for dispensing with legal/moral equality
• Operative illusion; it is actually producing something 
• But then legal equality is not a necessary condition? 
• BUT worker is not a slave; so they do freely sell their labor power 
• The worker has a right to take an employer to court for failure to provide wages
• The worker is seen as a partner in an exchange and can freely sell labour for the highest price/wage (Freedom)
• "He must constantly treat his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and he can do this only by placing it at the disposal of the buyer, i .e . handing it over to the buyer for him to consume, for a definite period of time, temporarily." (p. 271)
• Is it actually inequality or is it demonstrating a limitation to the legitimate concept of equality?
• Separate sphere of circulation from sphere of production (p. 271)
• Marx separates circulation (the market) from production such that he is not being ironic
• So, there actually is legal equality in the sphere of circulation but that excludes the underlying inequality in production

• Is the compulsion to sell labour-power an essential condition for the market? (Q6)
• Assumption that if you are a worker, you only have your labour-power to sell 
• Are the categories too neat? 
• Is there really a sharp distinction between those who sell their own labour-power and those who do not? 
• What about lumpenproletariat? 
• Marx agrees with the notion that markets exist before capitalism
• The wage form as a distinct component of the market
• The rise of the middle-class complicates this need to sell labour-power. Does the worker need to sell their labour-power? Or is it the fact of selling? 
• Why do this middle-class people still sell their labour-power? 
• More like "middle-income proletariat" 
• BUT what about the changing necessary requirements for the worker (p. 275/Q1)

• Moral element in the valuation of the worker (Q3) + Changing necessary requirement (Q1)
• So, middle-class works because there is this additional moral element at play 
• Social coercion 
• But is this what the moral element is on p. 275
• Only labour-power as a commodity has a historical and moral element; not the existence of other commodities
• If value is the social average necessary labour-time; labour-power demands more than just mere subsistence 
• Moral element is tied to habits/custom - drinking, eating, leisure, etc. 
• Description of the ethical (leniency in habit/custom)
• Historical (time) and moral (space/culture) differences in valuation 
• Ex. Air conditioning in Florida homes; not in Alaska

• But it can't just be subsistence for the criticism to work (?) 
• It can't just be about coercion; it's about extraction 
• The fundamental logic is not about coercion 
• Is labour part of our species-being? - if so, that explains why the middle-class continues to work
• Greater freedom in ability to sell labour; more contingency than the critic thinks
• Is "alienation" the same concept as in the EPM of 1844?

• What about the lack of the role of natural history in historical development? (Q5)
• "One thing, however, is cl ear : nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history, It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whol e series of older formations of social production" (p. 273)
• More Darwinian and less Hegelian (?) 
• Not an unfolding of biological necessity, but more anthropological 
• Maybe history goes all the way down 
• But maybe the Darwinian framework is better than dialectics
• More in-line with English political economy than German idealism
• Place of naturalism in Marx's philosophy

• Commodity production before capitalist mode of production (Q4)
• "The production and circulation of commodities can still take place even though the great mass of the objects produced are intended for the immediate requirements of their producers, and are not turned into commodities, so that the process of social production is as yet by no means dominated in its length and breadth by exchange-value." (p. 273)
• So is there overlap between modes of production? 
• Some commodities within an otherwise non-capitalist society; capitalism overtakes other kinds of relations - feudal/serf relations remade into capitalist relations
• Ex. Sharecroppers or chattel slavery's relation to capitalism
• Ex. Prison labour
• World-systems critique: Capitalist systems require non-capitalist periphery
• "The appearance of products as commodities requires a level of development of the division of labour within society such that the separation of use-value from exchange;. value, a separation which first begins with barter, has already been completed. But such a degree of development is common to many economic formations of society with the most diverse historical characteristics." (p. 273)

Marx, Capital Intro. and Ch. 1, Sections 1 and 2

 Discussion Questions

1. What is the power of abstraction? What work is Marx's 'cell-form' metaphor doing?

2. Why begin with the commodity as the matter of concern?

3. Breakdown of Marx's critique of Hegel's dialectical method? (M/E, pp. 301-302)

4. What is the relationship between scarcity and labor time? E.g., the diamond example (C1, p. 130)

5. What is the relationship between utility, value, and labor? (C1, p. 131)

6. Does Marx distinguish between use-values and usefulness (useful things)? (C1, p. 126)

(Concerning #1) Well, this metaphor is helpful for thinking about what he means by 'laws.' He uses a lot of organic metaphors: society as an organism. Perhaps his conception of economic laws (i.e., laws of capitalist production) are akin to biological laws. The commodity is a cell, not an atom. 

Marx's seems to also rely on an appearance/reality distinction. We need to uncover or disclose something and not limit ourselves to the analysis of surface practices and institutions. 

What is the cell relative to the body? What is this metaphor tracking? Well, atomistic metaphor implies something like bundles, whereas organic biological metaphors elicit a sense of systematicity, circularity, etc. More plasticity. 

Marx also uses physical metaphors to talk about constructing an ideal model of capitalist laws. England as the model of capitalism which other countries are approaching. 

(Concerning #2) I was thinking of Foucault's archaeological method of stripping away everything we hold constant in history. So, for Marx, why does he start with the commodity? If we follow the phenomenological reading, the commodity is the first 'appearance' of capitalism. But this seems analogous to Heidegger's starting point of Being/beings?

Well, the commodity seems like the universal category of the capitalist mode of production; it's present in any capitalist society. Well, I took the commodity as criterial for capitalism, so it's not so much a 'starting point,' and more as an analytic observation. Not just the commodity, but the 'immense' collection of commodities is criterial. 

What does Marx mean by 'appearance' for Marx mean? Kantian? Hegelian? Proto-Heideggerian?

(Concerning #5). Use-values are a necessary condition for the commodities. What does Marx mean by use-values presuppose 'definite quantities.' Maybe in the sense of the amount of useful things you want or possess?

It's interesting that Marx treats use-value as both a potentiality and an actuality. Use-values are, in some sense, transhistorical because as humans we always appropriate nature for our own uses. For Marx, labor in the abstract sense is a nature-imposed necessity, independent of all social forms (see p. 133). Marx has two senses of labor: abstract labor (capitalism) vs. concrete labor (human nature). 

Exchange-value is the commensurable value between two use-values. Two exchange-values are made equal by virtue of a 'third thing'? The socially average necessary labor-time it takes to produce a commodity assuming all things hold equal. 

(Concerning #4). Something that is useless cannot be commodity, but we can derive usefulness from things that are not commodity. Scarcity would be factored in the sense that it typically takes more socially average labor time to extract rare minerals like diamonds, whereas the same amount of time can extract more common minerals, like coal. 

Selections from Marx's Gründrisse

 Questions

1. What is the difference between fixed and circulating capital? (280). Can we provide an example of what is new (or is being introduced) by fixed capital?

2. Can we unpack the following claim: "In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital" (Marx-Engels Reader, 279).

3. "The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite" (279). Does this entail technological determinism? Is there any autonomy or agency left for the worker?

4. Can we discuss the distinction between machine/machinery and instrument? (279)

5. "In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself" (280) & "Thus the quantitative extent and the effectiveness (intensity) to which capital is developed as fixed capital indicate the general degree to which capital is developed as capital, as power over living labour, and to which it has conquered the production process as such" (281). What is the power-relation of machine and labor? In Foucauldian terms is this a sovereign, a disciplinary, or other modality of power relation? Does this imply a zero-sum struggle?

6. "While machinery is the most appropriate form of the use value of fixed capital, it does not at all follow that therefore subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery" (281). What does this mean? Does this open the door to techno-communism? What valence does this have: pessimism, optimism? Is it deterministic?

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4/22/ 2026 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Questions:

1. Vagabond/Peasant → What is the relation between the two

2. (614): “But the parody of imperialism was necessary” –What is the historiagraphical status of the appeals to necessity? Not just here, but throughout

3. (615): What does Marx mean by cause and effect in the context of Napoleon protecting material power?

4. (606): “But the revolution is thorough-going…” What does Marx mean by purgatory here, and what kind of method does Marx understand revolution to be?

5. Is “The Eighteenth Brumaire” historical materialism? How, why?

6. (597): “Society now seems to have fallen back behind its point of departure…” Again, how do passages like this instantiate a historical materialist method?

7. What relationship should the social revolutionary have to the past (597)?

Discussion:

On the social revolution drawing from the future question, maybe Marx is building on his initial reference to Hegel. The “phrase” and “content” meaning can be made visible in the Napoleanism of the past revolution, also maybe “form” distinction. 

• The proletarian revolution, as Marx envisages it, is perhaps more about the content of the revolution, rather than the form?

• So, is Marx, in saying that the content goes beyond the phrase, that there isn’t self-consciousness?

• The first french revolution conceived of itself as a Republican revolution, and thus was not aware of itself as a class revolution. For Marx, the form of this initial revolution in late 1700s was a class revolution, a revolution championed by the bourgeoisie as political dominance. 

• But, is Marx attributing full self-consciousness to the current (1848) revolutions? 

• (601) First full paragraph, seems that Marx is saying that class consciousness is stirring, but it is appropriated by bourgeois, leading to ever decreasing significance of results.

• “Bonapartism” = ideals or an ideology promulgated by the first Bonaparte (The Uncle) to exploit land.

On revolution:

• This text is interesting for many reasons, one being that revolutions cannot be “willed” or “forced” if certain conditions are not available. Revolution needs “real” ground, so this is against a “hyper-revolutionary” will to arms. Reality will impose itself, which isn’t just a question of consciousness.

• Emphasis on material conditions for revolution to take hold, otherwise there are so many partial or continuous revolutions that snowball. 

• C.P. the context of Russia that couldn’t bring about socialism in the same way that the material conditions prevented the realization of socialist possibilities 

• Okay, so what is the “scope” of “revolution,” for Marx?

• Is he just talking about the “flow of history,” or Proletarian revolution here?

• It seems that Marx is describing an “accelerationist point,” in reading the revolutions that proceed in the nineteenth century

• In another text by Marx, he describes the bourgeois dictatorship showing its ugly face in the sense of an executive power that mobilizes resistance.

• So, the preparatory work isn’t being done necessarily by a proletarian class, but instead by a determinism? (page 606) 

• Related to this historiographic question, what is the perspective of the social critic here? When Marx suggests that the content goes beyond the phrase, then how does one recognize or see it as such? 

• Marx is arguing that past revolutions understood themselves this way (as republican, etc), and there wasn’t a self-awareness of class struggle, but isn’t he just saying that the working class needs to detach from an antiquated Republic form and seize the means of production.

• But how does all that content emerge without being “phrased?”

• Now that there are social revolutions that go beyond the phrasing of political revolutions, where does the “social content come from? Is the content even articulable? It seems that Marx is setting up a temporal challenge: that this content is an epistemological problem. How do we articulate what we are trying to bring about if it has not already been brought about?

• Something cannot be so ontologically new that it cannot be seen as such, as what is being asked about. 

Status of the Peasantry:

• Not a class, not able to represent themselves, but in need of representation

• In need of authority 

• On the peasant/vagabond connection, seems to be a pretty sharp distinction from Foucault here on punitive society

• Nothing really changed after bourgeois revolution, but for Foucault there was massive change at the level of the microphysics of power through the figuration of the vagabond

• On Foucault’s account, the disciplinization of the vagabond IS a social revolution, so it’s telling that Marx accounts for the peasantry and lumpenproletariat in an entirely historically impotent way

• Normative versus descriptive stakes of situating the peasantry for Marxist’s account

On the Method:

• So what is the motor of this historical account? Doesn’e seem to be the will or consciousness of individual actors?

• “Men make their own history” shows that there is a sense of agency, but that historical conditions create concrete action. The problem seems to be in the crux between the two?

• (595): Marx as doing a critique and a warning, “and just when they seem engaged…” Marx is giving an account of fragments at play that would be overlooked in a history? –Possible view

• If Marx is arguing that agency is deterministically structured, then the futural conclusion can’t just help itself to an agency that doesn’t exist or has been possible in the past.

• Marx does seem to indicate a revolutionary point of departure, but we aren’t clear on what this means.

Marx, "Wage Labour and Capital"

 Questions

1. What processes are entailed by/within "the cost of reproduction"? (p. 206)

2. The universal accessibility of new means of production (p. 213): is this "universality" partial in the context of copyright laws?

3. What is included in "greater division of labor"? (pp. 212-213). What does it entail? What is its relationship to machinery/technology?

4. What does Marx mean by "totality"? (p. 207)

5. How are the laboring class and capitalist class defined? 

6. Compared to "Estranged Labor," in which Marx offers an argument about alienation, on what basis is Marx arguing here? Immiseration? 

Marx seems to anticipate Arendt's work/labor distinction on pp. 204-205: "But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life ..."

What does Marx mean by labor-time? Labor time is the expression of labor's exchange value, but the reality is the labor power.

Reproduction is unpaid. The worker must buy food to reproduce "him"self but, he is not necessarily the one cooking. 

The value of labor-power is the socially average cost of subsistence/reproduction it takes to (re)produce a worker.

Why is this work italicized so much.

Is "totality" an ontological or methodological claim? Mode of production = means of production + relations of production. The latter changes based on transformations in the former. 

Are the "laws" of capitalism mechanistic? sociological? economic? 

Why does Marx's explanans here shift from his earlier works? How does this better illuminate the explanandums of immiseration.

Laboring class = those who sell their labor-power in return for wages. Capital as accumulated labor? Capital as the means to exchange for labor power? 

Capital is determined in the process of production. The brute fact of having a steam engine, for example, does not make it capital until employed as such.

Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts – "Estranged Labor"

 Questions

1. What is dialectical relation between property as the product of alienation and the means by which labor alienates itself?

2. What is the relation of labor to/as life activity with Arendt's distinction of labor and work (77)?

3. Animals reproductive labor seems to be immediate. Does this mean that there is a distortion of human temporality in/through alienated labor?

4. What is species-being? How is it related to the universal?

5. What is a contradiction for Marx (79; 81)?

6. What is man's "essential nature" for Marx and what does he mean by the "objective world"?

Spring Term Readings Marx

 

WEEK	TEXT(S)	PAGES
2	“Estranged Labour” from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844  **Optional: “Wages of Labour” from the EPM	pp. 69-84 (optional: pp. 19-34)
3	“Wage Labour and Capital” (1847) in The Marx and Engels Reader	pp. 203-217
4	“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), in The Marx-Engels Reader	pp. 594-617
5	Selections from the Grundrisse (1857-1858) on the labor process and the famous “Fragments on Machines” in The Marx and Engels Reader	pp. 278-285
6	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), Preface to the First Edition & ch. 1, “The Commodity,” secs. 1-2	pp. 89-93, 125-137
7	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 6, “The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power”	pp. 270-280
8	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 7, “The Labour Process and the Valorization Process”	pp. 283-306
9	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 10, “The Working Day,” secs. 1-4	pp. 340-366
10	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 10, “The Working Day,” secs. 5-6 **Optional: sec. 7	pp. 367-410 (optional: pp. 411-416)
11	TBD	TBD