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Karl Marx Part 2 Lecture Notes
part 2 of lecture series on Marx
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Karl Marx Part 2Note: Use lectures as main source for essays
Today’s agenda: Focus on commodity
The Concern with COMMODITIES:
e.g. Labour power is one concern.
Marx is concerned with exchange value produced by labour and therefore sees commodities (e.g. things that can be
traded) as the central object of capitalism.
In Volume 1 Chapter 4 of Capital:
The Fetishisation of Commodity
• There is something about that chair as a commodity that is mysterious, the mysterious character
consists that the quality of the commodity are simply given and that what they are is the embodiment of another
commodity called human labour.
• No commodity is what it seems to be and will always have a mysterious transformative quality,
which Marx calls fetishism.
• Footnote: Marx uses fetishism, Nietzsche = idol, Freud
ironically
• This has given rise to the proletariat – modern industrial working class
• Worker becomes an appendage of the machine
• Machinery reduces required physical strength, hence allows exploitation of women
and children
• In CM, Marx says this reduces the worker to pauperism
• But this conclusion of immiseration can be misleading.
• See WAGE LABOUR AND CAPITAL
• “Let us suppose the most favorable case: if productive capital grows, the demand for labour grows. It therefore
increases the price of labour-power, wages.”
Value Elements = What goes into the value of a commodity?
• Constant capital
● Surpass value
● Wages
● Working conditions become exploitive when the owner owns the worker and his time of the day even if it
surpasses the work already done to have the money tp make the worker come back the next day.
● The Poverty of Economy is another book by Marx = We agreed on wage and labour
Commodities
• Labour-power was not always a commodity (merchandise). Labour was not always wage-labour, i.e., free labour.
The slave did not sell his labour-power to the slave-owner, any more than the ox sells his labour to the farmer. The
slave, together with his labour-power, was sold to his owner once for all. He is a commodity that can pass from the
hand of one owner to that of another. He himself is a commodity, but his labour-power is not his commodity. The serf
sells only a portion of his labour-power. It is not he who receives wages from the owner of the land; it is rather the
owner of the land who receives a tribute from him. The serf belongs to the soil, and to the lord of the soil he brings its
fruit. The free labourer, on the other hand, sells his very self, and that by fractions. He auctions off eight, 10, 12, 15
, hours of his life, one day like the next, to the highest bidder, to the owner of raw materials, tools, and the means of life
– i.e., to the capitalist. The labourer belongs neither to an owner nor to the soil, but eight, 10, 12, 15 hours of his daily
life belong to whomsoever buys them. The worker leaves the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he
chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the
required use, out of him. But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labour-power, cannot leave
the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this
or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is for him to find his man – i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class.
-– (W L and C)
But
• Business cycles
• Due to over production
• The bourgeoisie surmount these crises by finding new markets to exploit and by increasing their exploitation of
existing markets. However, their actions pave the way ‘‘for more extensive and more destructive crises, and . . .
[diminish] the means whereby crises are prevented’’
Economic Doctrine of the Manifesto
● All previous history is about class struggle but under industrial revolution the class struggle becomes
simplified to bourgeoise and proletariat.
● This simplification is caused by free competition, centralisation, machinery, urban cities, world market.
● The Bourgeoise is a revolutionary class
● Under the bourgeoisie (capitalism) this struggle is increasingly simplified
● Has put an end to everything except the cash nexus • Centrality of COMMODITIES
● This simplification has involved machinery; large cities; free competition; centralization; world market
● BUT: ‘‘it has shown what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing
Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals. . . . The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce
one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together.’”
The Simplification of class struggles: Commodities
Wage Labour and Capitalism Speech to Trade Union
• Defenders of slavery in Southern USA = Slavey is better than wage labour because we do not fire
our slaves
What does immiseration mean?
• We have thus seen that even the most favorable situation for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth of
capital, however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his
interests and the interests of the capitalist. Profit and wages remain as before, in inverse proportion.
• If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position
of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the
capitalist has widened.
• Finally, to say that "the most favorable condition for wage-labour is the fastest possible growth of productive capital",
is the same as to say: the quicker the working class multiplies and augments the power inimical to it – the wealth of
another which lords over that class – the more favorable will be the conditions under which it will be permitted to toil
anew at the multiplication of bourgeois wealth, at the enlargement of the power of capital, content thus to forge for
itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train.
• WLANDC
Business Cycles of Capitalism
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