lecture recording on 18 September 2025 at 12.57.14 PM
Overview and housekeeping
The lecture outlines key concepts in Marx's Capital, focusing on surplus value as the heart of exploitation in a capitalist economy.
Explains that this is a historical, social-scientific exercise in thinking through abstract social theory, not a definition of the speaker's personal identity.
Next week:
Tuesday: Marcus leads the lecture (Rosh Hashanah observed by the instructor); students should come prepared having read all selections for next week.
Thursday: Instructor returns for a second lecture on the material; papers due next Friday.
Week’s preview:Concluding parts of Capital Volume I, addressing the accumulation of capital and originary (primitive) accumulation; prerequisites for capitalist relations: a pot of money to purchase means of production and labor-time, and workers with nothing to sell.
Housekeeping in this session included sharing visual content to illustrate concepts (surplus value, exploitation, and mechanization).
The session moves from abstract theory to concrete examples and media (music videos) to stimulate thinking about the workday, time, and exploitation.
Core concept: surplus value and exploitation
Surplus value is the heart of Marx’s analysis: exploitation occurs through a commodified labor process that yields more value than is paid in wages.
Exploitation is a technical term here: it involves productive labor and the extraction of surplus labor time from workers under an employment relationship.
Important clarification: exploitation is not solely about harsh conditions; it is the ongoing norm of producing more value than is paid for in the paper company (the capitalist).
Two ways to realize surplus value:
Absolute surplus value: extend the length of the working day to produce more value, without changing the production process.
Relative surplus value: shorten the portion of the day that is necessary labor time (for the worker’s reproduction) by increasing productivity, so that surplus labor time grows relative to necessary labor time.
Necessary labor time (N) vs surplus labor time (S): total daily labor time L = N + S. Relative surplus value reduces N, increasing the ratio S/N.
Wage discussion (contextual, not core): wages reflect the value of labor power, i.e., the cost of its reproduction. See the referenced but non-assigned passage (noted as a long book with multiple explanations) indicating that commodities are bought and sold at value, and the value of labor power equals its reproduction cost.
Conceptual implication: the capitalist seeks to increase the surplus labor time in production, thereby increasing profits and reinvestment opportunities.
Limits to absolute surplus value: the working day cannot be extended indefinitely; physiological and social limits (and political resistance) cap the possibility of longer days.
Overwork tends to lead to greater general submission to capital and higher dependence on wages for survival, even if some workers temporarily earn more via overtime.
Marx’s interest: the abstract laws of motion of capital—how productivity, work-time, and social relations interrelate—rather than the fate of any individual factory.
Wages, value, and the cost of reproduction
Wages must be understood through the lens of the cost of reproduction: the price paid for labor power equals the cost to reproduce the worker.
Surplus labor time is the portion of the working day beyond what is necessary for the worker’s reproduction.
The increase in productivity (through technology, organization, etc.) reduces socially necessary labor time, thereby increasing relative surplus value.
The labor process is structured by coercion and social norms; the worker’s free time is captured by capitalist production, not freely realized by workers.
The concept of “free time” as liberatory is historically contingent and often marketed or industrially repackaged (see media examples below).
Economic indicators: productivity growth vs. wages growth over the past decades show a divergence—productivity often rises while wages have not kept pace proportionally with the value created.
Important caveat: wages and prices are mediated by monetary policy, inflation, tariffs, etc.; the underlying Marxian category is value, which maps onto wages and prices but is not directly equal to either in measured terms.
Productivity, technology, and the structure of labor
Productivity increases by two broad routes in Marx’s framework:
Economy of scale: more output per unit of input when multiple workers and machines are coordinated under one roof.
Increased social cooperation: large-scale production enables greater productive power of labor when workers collaborate under planned conditions.
In large-scale production, the worker becomes part of a total productive organism; the “dead labor” (past labor embodied in machinery and capital) dominates the living labor of workers.
The worker becomes an appendage of the machine; supervision and surveillance ensure coordination and minimize downtime.
The shift from crafts/shops to manufacture (and then to large-scale industry) significantly raises value produced per unit time, largely due to:
Economies of scale
The social and organizational power of coordinated labor
The concept of incorporation: workers are incorporated into capital, to the point where their productive power appears as the power of capital itself (often described as capital’s apparent gift when productivity increases occur under a capitalist regime).
The Latin root of “incorporate” (corpore) is invoked to emphasize that workers are brought into the body of capital, often literally described as the body of the factory or the machinery.
Two thematic consequences of large-scale production:
Revolutionary: dramatically raising productive power and reducing necessary labor time
Monstrous: yet entailing new forms of domination, surveillance, deskilling, and alienation
A classic Charlie Chaplin reference (via a visual clip from Modern Times) is used to illustrate the integration of worker into machine and the dehumanization of repetitive tasks.
Mechanisms of productivity and the role of the mega-factory
Reading passage (Marx, four fifty one): “Being independent of each other, the workers are isolated. They merely form a particular of existence of capital. Capital, hence, the productive power developed by the workers socially is a productive power of capital.”
The key idea: social productive power of labor emerges only under conditions set by capital; it is capital that places workers in those conditions.
The concept of appearing: Marx uses the term appears to indicate that certain powers seem to be capital’s own, even though they originate in workers’ collective activity.
The Great Mechanization idea: the factory system turns workers into a part of the capital system, enabling increased productivity but also facilitating the domination of dead labor over living labor.
Dead labor vs living labor: capital embodies accumulated past labor; it dictates the terms of present labor, often reducing the autonomy and complexity of human labor.
The text points to a classic tension: the same industrial process that enables vast productivity can also erode the intellectual and material conditions that make work meaningful (deskilling, reduced autonomy, etc.).
Historical context: accumulation, enclosure, and originary accumulation
Next week’s