Abstract
In this chapter Otani clarifies capital’s attribute of valorisation. Capital is money that augments through two transformations: money into commodity, and commodity into money. The «riddle of capital» comes down to understanding the source of that augmentation. The increase is possible if there is a purchasable commodity with the use-value of being able to generate value through its consumption. The previous chapter indicated that the labour that forms the value of a commodity is the consumption of labour-power. And one can obtain new value by purchasing labour-power on the market and then consuming it. Human labour-power can only be purchased on a daily basis, but the quantity of value generated by daily labour exceeds the daily value of labour-power. This difference becomes the surplus-value that augments capital.
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Notes
- 1.
When a money holder pays out his money, expecting a reflux of the money after a time, it is said that he advances the money. The term advance relates overwhelmingly to paying out money as capital, but there is also a peculiar case relating to money as means of circulation, as we shall see in 7 Sect. 14.3.2 in Part II.
- 2.
The word «free» in this case signifies «removed or forced out from a position».
- 3.
At the starting point of the analysis of capital the adult male workers must be posited as the possessors of labour-power. This is certainly not meant to suggest gender discrimination, but rather is historically as well as theoretically necessarily. Later (in 7 Sect. 5.4.3), we shall see how capitalist production massively incorporates women and children into the labour market.
- 4.
Marx (1865) first clearly stated the crux of this issue in his report in English at the meetings of the Working Men’s International Association held on 20 and 27 June, 1865: «What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his Labouring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist» (Marx 1985, p. 128; Marx’s emphasis). He writes in Capital (Marx 1872): «He [proprietor of labour-power] 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, at all times only temporarily, for a definite period of time» (Marx 1976, p. 271; my emphasis and brackets).
- 5.
Marx (1872) writes: «Suppose that a capitalist pays for a day’s worth of labour-power; then the right to use that power for a day belongs to him, just as much as the right to use any other commodity, such as a horse he had hired for the day» (Marx 1976, p. 292; my emphasis).
- 6.
The transaction-form of «lease» is commonly considered as a sort of lending and borrowing of money. In terms of industry classification, leasing enterprises also often belong to financial institutions. Lending and borrowing of money are almost the same insofar as their legal forms are concerned, but, as we shall see later (7 Sect. 19.1.1 in Part III), they have thoroughly different characteristics from leasing. Lending and borrowing takes the form of selling and buying a commodity (the peculiar commodity of money as capital). In capitalist society, every possible transaction between economic partners necessarily takes the form of commodity sale and purchase. Thus, we should clearly distinguish between the rent paid for leasing and the interest paid for lending (see the following footnote 7).
- 7.
In capitalist society, the practical transaction of leasing is related to the lending of money. This is because what is paid as rent involves the interest for the time period involved, in addition to the price of temporarily using the commodity. (It should go without saying that such an addition would never arise in the case of the sale of labour-power.) But to grasp the lease transaction in a pure form we must abstract from this side of lending—and therefore from interest. Once we have severed the link to lending, we can clearly see what kind of transaction leasing is. For example, however low the interest rate may fall, the leasing industry still must recover the value of leased commodities via rent, and as far as being able to do so this industry can continue to exist regardless of interest.
- 8.
The simple example of house rent highlights this point. Whether a tenant actually uses the rented house or not, he must unconditionally pay the rent. The monthly rent is paid for the right to use it for a month, not for the «utility» that it brings to the tenant.
- 9.
In practice, wages are paid by the hour. We shall elucidate the reason and the manner of this form of payment in 7 Chap. 7. Here it is only necessary to understand that, whatever their hourly wages may be, wageworkers must be able to live a day on their daily wages.
References
Marx K (1865) Lohn, Preis und Profit. English edition: Marx K (1985) Value, price and profit. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 20. Progress Publishers et al. New York
Marx K (1872) Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Oekonomie. Bd. 1. Buch 1: Der Produktionsprocess des Kapitals. 2. verb. Aufl. Hamburg. English edition: Marx K (1976) Capital. A critique of political economy. Vol. 1 (trans: Howkes B). Penguin Books
Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Japan (2016) Census 2014. Census of manufacture. Tokyo
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Otani, T. (2018). Capital and Surplus-value. In: A Guide to Marxian Political Economy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65954-1_3
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