- HOME
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Italy
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused Atlanta
- Globalized Atlanta
- Racialized Atlanta
- Greenwashed Atlanta
- Georgia Timescapes
- Mississippi Timescapes
- New Mexico Timescapes
- Florida Beachscapes
- California Waterscapes
- Yankee Landscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- New York Streetscapes
- Southern Roadscapes
- Branding Jacksonville
- Crafting the Quarter
- CONTACT
Gift Shop, The Dali, St. Petersburg, Florida
AGAINST THE CLOCK
Despite their ferocious critique of bourgeois political economy, Marx and Harvey agree with mainstream economists on one crucial issue. Both sides see capitalism as an economic engine whose overriding purpose to generate continuous gains in labor productivity. Without the never-ending revolutions in productivity which are arguably capital's most important material legacy, the engine will stop running.
This engine analogy is worth pushing. By the second half of the 19th century mechanical engineers in Britain and North America were hard at work improving the design and operation of the steam engine, the universal symbol of the industrial revolution. One of their inventions was the automatic lubricator which used the internal movements of the engine itself to supply oil to the cylinders and bearings when the pistons were in operation. Try thinking of capital as the self-lubricating engine and productivity as the oil. If anything goes amiss with the automatic lubricator and productivity stops flowing through the engine, capital will burn itself up.
Marx takes up the question of productivity by way of his value theory, which allows him to explain why labor-saving technology is a necessity under capital, and how individual capitalists internalize this necessity through the coercive laws of competition. He understands technology as broadly encompassing the material means of production like the steam engine, and the organizational forms of production like the factory.
To see how Marx builds his argument regarding technology, competition and productivity let's return to surplus value, the alpha and omega of the capitalist mode of production. Marx visualizes the working day as consisting of two segments whose dividing line is continuously shifting back and forth: "necessary labor time" refers to those hours of the working day during which workers produce the value equivalent of their labor power; "surplus labor time" refers to the remaining hours, when workers are producing surplus value for the capitalist.
I snapped the photo above at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, a surreal location for a collection devoted to the world's most famous surrealist painter. (Check out the gallery "Florida Beachscapes" for a deeper dive into the Sunshine State's surrealist appropriation of art, culture, history and nature.) The pair of melting clocks, which Dalí incorporated into his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory and which quickly became his personal trademark, has been reborn here as gift shop swag, another surrealist touch I suspect the master swagster Dalí would have appreciated.
For me the melting clocks speak to the fluidity of necessary labor time and surplus labor time. We will go into the capitalist production of time at greater length in the concluding section of this essay, but you might want to start thinking about it now. It's never too early to take the measure of time, especially if you're trying to grasp Marx's theory of capital.
To repurpose the famous (or infamous) question that Freud asked about women, what do capitalists want? They want as much surplus labor time as they can get. But to gain access to it, capitalists must first pay workers for their necessary labor time, which ends up not on the profit side of the ledger but as wages that workers will spend on the commodities they need in order to live. I'll offer the following analogy with fingers crossed that no one takes offense. If your private vices include an occasional game of poker, the choice facing the capitalist should sound all too familiar: to get into the poker game with a chance of winning the pot, you must first ante up by putting a chip or two on the table. For the capitalist necessary labor time is the ante that must be staked before getting into the game of capital.
Minimizing necessary labor time and maximizing surplus labor time is what capitalists think about when they roll out of bed in the morning and tuck themselves in at night. They can recalibrate the working day to their advantage in one of two ways, either by extending its length, say from 10 to 12 hours, while holding necessary labor time constant, or by holding its length constant while reducing necessary labor time, say from 6 to 4 hours. The first strategy aims to produce what Marx calls "absolute surplus value," the second "relative surplus value."
The drive for absolute surplus value took centerstage during the early days of industrial capitalism. Manchester factory owners were notorious for the long hours they squeezed out of their workers, women and children not excepted. As Marx shows, it finally took a combination of working-class struggle, middle-class humanitarianism and state intervention to prevent individual capitalists, who were acting out of self-interest and in accordance with the coercive laws of competition, from working their employees to death. Left to their own devices, mill owners seemed hellbent on canibalizing the lives and bodies of their employees, undermining the enabling conditions of their own reproduction as a class and destroying the capital-labor relation on which the mode of production rested. So, in 1847 the British Parliament passed the first Factory Act limiting the working day to 10 hours for women and young people.
The history of capitalism is littered with examples of capitalists having to be saved from their own self-destructive behavior by public authorities whose duty is to umpire the class struggle on behalf of capital as a whole. The regulation of the working day created a space in which a broader sense of class consciousnesses could take root, at least among some industrial capitalists. To maintain productivity levels, employers exhibited a greater willingness to give their workers free time for recreation, self-improvement and what might be called metabolic restoration. Likewise, as a matter of enlightened self-interest it made sense to give workers time to manage the basics of biological and social reproduction at home, otherwise where would future generations of wage earners come from?
As the practical and political limitations of absolute surplus value sank in, the advantages of relative surplus value came into sharper focus. This meant shortening necessary labor time through a reduction in the value of labor power. As we have noted, the value of labor power was determined by the value of the wage goods consumed by the working class. Gains in labor productivity in those branches of industry specializing in the production of wage goods thus translated into a decline in the value of labor power, an increase in surplus labor time and a growth in the mass of relative surplus value across all sectors of the economy.
For Marx the production of relative surplus value raised the troublesome question of competition, a subject he generally avoided on the grounds that competition could never determine the laws of motion of capital but only enforce them. Even so, in making the case for relative surplus value he had to explain why an individual capitalist would go to the trouble and expense of rolling out a brand-new, labor-saving innovation only to turn around and share it with the competition. Wasn't this irrational and self-defeating in terms of market behavior? After all, capitalists are in the business of making money not handing out free gifts to their rivals.
Marx's answer is this: individual capitalists are short-termers who make their investment decisions in the here and now. Any new technology that promises to give them a competitive edge, no matter how ephemeral, must be acted upon. The capitalist who fails to seize the opportunity to increase market share by adopting an innovation that brings down labor costs will be left behind as others jump at the chance to upgrade their production methods. That the technological advantage that increases labor productivity won't last forever is neither here nor there; nothing lasts forever in the competitive market.
Let's imagine an innovator who introduces a technological change in her production process that lowers labor costs. What happens next? The productivity of her workforce will rise compared to that of other workforces producing the same commodities. Remember that the value of these commodities is equal to the average amount of labor time required to produce them. Thanks to her new technology, the innovator is now producing commodities that contain less labor time and therefore less value than the social average. This difference between the individual value and social value of the commodity is "extra" surplus value for the innovator. She can sell her commodity below the market price and still make a profit, and that's what she will do for as long as she can.
But this advantage is fated to vanish. The same competitors who have been caught flat-footed using the old technology will eventually notice that their profit margins are starting to dip as the growing supply of cheaper commodities made possible by the new technology drives down the average market price. They will respond by storming the citadel of innovation. The labor-saving method that for a time generated an extra surplus value for the fortunate trail-blazer will soon spread far and wide, becoming the new normal in this line of production. Market conditions will then settle down into something like equilibrium until the next leapfrogging innovator arrives on the scene with yet another labor-saving method which will set off a new round of intra-class scrambling for technological advantage.
Marx has unveiled the hidden source of capital's addiction to productivity. In their quest for relative surplus value and in compliance with the coercive laws of competition, capitalists take on board the logic of continuous technological change. The productivity imperative is not only baked into the consciousness of individual capitalists but also absorbed into the reproduction requirements of capital as a whole.