Capital From Zero: Reading Marx in the Age of Climate Catastrophe

THE ENDLESS GAME OF VALUE INCREASE

In the previous chapter, we explored the differences between capitalist and noncapitalist societies by thinking about commodities. There are parts of noncapitalist societies that trade in commodities as well, but most of the things they produce are not commodities, but rather items created for their use- value because they help make people’s lives livable.

Capitalist societies, by contrast, commodify many different forms of societal wealth—water and forestland, or even community-owned resources like public parks and libraries— transforming them into things that cannot be accessed without money. This means that every one must devote all their energy into making money in order to survive.

As such, those with money are the ones with the highest status in a market society.

Goods are increasingly produced not for their use-value but because of their value; they are created not because they are necessary but because they might sell.

Under capitalism, there is constant competition in the marketplace to increase value. Capitalism is an endless game of value increase. But does this game create happiness? Not really. The real victims of a capitalist society are workers and the natural environment.

But it’s not enough to think about this problem solely by analyzing commodities and money. We must also analyze capital itself.

CAPITAL IS MOVEMENT

What, then, is the nature of capital? Most people hearing the term probably imagine a certain amount of money, or perhaps goods—machinery, buildings, or other assets—worth a certain amount of money.

But according to Marx capital is neither money nor goods—not machinery, not factories, not commodities. It’s movement.

What kind of movement? Incessant movement to make itself grow, to increase its own value. Marx expresses this movement in German as G–W–G¹— what he calls the “general formula for capital.” G stands for Geld, or “money,” while W stands for Ware, or “commodity.” In English, this formula is expressed as M–C–M¹ (money–commodity–money¹) (247–57).

In a society where production is based on use-value, a cobbler will make a pair of shoes, sell them, and then use that money to buy bread. He’ll eat the bread, and then that’s that. Such movement would be expressed as C–M–C.

But in a capitalist society, the cobbler uses his initial capital to make shoes, and then when he sells them, he’ll use that money to make more shoes. If they sell too, he’ll invest even more of his capital into making more shoes if he thinks they’ll keep selling. The difference between M and M¹ is the difference between his initial outlay of capital to make the shoes and the amount of money he makes from selling them, which may include profit.

Capital grows by continuously repeating this M–C–M¹ movement. It doesn’t matter whether you make shoes or bags or anything else as long as you’re producing profits. Use-value becomes, at best, a secondary concern.

Simply put, capital is movement that makes money, and any society primarily concerned with the upkeep of this moneymaking movement is a capitalist society.

THE REASON WHY CAPITALISTS CAN’T STOP SEEKING PROFIT

To review, the governing principle driving profit seeking is not a commodity’s use-value, but rather its value. The movement by which capital grows—expressed as M– C–M¹—increases value’s power, enough that value becomes a type of subject in and of itself, able to act on its own and manipulate humans according to its will.

In the circulation M–C–M both the money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself . . . It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in the movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject . . . Value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. (255)

Money and commodities can thus both be seen as simply temporary forms taken on by capital. Value is generated as capital moves from one form to another; according to Marx, value then becomes the self-propelling subject of this movement.

Let’s go back to our cobbler, who’s now a proper capitalist. He succeeds in his shoemaking business and makes about $125,000. He now thinks, “Next I’ll make $190,000!” If he succeeds in that, then naturally he’ll think, “Let’s try for $250,000!” Even if he makes $250,000, or more than that—even an amount of money he could never spend over the course of his whole life—he will still end up wanting more. As Marx puts it, “The movement of capital is therefore limitless” (253).

Marx stresses that capitalists are not a special race of people who lust after money, but rather are normal people fulfilling their “destiny” bound to the whims of capitalism. Their behavior isn’t a question of morality—those living under capitalism are not free to control their own desires and decide, for example, to use profits to raise the wages of their employees.

Ruthless competition is always taking place in the market. Capitalists toil tirelessly pursuing every dollar of profit they can, constantly working to improve their existing products and bring new ones to the market. Otherwise, they’ll stand to lose their share of the market to competitors and wither away, eventually becoming unable to pay their workers at all. Efficiency and cost- cutting are the order of the day.

In other words, even capitalists are nothing more than cogs in the self-propelling machine of capital that strives only to increase its own value. As long as capitalists wish to remain capitalists, they must submit to capital’s automatic movement. And by extension, workers have no choice but to submit to capitalists.

The self-propelling movement of capital animates society: Both humans and nature become controlled by it as well, their very existence reduced to being a function of capital. Swallowed up by the limitless movement of capital to grow and valorize itself, everything becomes a cog in the same machine. This creates a severe disturbance in the “metabolic interaction between nature and man.”

“THE HIDDEN ABODE OF PRODUCTION”

Before any discussion of how capitalism disempowers and alienates workers and impacts nature and the environment, it is important to understand the mechanism by which capitalists grow their capital and increase its value.

As the general formula M–C–M¹ shows us, keeping your money safely in your pocketbook will never make it grow. It’s irrational under capitalism to be a miser.

If you want to be a proper capitalist, you must take risks and invest your money producing things that you believe may sell. This is the only way to make capital grow. The stock and foreign exchange markets may make money for you, too, but as Marx shows, at base, the only real way to increase value is in “the hidden abode of production” (279).

What does this mean? Let’s break down the issue to its simplest form.

Let’s say a worker works for eight hours and is paid $60 a day. The capitalist pays the worker $60 after receiving a day’s work from him. If the value of the commodity produced by that day’s work is priced at $100, then the capitalist’s profit is the amount left over after subtracting the cost of the labor: $40. This is what Marx calls surplus-value, which is how capital grows itself.

The important thing to notice here is that the value created by the worker’s labor must be greater than the wages he receives for his labor-power. Otherwise, there’s no reason for the capitalist to buy that labor-power at all.

Applying this example to the general formula for capital, we see that the capitalist uses $63.54 (M) to buy the commodity called “one day’s worth of labor-power” to make the shoes (C), and then receives $101.66 when he sells them (M¹).

If the worker works the next day for $63.54 as well, and the shoes sell for $101.66 again, then the initial $63.54 (M) has produced two days’ worth of surplus-value $76.24, resulting in a total sum at the end of $139.78 (M¹). At this point, he could afford to hire two workers. And if he does, the surplus-value produced in a day would double. It’s through this kind of incessant movement that capital steadily increases itself.

By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It grinds forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs. (255)

No one has the power to stop the process by which human labor, transformed into value, increases value exponentially. And this “occult ability” is what causes workers to be exploited.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LABOR AND LABOR-POWER

Even though the worker created it, the $38.12 of surplus-value belongs to the capitalist. This absurdity, which is known as exploitation, is justified through the logic of capitalism. Marx explains why exploitation occurs by distinguishing between labor and labor-power.

Labor-power, the ability to perform labor, is a commodity. The worker sells his labor-power to the capitalist, who then has a right to his work.

But at the point when a worker decides to sell his labor-power for $63.54 a day, or alternatively, when a capitalist decides to buy that labor-power at that price, labor has not yet taken place. Labor only occurs at the moment when the capitalist starts to use the labor-power he bought as a commodity—that is, the moment he makes the worker perform labor. And this labor is what ultimately produces the new value (M¹) of $101.66.

During this process, the labor-power priced at $63.54 a day already belongs to the capitalist, and he’s free to do with it what he likes. He could even decide not to use it at all and let it go to waste, or he could just as easily use all eight hours and produce $101.66 of value. The point is, once labor-power is sold, the capitalist owns both the power to decide what to do with it and any surplus-value created through the labor—the worker owns neither.

The capitalist is not buying labor from the worker, but rather labor-power. Wages are paid as the price for labor-power, as it is a commodity. The worker is not being deceived in this process so the capitalist can pay him less than he’s worth. Rather, if we’re only looking at the exchange as it occurs in the marketplace, the guiding principle underlying the free exchange of commodities is being respected: Labor-power is being exchanged for money, ultimately making the exploitation of surplus-value difficult to see.

That said, the aim of Marx’s Capital is not to expose exploitation’s existence. This is a common misreading of the text. What we should be asking instead is why, if the existence of exploitation is already known, do workers continue working so obediently?

For now, the simple answer is that they have no way to make the money they need to survive other than by selling the only commodity that workers have at their disposal: their labor power. The worker owns neither the means of production nor the means of survival.

The price for their labor-power—the wage—is only barely enough to survive on. Even now, we continue to work tirelessly every day only to stop by the supermarket on the way home from work and search through the prepared meals, looking for one that might have a discount coupon stuck to it so we can afford to enjoy a canned highball with dinner.

THE TRICK BEHIND THE PROLIFERATION OF LONG WORK HOURS

The worker in the scenario we have just outlined is creating $12.71 of value with one hour of labor. If the capitalist hires that worker at a wage of $63.54 per day but only makes him work for five hours, the value produced by that labor will only be $63.54 and the capitalist’s profit will be zero.

However, any labor performed after those five hours are up becomes surplus-value, which is possessed solely by the capitalist. Therefore, an eight-hour workday produces $101.66 of value, of which $38.12 is surplus-value.

But what if the capitalist wants to make that value increase even more?

The easiest solution would be to make work hours longer without raising the daily wage, right? If the capitalist makes the worker work for ten hours a day, the surplus-value would rise by two hours’ worth—$25.41. If he makes the worker work for twelve hours, the surplus-value rises by $50.83.

Since the daily wage remains consistent at $63.54, the capitalist would reap $50.83 of profit for the same cost. Marx calls this kind of extra surplus-value attained simply by extending the workday, involving no extra work on the part of the capitalist, “absolute surplus-value.” This is why Japan and the United States have experienced a proliferation of overlong work hours and unpaid overtime.

The prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night . . . only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor. Capitalist production therefore drives, by its inherent nature, toward the appropriation of labor throughout the whole of the 24 hours in the day. (367)

It’s not only unpaid overtime—positions that are “management in name only,” for example, also make people work longer hours without additional compensation; systems like “fixed” overtime salaries end up producing the same result.

As the workday (that is, the number of hours worked during a day) gets longer, the worker’s lifestyle naturally becomes more difficult. Free time and time spent with family and friends disappears; there’s no way to recover from the exhaustion of work, no time to pursue other interests or pastimes. Workers simply work at the expense of their health and well-being. In extreme cases, they may even work themselves to death.