Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value

Contents

Section 1 - Length of the Working-Day and Intensity of Labour Constant. Productiveness of Labour Variable
Section 2 - Working-Day Constant. Productiveness of Labour Constant. Intensity of Labour Variable
Section 3 - Productiveness and Intensity of Labour Constant. Length of the Working-Day Variable
Section 4 - Simultaneous Variations in the Duration, Productiveness, and Intensity of Labour

A. Diminishing Productiveness of Labour with a Simultaneous Lengthening of the Working-Day
B. Increasing Intensity and Productiveness of Labour with Simultaneous Shortening of the Working-Day

The value of labour-power is determined by the value of the necessaries of life habitually required by the average labourer. The quantity of these necessaries is known at any given epoch of a given society, and can therefore be treated as a constant magnitude. What changes, is the value of this quantity. There are, besides, two other factors that enter into the determination of the value of labour-power. One, the expenses of developing that power, which expenses vary with the mode of production; the other, its natural diversity, the difference between the labour-power of men and women, of children and adults. The employment of these different sorts of labour-power, an employment which is, in its turn, made necessary by the mode of production, makes a great difference in the cost of maintaining the family of the labourer, and in the value of the labour-power of the adult male. Both these factors, however, are excluded in the following investigation.¹

I assume (1) that commodities are sold at their value; (2) that the price of labour-power rises occasionally above its value, but never sinks below it.

On this assumption we have seen that the relative magnitudes of surplus-value and of price of labour- power are determined by three circumstances; (1) the length of the working-day, or the extensive magnitude of labour; (2) the normal intensity of labour, its intensive magnitude, whereby a given quantity of labour is expended in a given time; (3) the productiveness of labour,whereby the same quantum of labour yields, in a given time, a greater or less quantum of product, dependent on the degree of development in the conditions of production. Very different combinations are clearly possible, according as one of the three factors is constant and two variable, or two constant and one variable, or lastly, all three simultaneously variable. And the number of these combinations is augmented by the fact that, when these factors simultaneously vary, the amount and direction of their respective variations may differ. In what follows the chief combinations alone are considered.

SECTION 1

LENGTH OF THE WORKING-DAY AND INTENSITY OF LABOUR CONSTANT. PRODUCTIVENESS OF LABOUR VARIABLE.

On these assumptions the value of labour-power, and the magnitude of surplus-value, are determined by three laws.

(1.) A working day of given length always creates the same amount of value, no matter how the productiveness of labour, and, with it, the mass of the product, and the price of each single commodity produced, may vary.

If the value created by a working-day of 12 hours be, say, six shillings, then, although the mass of the articles produced varies with the productiveness of labour, the only result is that the value represented by six shillings is spread over a greater or less number of articles.

(2.) Surplus-value and the value of labour-power vary in opposite directions. A variation in the productiveness of labour, its increase or diminution, causes a variation in the opposite direction in the value of labour- power, and in the same direction in surplus-value.