Chapter Three: Money or the Circulation of Commodities

Nasser Paydar

Rereading Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapters 3 to 9

1. Measure of values

Money does not make commodities measurable; quite the opposite is true. Commodities, as values, are the embodiment of human labour and, therefore, the embodiment of the labour time latent in them. That is why they are measurable. Money, as a measure of value, is the representation of labour time, which is the latent value of the commodity. The price of commodities is the monetary form of their value; this price, like the value itself, is separated from the physical form of the commodity and acquires a mental aspect. Just as the material conditions of human life or social existence are pumped into the formulas of their beliefs and thoughts. The value of iron or the necessary social work exists in the iron itself but is not seen, this value reveals itself in comparison with gold. Money or gold plays the role of a guard that glues this value to the commodity. Expressing the value of commodities in gold is a subjective matter, but this value actually exists in the commodity, and a subjective gold is used to represent the price. When the owner of a commodity expresses the value of his goods in the form of price or hypothetical gold, he is far from converting these values ​​into gold, but to estimate the amount of this gold, he does not need even the smallest carat of gold. Money in the role of valuation is only a hypothetical and virtual element. Let us not forget that although money has an imaginary state in performing the function of valuation, the price of each commodity represents the necessary social work hidden in it and therefore hidden behind money. Depending on whether gold, silver or copper are the scale of value, the value of a ton of iron will be expressed at different prices and with different amounts of the three metals above. In the same vein, if gold and silver are used simultaneously as a measure of value, copper will naturally find two different expressions of value, one with gold and one with silver. In this case, any change in the value relationship between these two metals will affect the ratio of the price of copper in terms of gold or silver.

Money has two different functions in terms of measuring values ​​and in terms of measuring prices. As a social symbol of human labour, it is a measuring instrument of values, and as a fixed quantity of metal of fixed weight, it is a measuring instrument of prices. In the first role, it converts the different values ​​of various commodities into prices, that is, virtual quantities of gold, and in the second role, it measures these quantities of gold. As a measure of value, it says how much socially necessary labour is embodied in this or that commodity, for example, equivalent to how much gold. As a measure of prices, it states how much the same amount of gold is worth in terms of a unit of gold. There are several points worth considering regarding the relationship between fluctuations in the price of commodities on the one hand and their value on the other.

1- The value of goods increases but the value of money remains constant, in this case prices rise.

2- The value of goods is constant but the value of money decreases, prices still rise.

3- The value of money is constant, but the value of goods decreases, in this case prices fall.

4- The value of goods is constant but the value of money increases, prices still fall.

5- An increase in the value of money does not necessarily lead to a decrease in the price of goods, just as a decrease in the value of money does not necessarily lead to an increase in the price of goods.

Price is the monetary name for the labour embodied in the commodity. As the representative of the value-value of the commodity, price is also the representative of the exchange relation of the commodity with money, but the reverse is not true. The representative of the exchange relation of the commodity and money is not the representative of the value-value of the commodity. In a quarter of wheat and 2 pounds sterling lies an equal amount of socially necessary labour. 2 pounds sterling is the monetary expression of the value-value of a quarter of wheat and its price. Now, if the price of a quarter of wheat becomes three- or one-pound sterling, then one pound or three pounds sterling, in terms of expressing the value of wheat, are smaller or larger than the actual value, but they are still considered the price of wheat. Because, first, they are the value form of wheat in the form of money, and second, they represent its exchange relationship with money. The value of a commodity expresses an inherent relation to the socially necessary labour time in it. By converting the value of the value into a price, this inherent relation appears as the exchange ratio of a commodity to the commodity-money existing outside it. In this relation, both the value of the commodity and the smaller or larger amount of money that the commodity is selling for under given conditions may appear. Thus, the possibility of a slight difference between the price and the value-value or of a deviation of the price from the value-value is inherent in the price form itself. This is not a defect of this form. On the contrary, it makes it the proper form of that mode of production within which order and rule can compensate for disorder only by blind law. The price form is not only accompanied by the possibility of a quantitative difference between the value amount and the price or the value amount and money, but it can also carry a qualitative contradiction within itself. For example, although the price is the value form of a commodity, it does not express any value. Conscience and honour are not commodities in themselves, but they may be traded for money for their owners and thus acquire the form of a commodity with their price. On the other hand, the virtual form of price may also conceal a real value relation or a derivative thereof. Such as the price of waste land in which no human labour has been expended and therefore has no value. The price form expresses the exchangeability of commodities with money and the necessity of this exchange. On the other hand, if gold plays a role as a subjective measure of value, it is because it has already consolidated its position as commodity money in the course of exchanges. Therefore, behind the subjective measure of value, coin money has taken refuge.

2. The Medium of Circulation

A. The Metamorphosis of Commodities

Let us begin with an example. A weaver goes to the market with 20 yards of linen and exchanges his linen for 2 pounds of gold. With these two pounds he buys a story book. Linen, which is a mere commodity and a carrier of value, leaves its original natural state in exchange for gold and takes on the form of a naked value. But a little later it leaves this value state and is exchanged for a story book, a commodity with use value. The exchange process here consists of two mutual and complementary transformations. In the first instance, the commodity is transformed into money, and in the second instance, money is transformed into a commodity. The first transformation is a sale, the second is a purchase. The first is (commodity-money), the second is (money-commodity). The weaver now has a storybook instead of linen, he is the owner of a commodity with a different use value from his previous commodity. Commodity production is inherently contradictory. The contradiction between use value and exchange value, the contradiction between abstract and concrete labour, this form of production expresses the continuous personalization of things and the continuous objectification of persons. The increasing development of commodity production does not reduce these contradictions and contradictions, on the contrary, it provides a form in which these inherent contradictions can continue. The change in form in the commodity is the result of the exchange of two commodities, one an ordinary commodity and the other commodity money. Commodities enter into exchange without being gold-plated or sugar-coated, but exchange divides them into commodities and money. Commodities and money are the external manifestation of the inherent opposition of use value and exchange value. Commodities represent use value and money represents exchange value. The process of exchange of commodities, as we have seen above, ends with changes in their form. Commodities become money and then money becomes commodities. Linen becomes money and money becomes a storybook (commodity – money – commodity).

The product of the weaver’s labour is useful to him only as exchange value, it will only acquire a socially accepted or equivalent form of value through its conversion into money. But money is in someone else’s pocket, it must come out of his pocket, for this to work, first of all, the product of the owner of the commodity must be useful to the owner of the money or have a use value. The commodity loves money, but the path to love is not smooth. The owners of the commodity find in practice that the same division of labour that has made them separate independent producers has also freed the process of social production and the relations of the producers in it from dependence on their will and placed them above them. The formal independence of the producers from each other is supplemented by a system of all-round, solid, and material dependence.

The division of labour helps to transform the product into a commodity, and in this way its transformation into money becomes necessary. The seller of linen substitutes gold coins for his commodity. The buyer substitutes gold for linen. Linen and gold change places, the commodity being exchanged for its general form of value, and gold for a specific form of use value. It will be asked why gold was placed as money against linen? The answer is not difficult. The £2 had already established a relationship between linen and gold. Price is the monetary expression of value, the monetary expression of the socially necessary labour inherent in the commodity. Linen had a price that had a hypothetical existence before being exchanged for gold, but by transferring it to another person it actually managed to attract money and went beyond its original form, that is, linen. This means that the realization of price or a merely hypothetical form of value is also the realization of the imaginary use value of money. The conversion of commodity into money is also the conversion of money into commodity. In the pole of the owner of goods, there is a sale, and in the pole of the owner of money, there is a purchase, in other words, every sale is also a purchase. (commodity – money) is simultaneously (money – commodity).

In order for gold to play the role of money, it must have entered the market of commodities from a point. This point is the origin of its production, where it has been exchanged as a direct product of human labour for another product or concentrated human labour of equal value. From then on, and apart from this particular case, gold represents the realized price of commodities; gold in the hands of each commodity owner is in fact his commodity, separated from its original form by being transferred. When commodities are exchanged for money, when they take on the value form of money, they are stripped of their use value and every sign and trace of this use value. All, like chrysalises, sink into a material cocoon of uniform and social form, that is, homogeneous human labour; all become similar to one another, all become identical in the form of money.

For the owner of the linen, the sale of his commodity was the beginning of an action that ended with its reciprocal action, the purchase of a storybook, (linen – money – book). But now let us suppose that the 2 pounds of gold we are referring to is the transformed form of half a ton of wheat, or in fact the result of the sale of half a ton of wheat. In other words, the buyer of the linen has obtained his 2 pounds of gold from the sale of this amount of wheat, in which case the purchase of the linen is the end of a process that began with a reciprocal action, the sale of the wheat (Wheat – money – linen). If we reflect on what has been said, we will see how the process of exchange of commodities breaks down all the limitations of the direct exchange of products, expands the circulation of the products of human social labor day by day, spontaneously and spontaneously creates a complex network of social connections, constantly expands and governs this network, such that the human producers have no role in it and are unable to exert any significant influence. If the weaver is able to sell his linen, it is only because the farmer has previously sold his wheat, if the wine merchant sells his wine, the reference’ of his practical treatise and the rabbi of his Torah, it is because many other people have previously produced and sold many products and have been engaged in a chain of trade. Money, as a medium of the circulation of commodities, plays the role of a means of circulation.  

B. The circulation of money

Let us look at the dynamics of the commodity cycle. The commodity is always in the hands of the seller and money is in the hands of the buyer. What money does as a means of purchase is to realize the price of the commodity. By realizing the price, it transfers the commodity from the seller to the buyer, and at the same time it leaves the buyer’s hands and falls into the hands of the seller to do the same thing with another commodity. The first change of commodity (commodity – money) is not seen only as the movement of money, it is also considered the movement of commodity, but in the second change (money – commodity) the movement of commodity is seen only as the movement of money. In the first circle, the commodity is replaced by money, its use form disappears, and its value form or monetary embodiment takes its place. In the second circle, the commodity sheds its natural covering and is dressed in money. In this way, the continuation of the movement of the commodity is assigned to money. A movement that for the commodity is two different processes, but for money is a single dynamic (the process of changing the place of money with the commodity). Here we are witnessing a kind of morphism. It is suggested that the substitution of one commodity for another does not result from the transformation of the commodities themselves, but rather from money as a means of circulation. If money functions as a means of circulation, it is only because the value of commodities has acquired a definite and independent form in its existence. The movement of money as a medium of circulation is nothing other than the movement of commodities accompanied by their transformation. The substitution of one commodity for another occurs because each of these commodities carries the same amount of socially necessary human labour.

In our example, cotton first replaced its commodity form by the money form, and then its money form replaced its new commodity form. The constant repetition of the exchange of money is not only a reflection of the transformations that a given commodity undergoes, but also a demonstration of the multitudinous intertwining of transformations that take place throughout the world of commodities. Let us not forget that all this applies only to the simple circulation of commodities. Money is a constant presence in this sphere as a medium of circulation. This raises the question of how much money does the sphere of circulation need? The answer is not so difficult. Money is the embodiment of the value of commodities, and commodities reflect the monetary expression of their values ​​in the form of prices, so the amount of the medium necessary for the circulation of commodities is determined by the total price of commodities. Let us not forget one point. The prices of commodities, if their value remains constant, will increase or decrease with the decrease or increase in the value of gold (as money). If, as a result of such a decrease or increase in the value of gold, the sum of the prices of commodities increases or decreases, then the volume of money in circulation will also witness the same fluctuation. Another factor that affects the amount of money required for the circulation of commodities in the market is the slowness or rapidity of the dynamics of the various transformations or cycles of the transformation of the form of use of commodities into their form of value. Let us illustrate the matter with an example. Let us consider four different goods, consisting of a quarter of wheat, 20 meters of cloth, a Torah, and a few litres of wine. The price of each of these four items is 2 pounds sterling. These commodities are ready for sale, and two distinct cases are conceivable for their sale. The first case: the goods are sold in parallel and unrelated places. In this case, 8 pounds sterling of gold or money are required for the cycle of circulation. The second case: the owner of a quarter of wheat sells his goods for 2 pounds sterling, and with these 2 pounds he buys 20 meters of cloth. A little further on the exchanges the cloth for 2 liras and buys a book with this money, he sells the book an hour later and buys wine with 2 liras. Here, in contrast to the first case, the circulation does not require more than 2 liras sterling. Because the same 2 liras sterling has been circulated 4 times. The more the number of circulations of money increases, the less money is required for the circulation of a given commodity.

C. Coin and symbols of value

A weight of gold, which is represented by a price or monetary expression of value, takes the form of a coin in the process of circulation. The mintage of coins, like the determination of the scale of price measurement, is determined by governments. The national uniform that the gold and silver coins of a country wear and that they bring out on the world market, indicates the separation of the internal and external spheres of the circulation of commodities. The only difference between coins and bullion is in their external appearance; both are constantly transformed into one another. The path from the mint to the smelting furnace is intertwined. Gold coins are worn out in the process of circulation. The weight of gold that was the standard of price diverged from the weight that played the role of the intermediary in the circulation of commodities; the latter could no longer be a real equivalent for the commodities whose prices were realized. This event had a message.

If worn gold, with its lesser weight, still had the capacity to be a measure of value, then metallic money could gradually be replaced by tokens of other metals or by specific symbols. It was from within the material possibility of this process or circulation of metallic money that paper money finally emerged. Money issued by the state and whose circulation depended on state power. Real paper money arose from money as a medium of exchange, but credit money did not arise in this way, but rather spontaneously, from the very nature of money as a means of payment. The government injected the paper money into the circulation from outside, and insofar as it replaced the amount of gold needed by the circulation, it played a role in accordance with the laws of money circulation and as a medium of exchange. If a law were passed for paper money, its content would be to specify the ratio between paper money and gold. The circulation of goods in each individual society required a certain volume of gold coins, and now paper money replaced this volume of gold. Paper money is a symbol of gold or money, and its relationship to the value of goods is such that first the values ​​find a hypothetical expression in the form of a certain quantity of gold, and then paper money becomes a tangible and tangible symbol of this quantity of gold. Here a question must be answered. The question of why a worthless object like paper was able to replace gold? Gold (money) allowed this replacement in a situation where it had already established and established its role as a coin in the process of commodity circulation. In the process of exchange, commodities expressed their value in gold coins, and this situation gradually allowed gold or gold money to replace another metal, another symbol, including paper money.

3. Money

The commodity that is the measure of the value inherent in goods and plays the role of a medium of circulation is money. Gold and silver also serve as money and play the same role in different forms, so let’s briefly examine these roles.

A – Gold-hoarding

In the early stages of the development of the commodity economy, only the surplus value of human use is exchanged and converted into money or gold and silver. During this period, those who acquire a volume of gold by selling their goods turn their gold into treasure. With the expansion of commodity production, every human producer gradually found increasing needs, he had to constantly buy new goods and needed some kind of social security to buy these goods. This happened in a situation where the production and sale of his own goods required time. He could not realize what he wanted with a mere feeling of need and determination to produce a product or exchange.

In such a situation, in order for him to buy without selling, he had to sell goods in advance without buying. This was a contradiction, and this contradiction was resolved in such a way that producers exchanged their goods for precious metals on certain days, without buying any goods. This event led to the accumulation of gold, silver, and other precious metals in the hands of a group of producers, the desire for goldsmithing grew, money-gold became the social form of wealth that could be used everywhere and at any time, and its power grew. Money expanded the sphere of power and became the universal representative of material wealth. Money does not reveal what it is exchanged for, it is exchangeable for everything. It eliminates the qualitative difference between goods in its appearance and replaces them all, but it is itself a commodity. An external object that can become the private property of any individual. In this way, it is transformed from a social power into a special power of private individuals. Ancient society denounced money for this reason, because of its tendency to destroy the economic and moral order. As a use value, a commodity satisfies a specific need and is part of material wealth, but the value of a commodity measures its popularity for all components of material wealth, including the social wealth of its owner. It is also worth mentioning that any present amount of money is limited in quantity and has a certain range as a means of purchase. This contradiction between the quantitative limitation of money on the one hand and the qualitative unlimitedness, that is, it’s being usable everywhere and always and being exchangeable for all commodities, has led goldsmiths or money-mad lovers to seek hoarding with the greatest desire. In order to treasure gold as much as possible and to turn it into a reserve currency, its role as a means of purchase had to be reduced as much as possible. It had to be removed from the circulation. On this basis, the goldsmith sacrificed his physical pleasures and comforts on the threshold of hoarding. On the other hand, the more he produced, the more he could sell, and on this basis, work, contentment, and greed were his three main virtues. Selling a lot and buying a little also determined the pillars of his political economy.

In an economy dominated by the circulation of metallic money, hoarding plays an effective role. With the constant fluctuations in the circulation of goods, the volume of money in circulation decreases or increases in terms of size, price, and speed, which is why it is necessary for the volume of money to be able to contract and expand, sometimes money goes out of circulation as coins and sometimes enters it. In order for the volume of money in circulation to always be able to adapt to the degree of saturation of the circulation environment, it is necessary for the amount of gold or silver in the country to be greater than the quantity that they perform according to their coinage function. Hoards and treasuries, as channels for the removal and absorption of money in circulation, help in this task. Money in circulation never overflows the channels of circulation.

B – Payment method

In simple commodity circulation, a single value always assumes two different forms: commodity and money. On this basis, the owners of commodities appear as representatives of equivalents with two different forms in opposition to each other. But with the development of circulation, a situation arose that had a significant impact on the dynamics of this confrontation. The acquisition of the price of a commodity gradually became more distant from the time of its dispatch. Let us explain the story a little. The production of one commodity required a short time, while the other required more or much more time. Depending on their type, commodities were produced at different times of the year, some were procured in the local market, while others arrived from distant places. The owner of one commodity was ready to sell before the owner of another commodity was ready to buy. These conditions of production required the adjustment of the conditions of sale to suit themselves, and they had to do so, or they created and made these conditions prevail. Apart from this, some commodities, for example houses, were sold under contract before the time of delivery arrived, the buyer became the owner of the use value of the house after the expiration of the period, and he paid the money at the end of this period, while the seller had sold the house without receiving the price in advance. In other words, the seller was the creditor, and the buyer was the debtor. Given all these changes and the emergence of new conditions, money acquired a new role, it became a means of payment. Let us not forget that we are still talking about simple commodity circulation, the positions of debtor and creditor are also considered with the components of this same cycle of circulation. However, what had happened, for example, the conflicts between debtor and creditor, had the capacity to appear and intensify as a social event, apart from the process of commodity circulation. For example, the class struggle that prevailed in the ancient world took the form of a struggle between debtors and creditors. In Rome, this struggle resulted in the defeat of the plebeians, or poor peasants and small craftsmen. The plebeians were defeated in war by the patricians (nobles) and were enslaved by the slave economy. In the Middle Ages, the defeat of the feudal lords and debtors led to the destruction of their political power.

Let us return to the sphere of commodity circulation. With the explanations we have given, the simultaneous presence of goods and money at the two poles of the sales process was suspended and postponed. Now, on the one hand, money had become the measure of value for determining the price of the goods sold, the price of the goods sold according to the contract and which the buyer had to pay at a certain date. On the other hand, it played the role of a hypothetical means of purchase and, with this role, also caused the transfer of goods. Needless to say, money only entered the circulation as a means of payment when the payment period was due and passed from the buyer to the seller.

The role of money as a means of payment is seriously contradictory. As long as payments compensate each other, for example, producers sell their commodities, buy new things with their price, and purchases and sales complement each other, money has a subjective function and acts as a measure of values. But as soon as real, asymmetrical payments come into play, for example, multiple sales with multiple contracts, with different due dates, money no longer enters the field simply as a medium of circulation or a determinant of the value of commodities, but on the contrary, it firmly and steadfastly demonstrates its embodied role, demonstrates the independent existence of its exchange value, and manifests itself as a public commodity. The rise of this contradiction can be clearly seen in the occasional rebellious industrial and commercial crises. These crises broke out where the long chain of payments, and with it the system artificially created for clearing these payments, had fully developed. Whenever and for whatever reason this payment system is disturbed, money suddenly and immediately goes beyond its merely hypothetical form, and lays bare its material and embodied status. Commodities become worthless, their use value disappears from sight and pales in comparison with their exchange value. If only yesterday the bourgeois were shouting that the commodity is everything and money is a mental creation, now they are everywhere shouting that money is above everything and nothing is above money. The crisis raises the contradiction between the commodity and its value form, money, to the point of absolute contradiction.

If we consider the total volume of money in circulation at a given time, we will see that this money, with respect to its specific speed of circulation, as a means of circulation and payment, must be equivalent to the following items: 1- The sum of the prices that must be realized, 2- The total of the payments that are due one after the other, of course, we must subtract the payments that are made one after the other and the transactions in which a given coin is alternately the medium of circulation and the means of payment. Let us illustrate the matter with an example. A farmer sells his wheat for £2, this money acts as a medium of exchange, the farmer uses the money to pay for the linen he has previously bought from the weaver, so the same £2 here acts as a payment. The weaver buys a garment with this cash; the money here again acts as a medium of exchange. This process can continue in this way. Therefore, if prices, the velocity of circulation of money and the rate of use of the means of payment are constant quantities, the volume of money in circulation and the volume of goods that circulate in a given time interval, say a day, will not coincide. Here there is money in circulation that represents goods that have already left circulation, while at the same time there are goods in circulation whose monetary equivalents arrive later.

Besides all this, the payments which are committed every day and the payments which fall due one after the other are completely dissimilar quantities. Credit money is the result of the function of money as a means of payment. A promissory note relating to the claims arising from the sale of commodity, in turn, circulates and transfers these claims to another. With the development of the credit system, the role of money as a means of payment also continues to expand. Money in this direction acquires specific forms of existence and with these forms becomes the field of large-scale trade. While gold and silver coins gradually take the path of retail trade. When commodity production has passed certain stages of its development, it extends the scope of money’s function as a means of payment beyond the sphere of commodity circulation. Money becomes the general commodity of contracts. Interest, taxes, and the like all abandon the form of payments in kind and become payments in cash. The two great failures of the Roman Empire in collecting tribute in the form of money loudly declare that the conversion of payments in kind into cash requires certain conditions in the development of commodity production. The indescribable poverty of the French peasants in the time of Louis XIV was not simply due to the heavy taxes; the change in the form of taxation from in-kind to cash played a much more fundamental role. The reverse was the case in Asia. Here the payment of rent in kind, which determined the main share of state taxes, depended on the prevailing production relations, and this method of payment in turn helped to preserve the old form of production. This was also one of the secrets of the survival of the Ottoman Empire. If the foreign trade imposed on Japan by Europe had led to the transformation of rent in kind into cash in that country, it would have been the triumph of Japanese model agriculture. With the development of bourgeois society, hoarding as an independent form of wealth accumulation disappeared, but it grew enormously in the form of a reserve fund for means of payment.

C. Universal Money

In world trade, commodities universalize their value. Their independent value form appears before them in the form of world money. Here, for the first time, money plays the full role of a commodity whose natural form is directly the social form of the realization of abstract human labour. In the domestic sphere, only one commodity can play the role of a measure of value, and it is this commodity that becomes money. In the world market, two measures of value are common. These two measures are gold and silver. World money performs several important functions at once. It is a universal means of purchase, a universal means of payment, and it also plays the role of the absolute social embodiment of wealth in its global sense. In the meantime, the task it assumes as a means of payment in settling the balance of international accounts is its main function. Gold and silver assume the role of a means of global purchases mainly at times when the balance in the sphere of exchange of products between countries or governments is disturbed, and finally, when the issue is not purchase or payment but the transfer of wealth from one country to another, it is this global money that solves the problem. Every country needs a monetary reserve in the same way that it needs a monetary reserve in the world market for the circulation of its economic affairs.

Part 2: Transformation of Money into Capital

Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital

The circulation of commodities is the point of origin of capital in its earliest forms. Trade, i.e. production for sale and circulation of commodities, provides the historical background for the emergence of capital. The history of capital in the modern era begins with the expansion of world trade and the world market in the 16th century. Money, as the final product of the process of commodity circulation, is the first form of the emergence of capital. Capital historically appeared in the form of money, money wealth, merchant capital, usurious capital in contrast to landed property. The first distinction between money as money and then as capital is their distinct forms of circulation. The simple form of the circulation of commodities was (commodity-money-commodity) or the conversion of commodities into money and the conversion of money back into commodities, but alongside this form we encountered another form. (money-commodity-money) or the conversion of money into commodities and the conversion of commodities back into money, which can be summarized in buying with the aim of selling. Here, it was in this second form of circulation that money was converted into capital. Let us briefly examine the story. Here too the circuit of circulation goes through two phases. First (money – commodity) where money leaves the hands of the individual and goods are purchased. Second commodity – money) where the purchased goods are converted back into money. Unlike the simple form of circulation which started with goods and ended with commodities, here it starts with money and ends with money. When we buy with money to sell and get money, the starting and ending point of our work will be money. As we review the story, a question will arise in our minds. What is the purpose of this form of circulation? Why should we throw the money we have into circulation so that after a while we can return to the same money again? The answer to this question also clarifies the stark difference between (money – commodity – money) and the simple form of circulation or (commodity – money – commodity). In order to break down this fundamental distinction, it is better to first look at their commonalities.

1. In both forms of circulation, we deal with commodity and money. 2- Within both, there are the characters of buyer and seller. 3- In both, the circulation process consists of two reciprocal and complementary circles. 4- And finally, in both processes, one only sells, one only buys, and the third is both buyer and seller. But let us see the differences between the two forms:
2. Simple circulation begins with sale and ends with purchase. While the latter, on the contrary, begins with purchase and ends with sale. 2- In the former, the starting and ending point is the commodity, but in the latter, it is money. 3- In the former, the medium of the whole process is money, but in the latter, it is the commodity. 4- In the former, money ultimately becomes a use value, and this means that the money has been spent, but in the latter, the buyer advances money only because he will later acquire it as a seller, he gives up the money but only with the intention of grabbing it again, so the money has not been spent. 5- In the simple form of circulation, a coin or banknote is moved twice, the seller takes it from the buyer and gives it to another seller. In the second form (money-commodity-money), not the banknote but the commodity is moved twice, causing the money to return to its point of departure. 6- And most importantly, in the second form, we are faced with a very clear difference between the circulation of money as capital and the circulation of money as money. In the path of simple circulation, the end point of the circuit is a commodity that leaves the sphere of circulation and enters the sphere of use. The ultimate goal of the cycle is the satisfaction of needs and use value. But in the path (money-commodity-money) the cause, the goal, and everything is exchanging value. In the simple form of circulation, the poles of beginning and end are both commodities. Commodities that carry equal value, but have different use values. In the second form of circulation, money is capital, at both poles of the money circuit stands, both not different use values ​​but only money, and this money is the converted form of commodities whose use value has disappeared. Finally, since the process (money – commodity – money) does not contain any qualitative difference between its two poles at the beginning and end, the quantitative changes of the two poles, i.e., reaching more money than the money advanced, are the whole meaning and content of circulation. Here the aim is simply to lead (money – commodity – money) to (money – commodity – money plus a surplus). Surplus money, which is surplus value. The owner of money becomes a capitalist in this cycle, and the increase in capital occupies the fabric of his mind, structures his consciousness, becomes the sole motivation for his actions. He is capital personified and endowed with capitalist consciousness. The relentless pursuit of profit becomes the first and last word of his existence, and the way in which this profit is secured becomes the centre of development and the expression of all social, moral, and cultural criteria and values, and everything in it. Now, if we examine the specific forms that capital or self-increasing value takes, we will see different determinations. Capital is money, capital is a commodity, but value here is the moving series of a process within which it itself becomes an increased value by acquiring the distinct figures of money and commodity. Value now, by virtue of its value, has acquired the miraculous power to procreate.

In simple circulation, the value of commodities, in contrast to their use value, finally took the form of money. In (money – commodity – money) value (exchange value) assumes the role of a transformed substance for which commodities and money are only forms. Furthermore, it establishes a private relationship with itself. As primary value, it is distinguished from itself as surplus value. This is how value becomes self-renewing, becomes capital. It goes out of circulation, returns to circulation. It both preserves and multiplies itself. It grows and grows larger. It seems that buying for resale at a higher price is a form that is specific only to commercial capital, but industrial capital is also money that is transformed into commodities (raw materials and labour power) and becomes a larger capital with the sale of the product. This valorisation is also true of the capital of the lord. In a word (money – commodities – money) is the general formula of capital.

2- Contradictions of the general formula

The form of circulation in which money is transformed into capital violates the laws that we know about the nature of commodities, value, money, and the flow of circulation. In this form, we witness the birth of surplus value for which, in the flow of circulation itself, not only no father, but even no mother can be found. The basic law of commodity economy is that commodities are exchanged on the basis of their value. If this is so, as it must be, then what happens to this surplus value and where does this contradiction find its answer? What distinguishes the form of circulation in question from its simple form is that (commodity – money – commodity) began with a sale and ended with a purchase, while (money – commodity – money) began with a purchase and ended with a sale. This difference itself does not open an opening for the creation of value beyond the value existing in the commodities, in the form of (money – commodity – money). Let us explain a little. Kaveh, the owner of the goods, in the form of (commodity – money – commodity), sells goods to Babak and buys goods from Arash. In the form of (money – commodity – money), he also buys goods from Arash and sells the same to Babak. For Arash and Babak, there is no difference in these two forms of exchange. Both people enter the field as buyers and sellers in both cases. Kaveh is either the owner of the goods or the owner of the money in both situations. Furthermore, in both cases, he is the buyer to Arash and the seller to Babak. He encounters the former as the representative of money and the latter as the representative of the goods. So far, our efforts to find the origin of the newly emerging surplus value in (money- commodity -money) have been completely futile and we have not reached any results. In the simple form of the era, money is only a medium of exchange, and as far as the exchange of use values ​​is concerned, both parties win. Because each give away unnecessary use value and seizes necessary use value, each may gain something in the meantime. A wheat farmer and a winemaker, if the former always grows wheat and the latter always produces wine, will most likely have a larger and better crop than if both produce both wheat and wine. Here, the mere entry of money into the cycle of circulation and its role as an intermediary in the circulation of Here, the mere entry of money into the cycle of circulation and its role as an intermediary in the circulation of commodities, or the transformation of buying and selling into two separate and distinct acts, does not disrupt the foundation of labour, does not create fundamental changes, and does not create a source or birthplace for surplus value. As long as the discussion is about the exchange of use values, it can be said that both sides are winners. So let us examine the cycle of exchange of value of exchanges. Let us consider the same example as above. Two people, one is a producer of wheat and the other is a winemaker. The first gives a certain volume of wheat with 50 hours of socially necessary labour concentrated to the winemaker, and the second gives a barrel of wine containing the same amount of socially necessary labour time to the wheat farmer, or the transformation of buying and selling into two separate and distinct acts, does not disrupt the foundation of labour, does not create fundamental changes, and does not create a source or birthplace for surplus value. As long as the discussion is about the exchange of use values, it can be said that both sides are winners. So let us examine the cycle of exchange of value of exchanges. Let us consider the same example as above. Two people, one is a producer of wheat and the other is a winemaker. The first gives a certain volume of wheat with 50 hours of socially necessary labour concentrated to the winemaker, and the second gives a barrel of wine containing the same amount of socially necessary labour time to the wheat farmer.

This exchange creates no wealth for either party. The fact that money, as a medium of exchange, takes over the transfer of commodities does not change the essence of the matter. Commodities had a certain value before they entered circulation, and they continue to carry the same amount of value afterwards. Value is the condition of circulation, not its result. In the maze of this circulation, there have been shifts. Wheat and wine first had their natural commodity form, then they assumed the form of money, then they were transformed again into commodities of a different form; all this has happened, but still no trace can be found of the origin of the surplus-value which we are investigating. All searches cry out that no new value is born from the circulation and exchange of equal values. The contradiction remains very serious, and it is this contradiction that has forced political economists to weave all kinds of contradictions. Some have seen the origin of this surplus value in the exchange of unequal’s, buying cheaper and selling more expensive. By putting forward this so-called argument, they not only did not resolve the contradiction, but also made it more misleading and obscure. The new question that was facing them was that every seller becomes a buyer and every buyer becomes a seller. If someone sells expensively, another can also sell to him expensively. If someone wants to buy cheaply, the seller must also have bought cheaply. If people gain something in one place, they lose the same amount in the next step, and no new value is born from this process. What is exchanged is the same value that was in the commodities. Some have argued that the root of this surplus value lies in the existence of a certain group, a group that has all its wealth from plunder and plunder, does not work, and always buys without selling. Here too, the serious question arises: if this “tribe,” always buying and averse to selling, has acquired all its wealth from plunder, then the total value produced and crystallized in commodities has not undergone any new increase. We observe that in the dynamics of the commodity era, wherever we turn, no trace of the source of new value or surplus value can be found. This is the essence of the argument. The process of commodity circulation does not create any value. In this regard, merchant capital and usury do not create any value. There is no doubt about this, but the certainty of this still does not solve the problem. The contradiction that looms over us in the cycle of commodity circulation still remains. After all, where is the source of this surplus value that accrues to merchant capital? Moreover, where did all the merchant capital of the pre-capitalist era come from and how was it accumulated?

It seems that this capital must be sought in the relations between the productive buyers and sellers and the merchant, but the path to this conclusion is not without its pitfalls. If we do not want to consider the increase in the value of commercial capital and this capital itself as the result of the gross fraud of the merchant and the foolish deception of the producer, we must continue our search with greater acuity. This search will reveal that: 1- Why are merchant and usurious capital always left out of our analysis of the fundamental form of capital or capital representing the economic organization of modern society? 2- Both merchant and usurious capitals are only subsidiary forms. 3- These two forms of capital emerged historically before the capital characteristic of the capitalist mode of production.

The origin of surplus value is certainly not in the sphere of circulation, that much is obvious. Therefore, something must have happened outside circulation, but is it possible for this surplus value to be created somewhere other than circulation, outside the process of relations between the owners of commodities? The answer to this question is as complicated as the previous ones. Outside the process of circulation, the owner of the commodity has only his commodity. He knows that this commodity contains a certain amount of labour or labour time, the value of the commodity is calculated in money, the monetary expression is the price value, and the owner of the commodity sees the manifestation of his labour in, say, 10 pounds.

His/her labour cannot appear once as £10 worth and again as £11, i.e. a value greater than its actual value. But he can increase the value of the existing one by adding new labour and consequently new value. For example, he can make shoes from leather, which have a higher value than the leather, while the leather used in them has the same value as before, has not been reproduced and has not added new value to itself in the process of being made into shoes. He/she cannot make value increase and invest his money outside the sphere of circulation and without contact with the owners of other commodities. To sum up, capital cannot arise from circulation, it cannot originate from anywhere else. Its origin must be both in circulation and not in it. Finally: the transformation of money into capital must be explained on the basis of the inherent laws of the exchange of commodities, and the basis of the work must be laid on the exchange of equal values. The owner of money, who is still at the beginning of the path to becoming a capitalist, must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process have more money than was advanced. We have only reached the halfway point of the search, we must continue.

3 – Buying and selling labour power

The source of the increase in the value of money that becomes capital cannot be in money itself. Because money plays the role of a medium of purchase and payment when it is in circulation, and when it is out of circulation it maintains its specific existing form (treasure), in neither of these two cases is money able to give birth to money. In this regard, this birth is impossible to occur in the second circle of the circulation circuit (money – commodity – money), that is, the circle (commodity – money), because here only the commodity changes from its natural form to the monetary form again. All of these shout out the same thing in unison, and what they shout out is exactly the secret that is dear to us, the missing link we are looking for, the true source of the production of surplus value. The secret of the creation of capital here, in the first link of the circuit (money – commodity – money), lies in the commodity that the owner of capital buys. The commodity whose consumption by the buyer (capitalist) creates value. The commodity whose process of emancipation from being a commodity, the process of emancipation of its owner from being a worker, is the process of human liberation in history. This commodity is labour power, here is the source of surplus value. But in order for the owner of money to be able to buy this commodity, this commodity itself must already be available on the market, its owner must also be able and compelled to sell it. Another important condition must also be met: the owner of money and the owner of the commodity of labour power must meet, this meeting must be continuous. The latter must be able to sell his commodity for a certain period of time, to regard what he has, that is, his labour power, only as a commodity, to be always ready to hand this commodity over to the customer and for it to be consumed by the buyer. He/she must completely abandon the idea of ​​owning the commodities in which his labour is embodied. He must think only of selling his labour-power, consent to this act, consider it his destiny, and finally have no other commodity than this labour-power. These components must have come into being, but how and by what process? This is a subject whose explanation and investigation must be pursued elsewhere. There is no doubt that nature has not made some people the owners of money and some the owners of the commodity of labour-power, nor is the opposition of the two a relationship that has existed in all historical ages. The conditions in question certainly arose from some important historical developments. The main point here is that the commodification of labour and the emergence of the relationship of buying and selling labour were the cornerstones of the capitalist mode of production. The commodification of labour products and the growth of commodity production had a long history, but the mere growth of the circulation of money and commodities did not guarantee the creation of the conditions for the rise of capital. Capital only arose where the owner of the means of production and the means of subsistence had access to the seller of a commodity called labour in the market. So let us examine this special commodity, full of wonders. This commodity, like all other commodities, has a value, but how is this value determined? Like all other commodities, its value is equal to the socially necessary labour that is used to produce and, of course, reproduce it. Labor power is the ability of a living person to work, so this person must be found alive as long as his commodity is needed. To keep him alive for the required period, he naturally needs some food and means of subsistence. The labour time required to produce this subsistence constitutes the value of labour power. To be more precise, the value of labour power is the value of the means of subsistence that are necessary to keep its owner alive. But this keeping alive within itself also has conditions and restrictions that must be considered. Among them:

1. Labor power, in the process of transition from potential to action, that is, its objective and practical application, is accompanied by the expenditure of some muscle, nerve, brain, and all physical and intellectual powers. These are things that must be compensated. A person who works today must be able to do this work tomorrow. The cost of the means of subsistence must be sufficient to reproduce this power, for food, clothing, fuel, shelter, and the like. 2. The type of these facilities, subsistence needs or biological needs in different countries and regions can carry more or less differences depending on climatic characteristics, natural conditions, geographical variations or even customs and habits.

3. The dimensions, number and scope of these needs are historical phenomena, they are the product of history, and, above all, they are related to the position of the working class and the length and breadth of the labour movement.

4. The seller of labour does not have eternal life, he is doomed to die, but capital needs to buy labour as long as it exists, and just as it replaces its broken machine with a new one, it is also preparing to replace the deceased labour force. Accordingly, the means of livelihood needed to raise the next generation of labour sellers should also be included in the list of necessities for the production of labour and ensuring the constant presence of this commodity in the market.

5. The more skills and experience a worker acquire, the more productive the use of his labour will be for the capitalist. Accordingly, the cost of training and educating the labour force is included in the list of means required to reproduce this commodity.

If we add together the value or socially necessary labour time condensed into the total of these means of subsistence which are necessary for the production and reproduction of the commodity of labour power, we arrive at the price of labour power. Some of these items, such as food, are consumed daily, others, such as clothing and household furniture, are consumed every few months, and finally, some tools and facilities are produced at much longer intervals. It is easy to calculate the average daily value or socially necessary labour crystallized into all these goods and necessities. It is enough to add up all the time of socially necessary intensive work in a year and divide the sum by the number of days in the year. Let us assume that the daily average we are looking for is equal to 1 hour of a 12-hour workday and its monetary expression is equal to 50 thousand tomans, the current Iranian currency. In this case, the price of the purchased labour force, these 50 thousand tomans, will be equivalent to one hour of work, while the seller of the labour force has worked for 12 hours. The minimum value of labour force consists of the value of the total goods without which the worker is unable to reproduce his labour force. If the price of labour falls to this extent, its price will be lower than its value. It is the custom of capitalism to pay the price of labour after it has been used for a specified period and at the end of this period. In this way, the worker always provides the value of the use of his labour to the capitalist in advance. Before receiving the price of his commodity, he allows the capitalist to use it. If the period of this forced permission was a week or a month a hundred years ago, today in Iranian society it has been extended to months and sometimes years.

Part Three – Production of Absolute Surplus Value

Chapter Five: The Labour Process and the Valuation Process

1 – The process of work

Work is, above all, a process between man and nature. Man interacts with nature through work. He intervenes in nature to change it and adapt it to his needs. In the process, he also changes his own nature. When we talk about work, we are not talking about its primitive, instinctive, animal forms. We are talking about work with its distinctively human character. The bee may put skilled architects to shame by building wax chambers, but the advantage of the worst architect over the best bee is that the former has built the structure in his head before he begins. Man, by his work, not only changes the form of the materials of nature but also applies his purpose to the process of this change and makes it a reality. He is aware of this purpose in advance; he governs the way he works and subordinates his will to it. The subordination of the will to the purpose here is not momentary, it is continuous, it is contemplation and attention. The less attractive the nature of the work and the way it is done to man, the more unpleasant and joyless the process of doing the work, the more intense and focused this attention will be. The simple factors of the labour process are purposeful and planned activity, the subject of labour, and the means or tools of labour. Land, water, fish, a tree that has fallen to the ground in a natural forest, a mineral that is separated from a mountain, raw materials, and all objects that lose their direct connection with the environment through labour are objects of labour. Every raw material is an object of labour, but the reverse is not true. The object of labour becomes raw material when changes are made in it by labour. The tools of labour are objects that come between man and the subject of labour. What a person directly possesses is not the subject of labour, but the tools of labour. In this regard, nature plays the role of a tool of labour for man, a tool that complements his body. The earth is the storehouse of man’s provisions and at the same time the storehouse of his tools of labour, for example, it provides him with stones for throwing, making mills, pressing, cutting and other works. The earth is therefore a tool of labour. The labour process, as it develops, requires tools that are prepared and prepared for a specific purpose.

The making and use of tools of labour existed in embryonic form among animals, but the distinguishing feature is the specific process of human labour. For this reason, the discovery of the tools of labour of the ancients has become an effective aid to the understanding of economic formations. What distinguishes different economic periods from each other is not the product of labour itself, but the tools of labour and the manner of their production. The instruments of labour are not only a measure of the degree of development of human labour, but also a means of recognizing the specific social relations in which the work is carried out. Among all the instruments, mechanical instruments such as the hammer, sickle, and Plow play the role of the skeleton of production and are an effective guide in identifying the characteristics of a given form or period of production. The instruments of labour, in their general sense, consist of all the objective devices for carrying out the dynamics of labour. These devices do not enter directly into the labour process, but the labour process would be impossible without them or at least would suffer from decisive limitations.

In the process of work, man, with the help of tools, makes the intended changes in the object of his work, his activity is manifested in the product. The work is intertwined with the object of work, it is embodied, and the movement of the worker takes on the form of the static properties of the product. The worker builds, and the product of his labour becomes a building. Labor and the subject of labour together constitute the means of production. Use values ​​emerge from the labour process, but they are use values ​​that, as products of previous labour, play the role of means of production and enter the labour process. This type of use value is both a product of labour and a means of labour. Every object has different properties. It can, while being ready for immediate consumption, also play the role of raw and auxiliary materials in various labour processes. It may be usable only as raw material, in the form of what is called a semi-finished product, but it has actually been manufactured to a certain extent. What determines whether a use value is a raw material, an instrument, or a product is simply the role that this use value plays in the labour process. As this role changes, its name and character also change. The important point is that when a product enters a new labour process as a means of production, it loses its character as a product and assumes only the role of an objective agent of living labour. For example, a spinner sees his spindle only as a means of labour.

A machine that is not involved and active in the labour process is not only useless but also falls into the abyss of scrap, iron rusts, wood rots, yarn that is not used in the production of clothes and fabrics is wasted cotton. It is only living labour that transforms them or the entire value of potential uses into actual and real use values. It is only labour that falls like fire on the soul of all things, melts them in itself, gives them life, enables them to manifest their potential and the most sublime form of performance. These objects are consumed in this process, mixed with living labour, but planned, with a definite purpose, and as phenomena that are to be the thread and thread of the production of a new product for the use of individuals or the tools and instruments of a new labour process. The finished products are not only the result of the labour process but also the condition of its existence. In order to preserve and realize their use value, these products have no choice but to be mixed again with living labour and to flow into the labour process.

Labor is itself a process of consumption because it consumes its subject and its means. The distinction between productive consumption and individual consumption is that in the latter the product is consumed as a means of life for a living individual, but in the former as a means of life, an activity that expresses the creativity of living labour power. Labor, since its subject and means are the result of labour, consumes the product in order to produce the product, but the labour process is at the same time a process of interaction between man and nature. Even today we use the means that nature has given us and that do not show on their faces any signs of being the result of a mixture of natural materials and human labour. Let us once again state that the labour process, in its simple and abstract form, is the purposeful activity of man for the production of use-values ​​and the preparation of nature for the satisfaction of human needs. It is the general condition of exchange between man and nature, the eternal condition of human life, independent of any form of human life or of all its social forms. In other words, it is common to all forms of human social life.

Continuing to examine the labour process, let us look at the capitalist’s appearance. He has purchased all the factors necessary for the labour process, including tools and equipment, raw materials, and labour-power goods. Everything is ready and he begins to consume labour-power. He commands the worker to consume the means of production with his work. The labour process, once the process of consuming labour-power is carried out by the capitalist, has two basic characteristics. First, the worker works under the control of the capitalist, and second, the product becomes the undisputed property of the capitalist. By selling his labour power, the worker no longer has any use for it; this power, like any other commodity, becomes the property of the buyer without any conditions. It is only the capitalist who decides on the purchased labour power and its consumption, determining how it is consumed, with what materials and substances it is mixed, what to produce, how much to produce, and everything becomes the inalienable right of capital. The worker no longer has any use for his work, not only is he no longer a use for his own work, but he is deprived of the right to any intervention in the fate of his work, production, and life. The right to determine the fate of his work and production is taken away from him and the indisputable and unchallenged right of capital is taken away. It is capital that makes policies for all issues related to his life, determines the boundaries of rights, freedom, civilization and authority, or in fact, defines all of these. Most importantly, it determines and determines all of these based on the needs of its own profitability and self-aggrandizement, that is, capital. It makes thoughts, beliefs, culture, ethics, social values ​​and everything else that are mechanisms for the self-aggrandizement of capital dominate the existence and non-existence of society and the lives of the working masses. It deprives workers of all rights, freedom, will and human agency. All of these are homogeneous, fused and dynamic components of labour in the capitalist mode of production.

2 – Valuation Process

In the production of commodities, use value is generally only the material carrier of exchange value. The capitalist has two goals. First, he produces use value in order to have exchange value. Second, he wants to produce a commodity whose value is greater than the sum of the values ​​used in its production. A commodity is essentially the unity of use value and exchange value. The process of its production is also the unity of the labour process and the process of value production. So let us examine the process of production as a process of value creation. The value of any commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour embodied in it. This rule also applies to the commodity produced in the process of consuming the labour power of the worker by the capitalist. Let us assume that the product we are examining is a Samand Soren car. First of all, let us calculate the amount of socially necessary labour or labour time concentrated in this car. In a very simple search, we can come across these figures.

1 – The cost of raw materials, semi-finished parts, tires, seats, auxiliary equipment, and the like is 643 GBP,

2 – The cost of depreciation of machinery is 57 GBP,

3 – Water, electricity, transportation, and similar items are 57 GBP,

Adding all the above items together, we arrive at the figure of 757 GBP (Pounds).

4 – The world of available data and evidence tells us that the value of the commodity produced by an 8-hour workday, with socially necessary work in the current historical conditions in Iranian society, is approximately equivalent to 14,3 GBP, 757 GBP we calculated would be approximately equivalent to 53 workdays. To put it more clearly, the total raw materials, depreciation, semi-finished parts and auxiliary equipment required for a Samand-Soren car is equal to 53 8-hour workdays, and this is of course a composite of the total working time spent in numerous and diverse work processes, at different intervals, in different places and conditions, for example, extraction, smelting, rolling, transportation, etc., to prepare these materials. The fact that each of these materials, parts, and auxiliary equipment was produced at different times, in different environments, under different conditions, and by workers in different countries has no particular bearing on our calculations. From the point of view of this analysis, all of these can be considered as preceding, following, or intermediate parts of a continuous labour process. The important point is that we have before us so far 53 days of labour crystallized in the goods needed to make a (Samand Soren car).

5 – The second part of the cost of producing a car is determined by the wages of the workers. Needless to say, the remaining part of the work process to prepare the car, such as welding, turning, milling, assembly and all other tasks, is not done by one or two workers but by a number of workers with related work, but our discussion is focused on the working time. The socially necessary labour time in each of these areas and to perform each part of the specific labour process in question or to produce a Samand-Soren car, in this regard, we assume that a total of 3 8-hour workdays is required to complete this process. Add these 3 days to the previous work time accumulated in raw materials, semi-finished parts, auxiliary equipment, tires, engines, and all other tools. We arrive at 56 days of work as the total time crystallized in a Samand-Soren car.

So far, everything is a story of loss and loss, or at best, the capitalist’s exhausting struggle and toil without any result for days on end!!! He has bought and imported various goods carrying 45 days of labour from all corners of the world, he has spent days traveling here and there. He/she has made the whole world a testing ground for tricks, deceit and deceit, he has borne the cost of depreciation of machinery. He/she has borne the other costs. He has created cruelty after cruelty, and now he stands at the very beginning of his work, and he has no more riyal than his previous capital. In total, he has collected 53 days of labour concentrated in goods in various forms, and he has also bought 3 days of labour of workers and added to it. What is now ready for release is a commodity that has 56 days of 8-hour labour crystallized within it. The value of every commodity is socially necessary labour, and the Samand Car, a product of a company owned or managed by a capitalist, cannot and is not supposed to have a value greater than this number of days of labour.

The commodity economy and its final form of development, capitalism, are based on the law of value, and the law of value firmly and firmly declares that the total value contained in the ocean of wealth, or the socially necessary labour concentrated in this ocean, does not exceed 56 days of labour. It seems that we are at a dead end, but “what fear of the waves of the sea, let Noah be the shipowner” capitalism is the solution to problems! Incidentally, the Miracle Foundation and the Miracle Creation Identity are exactly here, solving this very problem. With this mission, role, and identity, it has entered history and announced its emergence. So, let’s break down the process of this miracle. The three days of work used in the process of preparing and completing a car is equivalent to one-tenth of a worker’s monthly work, and this worker, under normal conditions, at best, has received a salary of about 43 GBP for 30 days of work. In one month, he/she has prepared about 10 Samand Soren for release by receiving this amount. Here is the delicate and sensitive point. This worker has been working for an entire month on the process of completing and preparing 10 vehicles and has only received 43 GBP in return. We are approaching the secret of the story or the weapon of capital in breaking the deadlock. The capitalist in the same place of the company has acquired 56 8-hour days of labour in exchange for the sale of each Samand Soren. The total sales result is 560 days of labour condensed with the socially necessary scale of labour in the current conditions of Iranian society. But the owner of the capital has not purchased 560 days of labour for all of these 10 cars, and what he has paid is blatantly different from what he receives. 10 cars certainly involve 560 days of labour, but the capitalist has only paid 530 days of labour for raw materials, semi-finished parts, auxiliary equipment, tires, seats, and the like, plus the equivalent value of 3 days of labour, or 43 Pounds, as the monthly wage for the worker. The worker has only received the price of 3 days for a month of work. He has worked for the owner of capital for 27 days. Instead of doing the same calculations with the socially necessary labour time condensed in cars, let us follow the same calculations with the monetary expression of values, that is, the monetary form of the crystallized labour value in 10 Samand Soren. For each vehicle, 643 GBP have been invested in raw and auxiliary materials, semi-finished parts, and other supplies, in addition to 57 GBP in depreciation costs and 57 GBP in utilities, transportation, and other expenses.

The cost of labour used in the production of a car is only 4,28 Pounds. The sum of these two parts, or in other words, the sum of fixed and variable capital used in the production of each Samand Soran, is 761 GBP. This car was sold at the factory for 799,7 GBP, and the resulting value added is 38.1 GBP. If we divide this figure by the worker’s wage, we will arrive at a value-added rate of 900 percent. A figure that is lower than the average value-added rate in the entire territory of social capital reproduction in Iran, and we are only using it as an example.

We have already spoken sufficiently about the difference between labour as use-value and labour as value-creation. What we must emphasize here, following the recent analysis and as a result of this analysis, is the profoundly distinct manifestation of this difference in the two different aspects of the production process. The process of production as the unity of the labour process and the value-creation process is the process of commodity production, but this same process as the unity of the labour process and valorisation is the process of capitalist production. In pre-capitalist commodity production, we do not witness a process of valorisation. Commodities were exchanged with each other on the basis of the socially necessary labour inherent in them. What took place was an exchange of equals. The parties to the exchange did not acquire more value than they had latent in their commodities. It is only in capitalism that the labour process is characterized by valorisation. The reason for this is very clear. Here a commodity enters the field whose consumption is productive and creates a mass of new values. The price of this commodity has nothing to do with the volume and size of these added values; like any other commodity, it is produced by the socially necessary labour concentrated in it, and this socially necessary labour is precisely the socially necessary labour time that is necessary in the commodities needed for its production and reproduction. The capitalist pays the same price, the price of its production, for the purchase of the commodity of labour power, but this commodity creates several, sometimes even dozens, times more new value, surplus value in the process of consumption by the capitalist. Values ​​that directly and completely accrue to the owner of capital and become the capital of the capitalist class.

Part Three: Continued

Chapter Six: Fixed Capital and Variable Capital

All the various components and factors of the labour process, with the exception of one, merely transfer their existing value, a part or a spark of this value, to the new product. Among them, it is only the commodity of labour power that produces a mass of new values ​​and adds to the old values. The latter commodity in the labour process simultaneously plays two roles, creating a huge mass of new values ​​and preserving the old values ​​and transferring them to the product. How does the worker play these two roles simultaneously?  How does he produce new values ​​and transfer old values? This is a matter that needs to be explained. He has sold his labour power to the capitalist for a certain period of time. The capitalist uses this commodity, like any raw material or other commodity, in a certain process of labour to produce a new product. Here and in the heart of this process, important events occur, the analysis of which is the key to discovering the above secrets. These events are:

1. Each of the commodities used in different labour processes to produce a specific product, for example a mobile phone, carries a certain amount of socially necessary value or labour time. Let’s assume that a mobile phone manufacturing company has 50 workers, each worker delivers one mobile phone every 40 minutes, for a total of 12 phones during an 8-hour workday. The capitalist pays the equivalent of 28,6 Pounds for the materials needed for a mobile phone, including front and back covers, battery, vibrator, antenna, microphone, bell, capacitor, resistor, transistor, diode, coil, IC, blocks, memory, speaker, filter. For all of this, in addition to labour, he pays 1,3 pound as a daily wage to the worker. During the first 40 minutes, the worker delivers a value equivalent to his entire daily wage to the capitalist, and with this calculation, the entire socially necessary labour is condensed into a mobile phone worth 29,8 Pound. The worker is forced to continue working and throughout the day produces not one phone, but 12 devices. He/she makes 12 mobile phones worth 358 Pound ready for delivery to the market, while what he receives is simply the cost of the labour used in one of these 12 devices. We see that all the materials imported or involved in the process of producing the mobile phone have only transferred their existing value to the new product, and it is only the labour commodity that has produced a new value equal to 12 times 1,3 Pounds, or 17,6 Pounds, and added to the previous values.
2. Transferring three million tomans of crystallized value in parts, systems, tools and raw materials to the new phone is a task that is again carried out only by the labour force present in the production process, an action that is different from valorisation or the production of new values, it is an additional property to the first property, but in no way a separate and independent process from it. Both properties emerge in a single process, the owner of capital by consuming the labour force purchased at the same time, on the one hand, preserves and keeps in his possession all the current values, and on the other hand, appropriates the mass of newly produced values. The worker, with his 8-hour workday, fulfils both roles simultaneously and in a single process, he both keeps the three million tomans of previous value alive and safe for the capitalist, and adds 17,6 Pounds of new value to those values.
3. If the worker did not perform the specific task of assembling electronic-information systems, he could not make a mobile phone, and in this regard, he could not transfer the values ​​crystallized in the tools, semi-finished parts, auxiliary equipment and raw materials required for the production of a mobile phone to a new product. The specific form of work is important in this respect, the basis and lever for transferring the existing values ​​to the new product is specific work, but the fundamental issue is that adding new value to the new product has nothing to do with the specific form of work. If the worker, instead of producing mobile phones, sewed clothes, assembled airplanes or cars, made computers, produced medicine, milked cows, or became a cook, he would certainly have added value, created new values ​​and made them available to the capitalist. Accordingly, his appreciation is carried out by work in general and not by this or that specific task. It is work in general or the individual work of a human being who is the real agent and founder of the creation of new values. The worker does not add new value to old values ​​because of the specific type of work he has done, he does not produce a huge mass of new values ​​because the product of his labour is a mobile phone, a car, an airplane, clothing, food, or pen and paper. In all these cases he has added value and created a mass of new values ​​simply because he has performed abstract social labour. The specific, specific, and useful nature of labour plays a role and effect in the complete transfer of previous values, but it is only general labour or abstract social labour that creates new values.
4. Let’s imagine that a worker assembles and prepares 10 mobile phones for release in 40 minutes instead of one. What happens in this case? The result is worth pondering. The total new value that is added to the previous values ​​by producing these 10 phones is still 17,6 Pounds. The amount that, in the example above, was added to the value of the commodities used in a mobile phone. To put it more clearly, previously, for every 28,6 Pounds of concentrated labour in the battery, frame, vibrator, antenna, microphone, capacitor, resistor, transistor, diode, IC, memory, filter, etc., a value equivalent to 40 minutes of new labour time was added and it became one mobile phone, but now the same amount of labour time turns 285,6 Pounds of embodied dead labour in the parts into 10 mobile phones. The socially necessary labour time for the production of each phone has been reduced to one-tenth of what it used to be. Despite all this and despite these drastic changes, the same 40 minutes of labour have transferred the entire 285,6 Pounds of previous values ​​contained in raw materials, systems, semi-finished parts and auxiliary equipment to the new product or products, to the 10 phones produced and ready for sale, have preserved all these values, kept them alive and transferred them to new products. We see how two completely different properties of the commodity of labour power, namely the production of new values ​​on the one hand and the transfer of old values ​​to the new product on the other, while accompanying and organically belonging to a single process, are distinguishable from each other and what completely different effects they leave behind.
5. If the degree of productivity of labour and the value of the means of production do not change, there will be a direct relationship between the new values ​​that the worker creates in a given working time and the previous values ​​that he preserves and transfers to the new commodity or commodities. For example, in two weeks he adds twice as much new value to the old values ​​as in one week, and at the same time preserves and transfers twice as much existing value to the new products. As long as the technical conditions of the labour process and the value of the means of production remain constant, the greater the value that the worker creates and adds with his new labour, the greater the value that he preserves and transfers. The important point in this transition is that this preservation and transmission of old values ​​is not due to the increase of new values, but because the technical conditions of work have remained constant. For example, in one hour of work, the worker produces the value of his labour power, creates the same amount of new value, and transmits the same amount of previous value. In two hours, he again produces the price of his labour power, at the same time creating twice as much new value as before and transmitting twice as much previous value. In a general summary, it can be said that the worker generally preserves and transmits previous values ​​in the same proportion as he produces surplus value.

6-The materials, tools, and necessities of the production process, by losing their independent use value, also lose their exchange value. In the labour process, they transfer to the new product only that value that they themselves have lost as semi-finished parts or raw materials and auxiliary means. In this case, machines, tools, and equipment, workshop buildings, and the like are used in the labour process only as long as they have retained their original configuration and form. But over time, in the labour process, these machines gradually transfer their value to new products due to the consumption of living labour, or the commodity of labour power. Let us consider a lathe, let us assume that it is operated for 300 days each year, 8 hours each day, for 10 years, and its total value is 341,5 Pounds. It has transferred its value to new commodity per hour, equivalent to 1,4 pence.

7-The lathe we are referring to, although it has been constantly wearing out in these 10 years or 24,000 working hours, has always functioned in the same role and form in the labour process. In this way, a labour process factor or a means of production enters the labour process as a whole but plays a partial role in the valuation process. In other words, a single means of production is present as an element of the labour process in its entirety and as an element of the valuation process in part.

8- We have seen those raw materials, machinery and means of production do not create any new value at all, they only transfer their value to the new product through living labour in the labour process. We call this part fixed capital. In the case of the mental factor of production or labour power or part of the capital that is transformed into labour power, the situation is fundamentally different. While labour power, through specific and purposeful work, perpetuates the value of the means of production and transfers it to a new product, it also creates additional or new value at every moment of its movement. A small part of this additional value is the cost of reproducing labour power, that is, the goods needed to produce this product, and a much larger part is the surplus value that accrues to the capitalist. If he works, for example, 8 hours, he may produce his wages in the first 40 minutes, and whatever he creates in the next 7 hours, and 20 minutes is the surplus value that accrues to the capitalist. We call this part variable capital. The part that undergoes a drastic change in its value in the production process.

Chapter 7 – The Rate of Surplus Value

1. Degree of exploitation of labour

In the process of capital appreciation, it is pretended that surplus value is an increase in the value of all the elements of production or capital that have been advanced!! This is a complete lie. Let’s take a furniture factory. The capitalist owner of the workshop has two workers. Each of them works 220 hours per month and, as usual, receives a salary of two million and two hundred thousand tomans with a delay of several months. The workshop prepares 4 sets of furniture per month, that is, each worker prepares 2 sets of furniture, and each set is sold for 170,6 Pounds. By reviewing the documents, figures, and what is before us, we find that: The cost of boards, fibres, nails, fabric, stitching, glue, and depreciation of labour tools or the total dead labour accumulated in each piece of furniture is 56 Pounds. A piece of furniture contains 110 hours of new labour. The wage that the worker received for its production is 10,4 Pounds. This figure is equivalent to 10 hours of the total 110 hours of new labour that the worker added to the raw materials, auxiliary materials, depreciation costs, and the total fixed capital or dead labour contained in the furniture. Considering the selling price (170,6 Pounds), he has created 12 million and 100 thousand Tomans of new value in the production process of each piece of furniture, of which 1 million and 100 thousand Tomans is his own wage and 11 million Tomans is the capitalist’s profit. In other words, of the 110 hours that the worker has spent producing a piece of furniture, only 10 hours have been allocated to producing his own livelihood needs, and the other 100 hours have been completely plundered by the capitalist. We have explained earlier that raw materials, auxiliary materials and the various components of fixed capital do not create any new value and do not add to the previous values, but the situation is completely different with variable capital. This part, which is spent on the purchase of labour, creates new value several times the value that was spent on its purchase or production during the day of work or a month of work. In our present example, a worker has delivered 2 pieces of furniture to the capitalist during the month, the total fixed and variable capital used or the total cost of producing two pieces of furniture is 132,8 Pounds. Part of the capital or a part of this 132,8 Pounds that has been spent on the purchase of labour is only 2,8 Pounds, but this part has produced 229,6 Pounds of new value and added to the previous value of 112 Pounds. Here are some basic points as follows.

• The story behind each piece of furniture is that 66,4 Pounds, consisting of 56 Pounds of fixed capital and 10,4 Pounds of variable capital, was spent in its production process, but the value of the product is now not 66,4 Pounds but 170,6 Pounds. Since the fixed part of capital only transfers its value to the commodity and does not add anything to it, then the reality of the matter is not the formula of 56 Pounds of fixed capital + 10,4 Pounds of variable capital + 104,4 Pounds of surplus value. In other words, the value actually created in the labour process is completely differentfrom the value of the product obtained from the total process. The first figure or dead work of five million nine hundred thousand tomans existed before and still exists now, in the meantime there is one million one hundred thousand tomans that has given birth to 10,4 Pounds and has become 114,8 Pounds. The result is that for calculating the valuation, it is absolutely correct to consider the role of fixed capital used in the production of furniture to be exactly equal to zero. 170,8 Pounds minus 56 Pounds is exactly equal to 10,4 Pounds plus 104,4 Pounds.

2. It will certainly be asked how 10,4 Pounds became 114,8 Pounds? And this is a contradiction!! It is undoubtedly a contradiction. Beyond this, it is one of the most essential, most identity-based and most fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. But we have already explained this contradiction and shown that capitalism is like this and cannot be anything else. The worker has produced 2 pieces of furniture during a month and has added a value equivalent to 229,6 Pounds to the previous values. During this month, he has worked 25 days. The working time he has devoted to making two pieces of furniture is 220 hours. In these 220 hours, he has produced 229,6 Pounds, or 1,04 Pounds per hour. The amount of value he has received during a month for the production of his subsistence needs is only 20,8 Pounds, equivalent to 20 hours of his total 220 hours of monthly work. 200 hours have been plundered by the owner of capital. The essential, identity and fundamental contradiction that is the inherent contradiction of capitalism lies here. He/she has worked for himself for 20 hours and has worked for the capitalist for 200 hours without receiving a single riyal.

3. In order for one component of capital to add value through conversion into labour power, another component of capital must be converted into means of production. The employment of variable capital or the consumption of labour power requires the entry of fixed capital into the labour and production process. The ratio of these two parts depends on the technical nature of the labour process or the degree of productivity of labour power.

4. We have clearly seen that the furniture worker, or any other worker anywhere in the world, devotes a small part of his daily work to producing the means of reproduction needed for his labour power, and the rest is spent on unpaid labour for the capitalist. When the worker works to produce his own living expenses, the necessary labour or necessary labour time and the time he has worked for the capitalist without any pay is called surplus labour or surplus labour time. In the above example, the furniture worker has worked 20 hours for himself and 200 hours for the capitalist without any pay during each month. He has 20 hours of necessary labour time and 200 hours of surplus labour time.

5. Marx called the equivalent value of necessary labour or necessary labour time necessary value and the equivalent value of surplus labour or surplus labour time surplus value. In the example above, in each hand, the furniture contained 110,4 Pounds of surplus value and only 10,4 Pounds of necessary value. Marx called the ratio of these two, that is, the result of dividing the surplus value by the necessary value, the rate of surplus value. The rate of surplus value or the rate of exploitation in the example under discussion is 110,4 Pounds over 10,4, the index is 1000%. The exploitation rate or surplus value rate is precisely the rate of exploitation of the capitalist or his class and government of the worker and the working class. In Iranian society, this rate has been around 1200% for years, according to what even the official institutions of the Islamic Republic announce in their statistical yearbooks. This means that out of every 12 million tomans of value that the Iranian worker produces, only one million tomans is spent on necessary labour or necessary value for his own livelihood, and 11 million tomans of his becomes surplus labour, surplus value or capital and profit for the capitalist. The root of poverty, misery, hunger, lack of medicine, lack of sanitation, disease, homelessness, drug addiction, lack of education, and all other misfortunes of the Iranian worker lies here. The killing of freedoms, the massacre of the most basic human rights, the most brutal gender discrimination, the horrific environmental pollution, and all other misfortunes can ultimately be traced back to this place, because all of these serve to perpetuate this system, are organized with this goal in mind, and are dressed up for performance. The shameless nonsense and deceitful nonsense of those who consider the basis of the workers’ misfortunes to be “underdevelopment”!!!, “insufficient industrial growth”!, “dictatorship” or “interference of religion and state” are simply and exclusively part of the intellectual suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie. Even more disgusting, shameless are the nonsense that is pumped everywhere about the sterility and lack of value of the Iranian worker’s work!! Or the inferiority and shoddiness of his products!!! And they even link the low level of the workers to this baseless fake issue!!! These nonsense and nonsense that unfortunately flow in a very annoying way even from the lips of many pretentious and ignorant workers who claim to be educated and aware!! The bourgeoisie does not only engage in physical oppression of the workers, it also engages in brutal intellectual oppression of them by all means. These opinions and theorizing are also continuous parts of this form of oppression that has been assigned to economists, politicians, philosophers, sociologists and their co-religionists within the framework of the selfish and internal division of labour of capital.

Chapter Eight – Daily Work

1 – Daily work limits

Our assumption is that labour power is sold according to its value. The value of each commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time for its production. If the social labour time necessary to produce the subsistence goods required to reproduce labour power in a day is, for example, one hour, the worker works this one hour for himself out of his entire daily work. Daily work has varied to some extent in different periods and in different countries in each period. Right now, the weekly working time in Western and Northern Europe is about 40 hours, in Iran and many countries it is 48 hours, and in some societies such as Singapore it is much more. There is no doubt that the range of these differences or fluctuations is not unlimited, in this regard it is important to remember a few points.

First: There is no minimum limit to the daily work. If we are to imagine a limit, it should be the dividing line between necessary and surplus labour time. For example, if a worker produces his daily necessities in just one hour, that one hour would be the minimum daily work. But capitalism considers necessary labour to be merely a part of the daily work, and reducing the daily work to the limit of necessary labour would be the negation of the existence of capitalism.

Second: On the contrary, the daily work has a maximum limit, and two vital components are the indicators for determining this limit. Physically, the worker is not able to work all day and night. He has to spend some hours sleeping, resting, eating, washing or doing other things. Spiritually and socially, he also needs leisure time. Considering these factors, the daily work is a flexible phenomenon and the place of the greatest conflicts between the owners of capital and the masses of workers.

Third: The capitalist is capital personified. His consciousness and thought are merely the manifestation of the consciousness, thought and will of capital. The essence of capital’s existence is valorisation. In order to valorise as much as possible, the worker’s surplus labour time must be extended as much as possible, and his necessary labour time must be reduced wherever possible. Capital comes to life, grows proud, and becomes strong through ever more intense exploitation, ever more brutal wear and tear, and ever more brutal slaughter of the worker. The capitalist of any gender, from any place, and of any time wants to increase the surplus labour time of the worker to the point of death, and this is where the worker’s voice rises. He rebels against this situation and uses his intelligence, resourcefulness, and available power to bring his rebellion to a conclusion. This is where the social existence of the proletariat boils. It is in the relationship of buying and selling labour power that he becomes a worker, separated from his work and deprived of the right to intervene in determining the fate of his work, his production, his life, his everything. This is not only the arena of the struggle for the balance between superfluous and necessary labour, it is also the starting point, expansion, roar and determination of the last war in history, the capitalist shouting at the worker with all his might that he has bought his labour power and is free to use it. The worker says that he sold it so that he could live and that his life would be one of leisure, health, and prosperity. The first warns more loudly that he has the right to determine how to spend what he has bought. The second firmly and decisively replies that the guarantee of all the physical and spiritual needs of himself and his family is also his unquestionable right. We see that at this very moment of beginning, this very point of the consumption of the worker’s labour power by capital, two contradictory rights, two rights that are inherently incompatible, two rights that are inherently hostile and irreconcilable, are placed against each other. Two fundamentally irreconcilable rights that emerge from the depths of the relationship of buying and selling labour power, that flourish and branch out into the entire fabric of the society that is being formed, developed and structured, that is, capitalist society.  It becomes politics, it wears the clothes of civilization, it becomes culture, ethics, social values ​​and everything, the bourgeoisie turns this same right into theory, government, law, parliament, democracy, ideology, order, police, army, mobilization, army, arsenal, octopus brainwashing apparatus, party and many other devices or weapons. It makes all of these tools of power and rule of itself or capital. It makes these same mechanisms capital personified in the form of existing society. The bourgeoisie does not stop at this, with the help of these infernal institutions of power and sovereignty, it forces the working class to consider everything that is only the specific manifestation of the right of capital and the weapon of capital’s power as “its real right”!!! The capitalist class does all these things, it uses all these functions in the service of the survival of the relationship of buying and selling labour power, the increase, expansion and survival of surplus labour as much as possible, but in this process, from the very beginning and as soon as it begins, it is nailed to the powerful siren of the proletariat’s protest. A class that sees all right, right and right of the bourgeoisie as injustice, injustice and absolute injustice, the brutal killing of all rights, freedoms, civilizations, humanity, and the bombing of the human life of its members. Both classes speak of right, both classes in all channels, spheres and territories of the present society, in all areas of social life, line up against each other with an inherently contradictory narrative of right. The bourgeoisie, moment by moment, riding the wave of capitalist development, step by step, with the power that capital confers on it, makes the needs of the capital appreciation cycle its structure of economic force and political, civil, and legal order, and the proletariat also senses from the very beginning, albeit fragmentarily and rudimentarily, that the answer to power must be given with power. In the words of that poet, “What are you talking about in vain about right and wrong? Go for it, for right is achieved by force.” The worker’s spontaneous anti-capitalism is his violent reaction to this process, to all this barbarity, based on exploitation, subordination, and the increasing and uncontrolled killings of livelihood, legal, political, civil, cultural, moral, and social values. This anti-capitalism arises from the depths of the worker’s social existence. If life creates thought and not vice versa, then the real field of communism and the main source of anti-capitalism is also here. Communism and spontaneous anti-capitalism, which, like any natural living being, need to flourish, branch out, grow, rebel, and conquer.

2 – Capital’s extreme thirst for surplus labour and intensification of exploitation

Surplus labour is not the discovery of capital. Wherever and whenever the ownership of the means of labour and production has been the monopoly of private individuals, the worker in whatever form, free or unfree, has delivered a considerable amount of surplus labour to the owners of the means of production, in addition to the work he has done for his livelihood. One thing is clear. In earlier forms of production, and as long as exchange value did not play a dominant role in transactions, surplus labour also had limitations. Limitations that did not necessarily follow from the specific nature of the mode of production of the day. Even in those same ages, with the occurrence of events such as the rise of the role of money in exchanges, the brutal onslaught of masters and owners to force slaves or peasants to do surplus labour suddenly became very brutal and stormy. However, the nature of these events did not determine the official form of surplus labour and were mostly exceptional. It is only in capitalism that the thirst for an excessive and deadly increase in the worker’s surplus labour forms the fabric of the system’s identity. The masters, owners and merchants of the previous forms of production, when they were blinded by the capitalist world market, resorted to all kinds of savagery, barbarity and atrocities in order to extract the maximum amount of surplus labour from the exploited. Surplus labour in feudalism and the old modes of production had a more naked and tangible appearance. The peasant saw the work he did for his own living as completely distinguishable from the forced labour he did for the landowner. These two forms of labour were even performed in two different places. This is not the case with the worker who sells his labour power. There is no fixed boundary between necessary and surplus labour. Capital distorts everything, distorts all realities, while, by resorting to all forms of power and applying all methods of barbarity, it strives to make the worker’s surplus labour a galaxy and his necessary labour a nothingness, it raises its slogan of humanism, human rights, freedom, and authoritarianism to the heights of the heavens! Capitalism is an unbridled volcano of deceit, lies and crime. If the uneducated peasant and peasant of the dark lands of the Middle Qazvin could easily expose and touch the deadly catastrophe of forced labour for several hours a day of the feudal lords, capitalism will do anything to prevent the university-educated worker of the 21st century, who is apparently also against the capitalist system!!! from seeing his own deadly exploitation rate of 1200% and even denying it altogether.

From the very beginning, the capitalist class, observing the wave of anger and rebellion of the working masses against the intensity of exploitation and deadly overtime, tried to legalize its unlimited discretion and absolute power in the most explosive extension of the workers’ overtime and clothe it in the luxurious dress of law. The British Labor Act of 1850 was the forerunner of the beginning of modern bourgeois legislation in the most advanced capitalist society. According to this law, workers were forced to work an average of 70 hours per week and at least 10 hours per day. But the savage thirst of the capitalists for an excessive increase in the surplus labour of the working masses was such that then, as now, they were not satisfied even with the very law which was the iron chain of their power over the hands and feet of the working class. The law, with all its savage and anti-working-class nature and texture, played only the role of a restraint for the violent suppression of every cry of protest of the workers. The daily work imposed on the English working class by the Labour Act of 1850 was a testimony to the ugly truth that under the capitalist system, and as long as this system exists, the worker is nothing but personified labour time.

3 – Surplus labour without any restrictions

Let us clarify again that capital wants law only as a mechanism of deception to brutally invade the necessary labour of the workers and to prolong surplus labour as horribly as possible. Wherever the need demands, it substitutes lawlessness for law. In the same decade when the laws were first introduced in Britain, the English capitalists, with a cruelty that no pen can describe, forced a large number of 9-year-old children to leave their homes at 2 a.m. every night. In exchange for a meagre morsel of bread, they were forced to do the most arduous work until 12 a.m. the next morning, without a moment’s rest. Of course, they were not the “rent-seeking oil capitalists” of Messrs. Katouzian, Morteza Mohit, or many of their ilk; they were civilized capitalists who formed the most advanced and progressive industrial country in the world today. Consider a few similar sentences from several reliable British government sources of the day about the horrific extent of child exploitation. “William started working at the age of 7 years and 10 months. He worked 15 hours a day, every weekday, from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mary, 12, started working at 6 a.m. and sometimes 4 a.m., and continued until late at night, sometimes having to stay up all night without a break, producing profits for the owners of the capital. She only gets 3 shillings and 6 pence…’ The average life expectancy of workers was very low, especially in some parts of England, under the pressure of long working days and the deadly rigors of the work. Diseases such as tuberculosis were rampant, claiming the lives of large numbers of workers every year. No potter’s body showed any signs of health, and according to the doctors, the potters were a degenerate population. The situation in matchmaking, baking, printing, building work and all the other industries was not only no better, but each was more deadly and terrifying than the next. The hard work of the workers, even the youngest girls and boys, day and night, without having the right to sleep for a moment during the night, forcing them to endure this situation with the weapon of economic coercion and all kinds of beatings or all other crimes, was the very high banner of the capitalist class’s demand for rights, freedom and justice at the lofty peak of capitalist industry. The right to consume purchased labour in any possible way, in any context, and with any cruelty that history has not remembered. The bourgeoisie’s extreme thirst for increasing profits and capital was not satisfied by imposing 15, 16, and 18-hour workdays on workers, even young children. It is not just the Iranian capitalists of the 21st century who call the demand for labour a workers’ uprising against national security or a war against God and His Messenger!! And they consider putting forward this demand as corruption on earth and worthy of being shot. Their 19th century British predecessors also had the same kind of behaviour and approach towards the workers of the British era. They forced workers, including children, to do the hardest work for 18 hours a day, but only paid a meagre wage of 12 hours. In this way, they added 6 hours of completely free labour to the massive hours of extra labour of each worker and turned all of this into their own profit and capital.

The hysterical greed of the capitalists for profit and the crushing, exhausting and deadly pressure of working conditions, as already stated, very quickly led to a storm of workers’ anger. Between 1858 and 1860, the Irish bakers held the most magnificent protest meetings against night work and Sunday work. The movement achieved some success, but it met with stubborn resistance from the owners of the workshops and the masters. The capitalists attacked the workers with the weapon of unemployment and blocked the way for the movement to spread. Although the British government had a long way to go before it became the eight-headed octopus of the present capitalist state, it entered the field with all the mechanisms of deception in its day, supporting the owners of capital and against the workers.

4 – Day and night work, shift work system

It is needless to repeat that the fixed part of capital does not create any value, does not generate any surplus value, its only property is to absorb labour and to suck out the highest possible amount of surplus labour from every drop of labour and make it the share of its owner. In this regard, the capitalist, as soon as he advances this part, sees it as a means that must be put into circulation by labour power, absorb labour and pave the way for the consumption of labour power, so that this power generates the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. If fixed capital does not fulfil this role, it is not only more useless than desert sand, but it can also be the source of massive losses at any point in its life. The extent of this loss is not limited to it becoming petrified and useless, nor is it limited to the obsolescence and wear and tear of its constituent materials. The discovery and invention of new machines, the development of techniques, the modernization of tools of labour, the ever-increasing productivity of labour are the essence of capital and the source of its identity. This process continuously lowers the socially necessary volume of labour crystallized in new products and leads to the cheaper use of new machines. An event that also implies a continuous decline in the value of previous means of production. In view of all this, every moment of separation between machines, raw materials, and means of production with labour is a painful moment for the capitalist that leads to sudden death (stroke and heart attack). The ideal and the sweetest dream of the capitalist is that the worker works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without any moment of rest, sleep or the right to breathe, putting machines, raw materials and auxiliary equipment into operation, creating new products and delivering massive surplus labour. This is the ideal of capital. A dream that, of course, cannot be realized, but the capitalist is not ready to accept the impossibility or stop behind the boundaries of its impossibility. The history of capitalism is the history of turning the impossible into the possible through the criminal bombardment of man, nature, all human rights and values ​​with the weapon of profit and profit-increasing knowledge. It did the same in this context. It built a bridge between the dream and the impossible and did everything to build this bridge. First, he resorted to the 18-hour workday and beyond. He kept the working men, women, and children awake from 4 a.m. until well past midnight, behind spinning or pottery machines, and he cracked down on any attempt by any child to fall asleep with the crack of a whip. He did this for a long time, but firstly he encountered the violent resistance of the cursed wage slaves. Secondly, his growing and deadly thirst for surplus work also found no cure. It was here that he thought of working in shifts, at night and during the day. He decided that the whole machine would not be stopped from turning by labour for a single second, that living labour would be consumed by dead labour, that the greatest possible amount of surplus labour would be produced, and that the last drops of blood of the working masses would be sucked out like bats. In this direction, the shift system with 12-hour workdays and the completion of these workdays with unpaid hours replaced the old system.

5 – Labor movement to shorten the working day (mid-14th century to the end of the 17th century)

The uncontrolled prolongation of the working day not only leads the worker to the abyss of decline due to the disappearance of the material and spiritual conditions of his growth but also causes his extreme exhaustion and ruin. By shortening the worker’s life, capital lengthens his production time in a given period but let us not forget that the monstrous prolongation of the working day, under the pressure of the inherent movement of capital, shortens the life of the worker and the life of his labour power. In this regard, the perished worker had to be replaced more quickly by a fresh wage slave, and this not only increases but also lowers the cost of reproducing labour power. The faster a machine wears out, the greater its share of daily worn-out value. If we take these points as a basis, it will seem to be in the interest of capital to take the path of agreement with the normal working day or of a “reasonable” shortening of working time. But capital and its personified being, the capitalist, are not at all familiar with these calculations and have never made or will make any concessions to it. Historically, capitalists followed the path of their slave-owning predecessors. For the slave-owner, finding a slave was all that mattered; the slave’s early death never bothered him in the slightest. Capitalists did exactly that and do the same today, and they were never concerned about the scarcity of workers. On the contrary, they saw the longest caravans of labour, with sufficient diversity, women, men, seven-year-olds, seventy-year-olds, “nationals”, “transnationals”, rushing in from land and sea to fill the void left by workers who died under the pressure of long daily work and the terrible conditions of exploitation. The collective memory of the capitalists cried out that there would always be a huge surplus of labour, and that inevitably questions of this kind arose: The pressure of hard work or the long daily workday leads to extreme degradation of man, reduces the mental faculties of the worker, causes all kinds of physical and mental damage, leads to the destruction of generation after generation of workers, and even creates problems for capital in terms of access to workers and increased productivity of labour. These kinds of sermons would not bother any capitalist anywhere. To the capitalist of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the prospect of the degeneration of humanity or the inevitable extinction of the working class was as irrelevant as the impact of the explosive environmental pollution produced by capitalism on human life is to their twenty-first-century descendants. Historically, the bourgeoisie has only accepted any form of retreat, even those that ultimately became a testament to the survival of the capitalist octopus, under the pressure of the workers. The tolerance of right-wing unionist reformism by the capitalists of Europe and America is a clear example of this fact. If the volcanic fury of the successive campaigns of the European workers between the 1940s and the 1970s and the historic uprising of the Communards had not shaken the ground beneath the feet of the bourgeoisie of the two continents, the capitalists on both sides of the Atlantic would have shown no interest in listening to any of the Kautskyites’ priestly sermons and exhortations.

The bourgeoisie’s tendency to legislate and legalize shorter working days also began to sprout in exactly the same way, under the pressure of force, power and the wave of struggle of the working masses. The history of this struggle is mixed with two completely opposite trends. Laws based on the consolidation of long working days and laws that were a reflection of the capitalists’ fear of the workers’ anger. The English Labour Code is of the first type, and the English Labour Law is of the second type. The first was enacted in the fourteenth century to lengthen the working day, and the second was enacted in the second half of the nineteenth century to guarantee the reduction of working hours. We have already said that the bourgeoisie understands only the language of force, and this point must be supplemented by another important point. Even when the bourgeoisie is forced to retreat under the pressure of the rising power of the proletariat, it resorts to all possible enterprises to make this retreat a pact for an ever more brutal intensification of the exploitation of labour and for the further consolidation of the foundations of its rule. The majority of English and European capitalists finally submitted to a shorter working day, but only when they were able to secure the workers’ submission to the longest working days by the disastrous economic force resulting from the ever-increasing domination of capitalism over the fabric of the lives of the working masses. For many years, capital, by the force of the state’s bayonet, forced workers to accept 12- to 18-hour workdays, but by passing through the initial phases of development, it created conditions in which the sellers of labour power would accept the same workdays even in the absence of violent military bloodbaths. The economic violence of capital is much more crushing and destructive than its nuclear violence. Centuries had to pass before the “free worker”! would appear of his own free will! Selling his entire active life, his labour power, all his freedom and human rights for a bowl of soup, capital, with its economic power, transformed its needs for appreciation into the desires and appetites of the working masses. It created their tastes, customs, habits and ethics. The 12-hour workday under the bayonet of the state gave way to the same workday, without the necessary need for costly military campaigns. The bourgeoisie finally agreed to retreat in its bloody war to forcibly impose a 12-hour day on the workers of England and Europe, but it did so only when, first, the volcano of struggle of the working masses enveloped it on all sides and, secondly, it was able to secure the reduction of military force by the rebellious and fierce pressure of economic force and the octopus-like domination of the type of need, consumption, compulsion and form of life of the workers. The heresy of legislative deception and legislation was not the work of the workers’ movement but fundamentally the work of the bourgeoisie. The Labour Act of 1349, the twenty-third year of the reign of Edward III, was a violent and violent attack by the capitalists to ensure the supply of the necessary labour and to guarantee the greatest possible surplus labour. The plague of that year was relentlessly and terribly killing the labour force, the labourers were not as plentiful as before and, if they were, they demanded higher wages. It was in this situation that the capitalists made it a law to force them to work for low wages, long working days and the greatest possible surplus labour. Historically, it has not been the working class and the labour movement that has been fascinated by the interference of law. On the contrary, it has been the bourgeoisie that has seen the suppression of workers and their movement as dependent on legislation and law-making. The workers’ weapon has always been the power of their struggle, and the bourgeoisie has sought law to contain this power.

6 – Labor movement for daily work restrictions between 1833 and 1864

For centuries the bourgeoisie had increased the working hours of the workers as much as it could and had imposed a 12-hour day as the shortest working day on the vast mass of the working class. The emergence of large-scale factory industry in the last third of the eighteenth century disrupted even this. The deadly thirst for ever more surplus work rose more and more from the worn-out and exhausted bodies of the workers, and very quickly made everything its prey, all moral, natural, age, sexual boundaries, even the boundaries of day and night. The bourgeoisie was determined to spend the entire cost of its industrial modernization, the entire cost of increasing labour productivity, rial by rial of the expenses of preparing for the more explosive exploitation of the working class, on the miserable and abject lives of the workers themselves. This terrifying invasion of capital could not go unanswered by the working masses. It was a matter of life and death. Resistance began. The workers entered the battlefield, marshaled their strength, and as usual the bourgeoisie resorted to all methods of repression. Legislation was the least expensive and most effective mechanism of repression, and the parliament or the law-making factory of capital, along with other industries, began to operate at full capacity.  Between 1802 and 1833, five “Labor Laws” were passed. The formal arrangement of the story was that the bourgeoisie was retreating in the face of the power of the struggle of the working masses!! An event that was apparently true, but it would be a cause for lamentation if the working class took half the truth as a whole. The capitalists were certainly forced to retreat in the face of the powerful wave of the workers’ struggle, but the very fact that they were going to pass laws while retreating made the anti-worker and anti-human nature of this legislation sufficiently clear. The labour movement, to the extent that it forced the bourgeoisie to legislate, certainly turned over its record of victories, but as soon as it saw the law as the achievement of its struggles and hung it on its fence, it only opened the black scroll of its deception, metamorphosis and defeat before the eyes of history and disgraced itself. The law of 1833 determined the normal working day from half past five in the morning to half past eight in the evening. It allowed the exploitation of young people aged 13 to 18 for up to 12 full hours during this time interval and of course added a provision for the arbitrary extension of this time. The employment of children under 9 years of age was prohibited except in special cases. The work of children from 9 to 13 years of age was limited to 8 hours, and night work for people from 9 to 18 years of age between 8:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. was declared illegal. In their parliamentary resolutions, the legislators laid mines everywhere to give the capitalists unlimited freedom to exploit the workers even more terrifyingly. Despite the pressure of the long-standing struggles of the working masses, they imposed 72 hours of hard and deadly work a week on children from 9 years of age. They were forced to leave their sleep at dawn and start the wheel of profit at half past five in the morning. They imposed two-shift work and an eight-hour workday on them with economic force and the terrifying whip of the law. They defined their childhood as suffering hunger, exhaustion, longing, hardship, and being filled up for the huge outburst of capital profit, and they committed all legal crimes alongside all other crimes.

On the other side of the field were the workers who played their part. The more the capitalists increased their legal, police and military brutality, the more rebellious and rebellious the working masses entered the scene of struggle. They made the struggle for the ten-hour day the banner of the war of the day. They drove Parliament into despair. The working women, who had fought alongside and side by side with men throughout all these centuries against the pressure of exploitation and the many forms of capital oppression, increased the intensity of their struggle. The years 1846-1847 constitute a very important period in the history of the working-class movement in England and throughout Europe. During these years, the Chartist movement began to flourish. A movement that in a short time frightened the bourgeoisie to some extent. It brought the workers’ power to the fore, although very limited. At the same time, France became a hotbed of radical workers’ uprisings. The June Revolution of 1848 terrified the bourgeoisie; the proletariat took to the streets with the Communist Manifesto in hand and the banner of the destruction of capitalism. Paris became the scene of a raging class war between the working masses and the capitalists and was divided into the Paris of the workers and the Paris of the bourgeoisie. In this same year, the English bourgeoisie was finally forced, after years of resistance, to accept some of the demands of the workers. It gave in to the 10-hour workday law. And it raised the sails of surrender in the face of the storm of the workers’ struggle. The workers’ movement achieved these successes, but in order to continue its conquests, even to protect its achievements, this movement had no other choice but to beat the drums of a more radical, more anti-capitalist and more powerful war against the capitalist existence. As long as it did not do this, as long as it did not fight more radically and more anti-wage labour at every step, as long as it did not create the class framework necessary for the victorious advancement of this war, it could not escape the danger of regression, stagnation and instability.  Hanging on to legal struggle did not create any future except failure. The Chartists, despite all their relative brilliance, were unable to continue under the pressure of fundamental shortcomings and collapsed. Any workers’ approach, with any degree of influence among the working class, will sooner or later reach a dead end if it cannot unite the masses of the class in a radical and anti-wage labour movement. The Chartists were also forced to endure this fate. The wave of workers’ anger in these years throughout Europe overwhelmed the bourgeoisie, and this was at a time when the workers’ movement was a long way from achieving the necessary preparation and readiness to settle accounts with the system of wage slavery.

The defeat of Chartism was in effect the defeat of the movement lacking a radical anti-wage-labour orientation, and it plunged the working masses into despair throughout the country. It gave the capitalist class the opportunity to rally all its factions—landlords, stock-market wolves, small shopkeepers, tariff-protectors, free-trade hardliners, the government, bourgeois opposition, priests, young brothels and old nuns—in England and throughout the continent, under the banner of the salvation of property, the defence of the law, the sanctity of the family and the dignity of society, against the proletariat. The working class was everywhere targeted for ostracism and excommunication. The bourgeoisie left in force all the scraps that had previously built up, in the name of law, the anti-worker and reactionary strongholds during the forced and emergency retreat against the power of the workers, including the three labour laws of 1833, 1844 and 1847. For the obvious reason that none of them limited the working day of workers over 18 in any way, they all considered 12 hours and later 10 hours of work in a 15-hour period between 5:30 in the morning and 8:30 in the evening to be permissible and mandatory. All of them were merely weapons in the hands of capital to break and bring to a standstill the dynamic of the struggle of the working class. More importantly and fundamentally, when the deadly economic violence of capital and the pressure of hunger, homelessness, disease, and lack of medicine resulting from capitalist exploitation of the worker force even the youngest children of the workers, even the most exhausted, sickest, and disabled workers to endure the longest working days in the most difficult conditions, the listing of articles, notes, and legal clauses could only play the role of the most narcotic drugs for brainwashing the working masses. These scraps of paper were only useful for the businessmen to obtain licenses for their degenerate syndicalist shopkeepers. The English capitalists, under the deceptive banner of the law, apparently forbade children from working late at night alongside adult workers or!! They reduced the tremendous pressure on women!! But wherever they needed and wanted, they subjected children to the deadly scourge of exploitation alongside adults during the same night work hours. They made women the targets of the most arduous night and day work in the most brutal way. The reformists, of course, cried out and cried “illegal”, but the response of the bourgeoisie was very clear and transparent. “I am the law, the law of capital’s need and my power to impose this need. May riots be the license for businessmen.” The bourgeoisie stood against the wave of anger and struggle of the working masses with all its weapons, including the terrible and disastrous weapon of law, but the workers also followed their own path of class struggle with all its ups and downs. In the midst of the united front of the capitalists, the workers of Lancashire and Yorkshire rose up in revolt, held a very grand meeting, threw down the scandalous basin of law, legislation and legality of the capitalist class and its government. They shouted that the law was merely a parliamentary deception of the capitalists to brainwash the working class. The workers carried out these revelations on a large scale, but the bourgeoisie again entered the field with all its deceit. Its oppositions became more compassionate nanny than mother and raised the flag of solidarity with the workers’ protest!! The labour movement was in a weak position in terms of its conscious anti-wage labour structure; working-class communism or the radical anti-capitalist approach did not have the necessary strength to express itself in an organized and effective way. Labor reformism had the upper hand and, in conjunction with the liberal oppositions of the bourgeoisie, they formed an important force. A force that was able to divert the current class struggle and prevent it from taking a radical direction.

By combining all the arsenals and firing them all at once, from military repression to parliamentary resolutions, from physical to intellectual repression, from police power to legislation, the capitalists suppressed the labour movement. They legalized the rights of the master’s for the brutal exploitation of young children. Children who, due to their young age and extreme physical weakness, had to put a stool under their feet even to work with machines. The Labor Law of 1845 increased the daily work of children from 8 to 13 years old and women to 16 hours from six in the morning to ten at night. During these 16 hours, they were deprived of the right to eat, the right to stop the machine every second, the right to any kind of breathing without hard work.

7 – The labour movement, a storm of struggle and the imposition of law! Or the burning candle of power fighting the law!

Nothing but the power of the working masses could restrain the explosive thirst of capital for the intensification of exploitation and the relentless increase of the surplus labour of the worker. The labour movement of the first half of the nineteenth century achieved successes in various places during this transition, notably in England, France, and elsewhere, and rushed to curb the insatiable thirst of the capitalists for the acquisition of surplus labour. The weapon of the workers was certainly the power of their class struggle, but in this transition, as we have seen, the subject of law, legislation, and the enactment of labour laws or regulations also came up constantly and everywhere. A subject that has historically been the subject of contradictory interpretations, including decadent inversions. The issue must be clarified, and, in this rewriting, three different readings of events should be recounted, taking into account the world of events that have occurred since then.

First: It seems that the working class has been fascinated and obsessed with legislation. It has seen the solution to the deadly and life-destroying pains of its masses in the enactment of laws that are just!! modern!! secular, progressive, democratic and safeguard security, welfare, health and human dignity. It has tried to achieve this goal through various means, including parliamentarism and the right to vote!!

Second: It has had no interest in parliamentarism and legal struggle. It has relied on the strategy of strikes, meetings, and shutdowns of the production cycle while simultaneously fighting against the regime or seeking its overthrow. However, it has also fought to reform the laws and replace oppressive and anti-worker charters with just, progressive laws based on its own interests!!

Third: The working masses have fundamentally departed from their class power. They have exercised this power on the bourgeoisie in different periods and with due regard to all the components related to the arrangement of their forces of the day. They have imposed their demands and expectations on the capitalists and the state in proportion to their capacity and the victory of their current struggle. In this regard, it has been the bourgeoisie that has raised the voice of lawlessness. The wave of revolt of the working masses is anti-order!! anti-security!! anti-peace of production!! anti-stability of society!! It has considered it against national interests, against the progress and advancement of the ancestral homeland!! Against the Charter of Human Rights!! And against everything. It has taken up the task of suppressing and controlling these struggles and uprisings with all its might. It has brought the police, the army, and the institutions of violence into the field. The parliament has also been precisely among these institutions of power. If the police were massacring, if the priest was preaching, if the army was wreaking bloodshed, the parliament has also taken up the task of passing laws with the utmost urgency to prevent the danger of the movement and eliminate this danger from the capital. The weapon of the law, along with all weapons, has been suppression, but the nature of this suppression has been different. The army and the police used to shoot the strike, they were capital personified in the form of cannons and rifles, but the parliament was capital personified in the guise of rights, civility, and law, and had the terrifying role of deception and brainwashing. Parliament entered the field with this position, heaping up a mountain of inversions on the working masses, imposing itself as parliament, the state, the law and the power of the whole society, casting a veil of ignorance over the existence of classes, class society, the exploitation of the proletariat by capital, the separation of the worker from work and the results of work and the process of determining the fate of production and life, over all these rude and rebellious realities of class society. Parliament and the state entered the scene of the campaign with this role, testing the strength of the workers, testing their intelligence, measuring their wisdom and knowledge, investigating everything and then, as a form of capital personification, attacking with the weapon of violence or drawing up a ceasefire resolution. This emergency, expedient, capitalist-oriented ceasefire with the aim of preserving capitalism was also called law. There have been, and still are, three narratives about the relationship between the labour movement and bourgeois legislation. Three interpretations that at the same time indicated the presence and role played by three distinct social approaches in this movement. The existence of these three orientations in different periods, from ancient times to the present day, in the labour movement of countries, at the international level, has not been and cannot be denied in any way, but in this passage, a few important points can be emphasized and need explanation:

1. The first and second tendencies, despite their different appearances, have had and continue to have a completely unified nature. Both, albeit in different forms, insist on the importance of subjecting the working masses to the law. Meanwhile, the first goes as far as completely negating the class struggle and replacing it with parliamentarism. An approach that was represented, especially from the late 19th century onwards, by social democracy and the leaders of the Second International, the world’s trade unions and a wide range of so-called workers’ circles!! The latter apparently does not do so, taking refuge behind the sky-high and controversial slogans of revolution, overthrow, conquest of political power and even “communism”!! But still, just as completely, it destroys the foundation of the class struggle of the radical proletariat and makes the workers’ movement a tool for replacing one form of capitalism with another. The path that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Third International, the wide range of Leninist parties from Pro-Russia to Maoists, Trotskyists or their offshoots and heirs have taken and continue to take. Let us not forget that our discussion here has nothing to do with describing parliamentarism or left-wing subversion devoid of any anti-wage-labour charge. All our emphasis for the time being is on the common and essential theme of both approaches regarding the place of law and the legal struggle for the labour movement. Both believe that the working class must fully embrace the weapon of law and the attachment to the legal decrees of the bourgeoisie and strive with all its might to replace the bad laws with “good laws.” Through the struggle for the passage of a labour law! Modern, democratic and welfare-oriented!! Improve the living conditions and social welfare of the day. Demand more from the bourgeoisie for civility, human rights and political freedoms and obtain reliable legal and legal support for these demands!

2. Marx is the opposite of both these approaches, he is at the beating heart of the third tendency and is the most advanced, most aware, most awake and most solution-oriented activist of this direction. The essence of his speech everywhere, including in all his explanations of the labour movement in England, France, all of Europe and America in the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, is a very eloquent, decisive and firm witness to this truth. He insists only on the proletariat’s reliance on the power of its united anti-capitalist struggle. From his point of view, it is the bourgeoisie and only the bourgeoisie that advances the law and uses the law as an effective weapon to perpetuate capitalism and eliminate the danger of the labour movement from capital. Marx sanctifies the struggle of the working masses for an 8-hour workday, praises the workers’ war against child labour and the intensified exploitation of women, values ​​the struggle of the working class even for the realization of the lowest demands, but sees the guarantee of all this solely in the stormy fieldwork of the workers and the artillery of their power and violence against capital. For Marx, imposing an 8-hour workday on the bourgeoisie or any other demand of this kind was merely a step, a moment, and a bastion in the general war of the proletariat to push back the capitalist class more and more stubbornly and crushingly and to march without stopping towards the elimination of capitalism and the abolition of wage labour. In Marx’s view, what is devoid of any value is the law enacted by the bourgeoisie, and what is of utmost importance is the war through which the working class continually forces the bourgeoisie to retreat and crawl into the embankment of the law, especially the use it makes of the new bastion to further consolidate its power and continue its struggle.

Chapter 9 – Rate and Volume of Surplus Value

Let us begin this chapter by recalling a few important points:

1- The price of each worker’s labour power, like any other commodity, is the price of socially necessary labour, which is crystallized in the goods needed to reproduce this power or commodity.

2 – The total variable capital of a capitalist in a given unit of production is the total value of the labour power that this capital simultaneously exploits. In other words, whenever we multiply the average value of a labour power by the number of workers, we will arrive at the total variable capital.

3 – The volume of surplus value that a worker alone produces, if the value of labour power is known, is determined by the rate of surplus value. Accordingly, the volume of surplus value produced is equal to the amount of variable capital advanced, multiplied by the rate of surplus value.

4 – If we divide the average daily surplus value produced by a worker by the variable capital spent on purchasing his labour power and multiply the result (the rate of exploitation) by the total variable capital, we arrive at the total volume of surplus value.

5 – Whenever we multiply the average value of a labour power by the rate of exploitation and then by the number of exploited workers, the result will still be the same total volume of surplus value.

6 – If variable capital decreases and at the same time and in the same proportion the rate of surplus value increases, the volume of surplus value produced remains unchanged. If the capitalist of an enterprise exploiting 10 workers at an exploitation rate of about 500% transforms the technical process of work, uses more modern machinery and, for example, doubles the productivity of labour, he can, under the new conditions, make half of the workers unemployed, without any decrease in the previous volume of production or the amount of profit he has earned.

7. A reduction in the number of workers or a reduction in the volume of variable capital can be compensated for by an increase in the rate of surplus value or by an extension of the working day. But the extension of the working day has an insurmountable limit. The day is no longer than 24 hours, while the capitalist’s hunger for surplus labour knows no bounds. Capital is under the pressure of the acute contradiction of two inherent tendencies. On the one hand, it wants to reduce its variable part or the number of workers. On the other hand, it wants to increase the volume of surplus value without restraint.

8 – A third factor is also involved. The volume of surplus value depends on two factors: the rate of surplus value and the amount of variable capital advanced. If the rate of surplus value and the value of labour power are known, then the greater the amount of variable capital, the greater the volume of value and surplus value. If the length of the working day and the hours required by the worker are known, then the volume of value and surplus value is simply a function of the volume of labour that the capitalist puts into circulation. The more workers he/she employs, the greater his variable capital, the greater the total volume of surplus value. It goes without saying that the ratio between the two constant and variable parts of capital can be quite different in different spheres of accumulation and in the case of different capitals, but these components have no effect on the law we are discussing. For the obvious reason that constant capital creates no new value and, naturally, no surplus value. In this regard, this law can be refined and supplemented and said: The volume of value and surplus value produced by different capitals, with different ratios between the fixed and variable parts, is directly proportional to the volume of the variable part of these capitals, provided the value of labour power is known and the rate of exploitation is equal in different investments.

9 – The above law seems to contradict our observations and experiences based on our senses. In a bakery, the ratio of variable to constant capital is higher than in a spinning mill, but the surplus value captured by the latter is greater than that of the former. We will discuss the fate of this contradiction later, in appropriate places. For the time being, let us consider that all the workers of a society are exploited by a single capital. For example, one million workers work 10 hours each day, and the total daily work is 10 million hours. With a fixed duration of daily labour, the amount of surplus value increases only with an increase in the number of workers. The reverse is also true; with a fixed population, any additional surplus value depends on the extension of the daily labour. Let us not forget that all these points are true to the extent that we speak of absolute surplus value.

10 – Capital, in the midst of the process of production, with its own development, became the absolute ruler of labour, it dominated labour power and labour itself. The whole idea of ​​the capitalist or personified capital was to extract ever more surplus labour from the workers.

11 – The process of capital’s expansion has always been based on violence from the beginning. In order to obtain ever more surplus labour, capital imposed on the workers, on the one hand, the most brutal living restrictions, and on the other, it increased the length of the working day to the limit. Capital, in intensifying exploitation and extracting surplus labour from people, has tied the hands of all previous forms of production.

12 – Capital first brought labour under its control under the same technical conditions as they existed historically. It did not immediately and directly change the mode of production. In the same way, the production of surplus value in an absolute form, that is, through the daily prolongation of labour, did not postpone the change in the present mode of production.

13 – If we look at the dynamics of production through the eyes of the worker, his relationship to the means of labour is not a relationship to capital, but a simple relationship to the tools needed to perform a purposeful task. But as soon as the process of production becomes a process of valorisation, everything changes. The means of labour no longer become merely means for absorbing the worker’s surplus labour. It is no longer the worker who takes possession of the means of production, it is the means of production or capital that employs the worker. As soon as a certain amount of money becomes the means of production or the objective factors of the labour process, these same means become the basis of the right of ownership over labour and the result of the exploitation of others, whether legal or coercive. With the transformation of the production process into a process of valorisation, everything fell into the abyss of inversion. Dead labour, the owner, God, and undisputed ruler of living labour, became living labour. The creator fell to the brink of humiliation and the creature ascended the throne of sovereignty. This transformation became explosive, the role of living labour in the creation of dead labour was completely denied. To the extent that the Scottish capitalist, when selling his factory, sometimes claimed the right to demand the right to valorise the machines!! along with the price!! As if, in truth, constant capital had created value!