Is the Iran Nuclear Agreement Dead?

By Mazda Majidi

Republished from Liberation News.

On Aug. 6, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian called on the United States to have a “realistic response” to Iran’s proposals in the ongoing negotiations on the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear agreement. Meanwhile, the Europeans, who are acting as intermediaries in the U.S.-Iran negotiations said in a statement: “The text is on the table. There will be no re-opening of negotiations. Iran must now decide to conclude the deal while this is still possible.”

If we follow U.S. media coverage, it is easy to adopt the false narrative that the ongoing negotiations are at a standstill because the new “hardline” administration of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi is not really negotiating in good faith. The Europeans, supposedly the impartial deal brokers, have done much to bolster this narrative, obfuscating the obvious reason why the deal needs to be renegotiated to begin with. 

Russian and Chinese officials, the other signatories to the agreement, have made realistic statements throughout, pointing to the fact that the United States broke the agreement and the onus is on the U.S. to make amends for it. But, as portrayed in the U.S. media, Russia and China are pariah states whose words are unreliable, while the friendly European junior imperialists are to be trusted.

And then, there is the U.S. sponsored settler state in the Middle East, Israel, a nuclear-powered state whose every statement of concern about Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons is taken as legitimate.

What is the JCPOA?

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is an agreement signed on July 14, 2015, under the Obama administration. The signatories are Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — Germany and the European Union.

According to the JCPOA, the United States and others recognized Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. This is a right guaranteed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but one that imperialist powers had effectively refused to recognize up until then. Iran would implement the “Additional Protocol,” giving the International Atomic Energy Agency more powers to monitor its nuclear facilities. 

Additionally, Iran would reduce two-thirds of its uranium enrichment activity and ship out all of its enriched uranium above 300 kg abroad. The Fordow facility, built inside a hollowed-out mountain and virtually impenetrable by aerial bombardment, would remain operational, but only as a research center. The heavy water plant at Arak would continue operating, but redesigned to make it impossible to produce weapons-grade plutonium, if that were the intent.

Once the IAEA confirmed that these steps were taken, the United States would lift all nuclear-related economic sanctions, including oil embargos and financial restrictions.

The JCPOA worked for the remainder of President Obama’s administration. By all accounts, Iran complied with the agreement throughout. But, in October 2017, the administration of President Donald Trump unilaterally and illegally pulled out of the JCPOA and re-imposed sanctions on Iran in direct violation of the agreement.

How did Biden approach the JCPOA once elected?

Following the 2020 U.S. elections, many were hoping that President Joe Biden would quickly undo the Trump violation of the JCPOA, have the United States live up to its commitments and remove the sanctions on Iran as required by the agreement. It didn’t take long, however, until it became clear that the Biden administration was going to play hard ball.

First, Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded that Iran return to compliance before the United States would. This was a ridiculous demand on its face as it was incontestable that it was the Trump administration that had violated the agreement, not Iran. In fact, even after Trump’s violation of the agreement, Iran had remained in compliance for about a year in a show of good faith.

In subsequent months, the United States raised the issue of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Iran has made scientific advances, making its missiles capable of reaching Israel. To the U.S. and Israel, this is unacceptable.

It is certainly fine for Israel to own nuclear bombs and missiles capable of delivering them to Iran any time. It is also perfectly acceptable for Israeli officials to threaten Iran day and night. But for Iran to have any means of defending itself, or showing that it can strike back, is unacceptable in imperialist circles.

In the next stage of the negotiations, the United States and Europe have continuously raised the objection that Iran is raising demands that are outside of the JCPOA, specifically Iran’s demand that the United States drop Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. If the United States dropped its demands that were outside of the JCPOA framework, the line goes, Iran should drop the demand of the United States dropping the IRGC from the terrorist list.

In an April 24 call with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Biden conveyed that the U.S. decision to maintain the IRGC on the terrorist list is final and that the U.S. would make no more concessions to Iran.

But this goes to the very heart of the JCPOA. Removal of sanctions was Iran’s sole incentive for entering the agreement. The designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization enables the United States to impose widespread economic sanctions on Iran, irrespective of the JCPOA. In fact, on March 20, 2017, the Trump administration formally certified that Iran was in compliance with JCPOA, but added that the country will be subject to non-nuclear, terrorism-related sanctions. The Trump administration refused to recertify Iran’s compliance in October 2017, however, citing multiple violations.

Economic importance of Revolutionary Guards

The IRGC is a major wing of Iran’s military. Much like the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, but on a much larger scale, the IRGC is involved in construction projects all around the country. In fact, as sanctions have driven out foreign investments and put a damper on domestic investments, the economic prominence of the IRGC has increased.

Without the removal of the IRGC from the U.S. terrorist list, Iran will effectively have to return to compliance, agreeing to restrictions on its nuclear program that other countries do not, while getting nothing in return. Pointing to the role of the IRGC in various economic projects, there will be no meaningful relief of sanctions.

Which side is hardline?

What the United States is presenting to Iran is this: Return to compliance with the JCPOA, allow unannounced inspections of your nuclear facilities to take place on demand, allow cameras to monitor some of your military sites 24/7, ship your enriched uranium out of the country, shut down the Fordo uranium enrichment facility — the only one that is impenetrable to a U.S./Israeli bombing. In return, the United States will see what it can do about removing sanctions on entities that it does not perceive as being in any way related to the IRGC. And, by the way, if a Republican administration gets elected in 2024, we are going to pull out of the JCPOA again.

With these being the effective terms of the negotiations to revive the JCPOA, it speaks to the highly biased coverage of the corporate media that the dominant narrative is that Iran’s new hardline administration does not want an agreement.

The task of socialists and other antiwar activists in the United States is to expose our government’s criminal foreign policy, whether it comes in the form of invasions, occupations and other military interventions, sanctions, coups, or funding right-wing opposition forces in targeted countries.

The U.S. imperialist ruling class is not there to benefit the working class, but to benefit its sponsors, big capital. The enemies of the Pentagon and the State Department are not the real enemies of the American people. The danger of future war and annihilation does not come from Iran, which has no nuclear weapons and a small fraction of the military might of the terrifying U.S. military. It is the U.S. government that is the primary danger to peace among the people on earth and to life on the planet itself.  

Clarifying and Inspiring Revolution for 130 Years: Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme"

By Mazda Majidi and Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Karl Marx never intended to spell out what the communist future would look like or how we would get there. His writing that comes closest to doing this is a short letter he wrote in 1875, given the title Critique of the Gotha Programme. Published 130 years ago—in 1891—by Friedrich Engels, Marx’s lifelong collaborator and comrade, the short and incisive text served to clarify and inspire the working-class struggle for power through a critique of the draft version of the Gotha Programme, a program eventually adopted with a few revisions at the First Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the city of Gotha in 1875. The program brought together the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany and the General Association of German Workers. The latter was founded by Ferdinand Lassalle, whose ideas strongly influenced the new party’s platform.

Lassalle and Marx became friends and comrades through their participation in the 1848 democratic revolutions throughout Europe. Marx first organized for the revolution in Brussels but was banished to Germany, where Lassalle lived, and where Marx continued to agitate and organize. Lassalle was imprisoned for inciting violence and served six months in prison. Years later, in 1864, when he was only 39, having been deprived of the chance to marry a woman he loved, Lassalle challenged the man to whom the woman’s father married her, a Romanian prince, to a duel. Lassalle was killed.

In his preface to the 1888 English edition of The Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote in a footnote that “Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx” who “stood on the ground of the Manifesto,” although in the last two years of his life his “public agitation… did not go beyond demanding cooperative workshops supported by state credit” [1].

The Gotha Programme was a compromise between the followers of Lassalle and Marx. Marx wrote his critique in preparation for the Congress, and it circulated widely amongst Party members, especially those coming from the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany. Marx addressed it to his allies in an effort to convince them not to compromise with the reformist ideas of Lassalle. In 1875, Engels wrote a letter to August Bebel, who for most of his life was a Marxist. Engels wrote that he and Marx were only aware of the unification efforts through public papers and that the “programme has certainly astonished us not a little” [2].

Engels published The Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1891, after Marx’s death and the same year the Erfurt Programme replaced the Gotha Programme. Although the Erfurt Programme was more revolutionary in content than the earlier one, the Party apparatus was still dominated by what we’d now refer to as social democrats and adherents to other non-revolutionary variants of socialism.

It is important to read the text for what it was: a critique, a commentary written in conversation with the socialist movement at a certain juncture in history. At the same time, the short Critique (of an even shorter program itself) has a long legacy with lasting impacts on the world socialist and then communist movements. Given the attention Lenin gave to the text and to Marx and Engels’ letters about it in his State and Revolution, we can see that the Critique provided some theoretical groundwork for the revolutionary Marxism of the Third International to split with the reformism and national chauvinism of the Second International [3].

Background of the Critique: Marx’s analysis of capitalism, the state, and revolution

After the 1848 revolutions some—or actually most—people in the movement and in the Communist League believed there would be an immediate resurgence of struggle after the counterrevolution prevailed. Marx and Engels disagreed. They forecast—correctly—that a reactionary period was settling in for some time. As a result, they believed that the immediate tasks of the communist movement should emphasize revolutionary education and theory. Marx and Engels were able to convince the Communist League’s branch in London of their conviction, although the League would dissolve in 1852.

In accordance with the new tasks for the new period, Marx turned his attention to the study of political economy, a study in which he had not systematically engaged yet. This work was ironically facilitated after the German authorities put Marx on trial several times, in each of which he was acquitted. They kicked him out of Germany in 1849. Marx first tried going back to Paris, but the authorities said he was too dangerous. So Marx ended up in London, where he spent the rest of his life.

Marx’s studies of political economy culminated in the 1867 publication of the first volume of Capital–Marx’s most developed analysis of capitalist production–where he articulated the theory of value and surplus value. Marx was working on other volumes at the time, although the workers’ movement forced him to turn his attention elsewhere. Particularly relevant to the Critique was the experience of the Paris Commune. His study of the Commune was published in 1871 as The Civil War in France, and was one of Marx’s most developed analyses of the state and the revolutionary process.

The essence of Marx’s critique

The real dynamics of capitalism and the role of the state in the revolutionary struggle for communism are at the heart of Marx and Engels’ criticisms. At the same time, it’s important to remember that Marx was writing to comrades in the German Party (not for the public) and it was a highly contextual intervention. The essence of the Critique revolves around the program’s interrelated misconceptions of 1) labor, classes, and wages; 2) the state’s role in the emancipation of the working class; and 3) the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism. In this section, we highlight some of the most relevant insights that emerge from the text.

The program did not comply with Marx’s theory of value [4]. The draft and final version of the Gotha Programme demanded the “equitable distribution” of the “total labour” of society. There’s no acknowledgement of the fact that what is produced has to be divided between replacing “the means of production used up,” investments in expanding productive capacities, and the creation of a reserve of surpluses for an “insurance fund.” Moreover, society’s products have to fund administration, common “needs, such as schools, health services,” as well as “those unable to work” [5]. The demand is thus utopian in that it supposes a communist society based “on its own foundations” rather than on the actual foundations on which it emerges: capitalism [6].

Rather than “equal distribution” there will, under socialism–the first stage of communism–be unequal distribution because socialism inherits inequalities from capitalism that can’t be wished away. In the first stage of communism–socialism, material goods are not distributed evenly. There is still the distinction between the wages of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labor. Only “in a higher phase of communist society” can “society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” [7]!

The Program proclaimed that all classes besides the working class “are only one reactionary mass” and ignored the existence of other classes, such as landlords, the self-employed, peasants, and the middle classes [8]. With the continued concentration of capital, these classes are largely proletarianized, giving them a revolutionary potential dismissed in the Gotha Programme. At the same time, the program declared that its utopian demands would be achieved by the “democratic control” of “state aid,” which would establish “the free basis of the state” [9]. This free basis includes a number of democratic demands like universal suffrage, free and compulsory schooling, and a progressive income tax.

Marx asks: “Free state – What is this” [10]? The state isn’t free-floating or neutral, but is rooted in the capitalist mode of production. The experience of the Paris Commune, in particular, showed that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” [11]. Instead, the struggle for communism entails a “period of revolutionary transformation,” to which “there corresponds… also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” [12]. Marx insists on the necessary struggle for the working and oppressed to conquer state power to repress the former ruling classes.

Although “the free basis of the state” in the draft was replaced with “the state,” the essence remained unchanged because the state was seen as a neutral vehicle to be used to replace capitalism with socialism.

Later developments and political consequences of Marx’s critique

Because this was a founding program based on principles rather than strategies, Marx and Engels worried about its impact on the Party and the workers’ movement as a whole. In their correspondence on the unification congress, both insisted that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes” [13]. What matters more than what the Party says is what the Party does. For example, even though the final program addressed Marx’s criticism of the implicit nationalism in the draft–which didn’t include “a word… about the international functions of the German working class!”–the Party’s later support for World War I would make their chauvinism clear [14].

The critique was a key resource for Lenin’s study and publication of The State and Revolution. Lenin expanded on the transition between the first and second stages of communism and justified the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lenin writes that “the first phase of communism cannot yet produce justice and equality; differences, and unjust differences, in wealth will still exist, but the exploitation of man will have become impossible” [15]. This, Lenin writes, guards against idealism insofar as “we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law. Besides, the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic prerequisites for such a change” [16]. The dictatorship of the proletariat is essential in consolidating this phase and guiding society towards the next phase, in which there’s “no need for society, in distributing the products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will take freely ‘according to his needs’” [17].

Importantly, the construction of communist society is a possibility without guarantees. “By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim,” Lenin insists, “we do not and cannot know” [18].

Marx’s emphasis on the importance of the proletarian dictatorship in the transition between capitalism and communism in the Critique is echoed in W.E.B. Du Bois’ classic, Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois initially titled one chapter, “the dictatorship of the Black proletariat in South Carolina.” In a 1934 letter to his publisher (in which he admits he only has a few of Lenin’s works), Du Bois defends the title in response to objections from others, noting that “in 1867, there were distinct evidences of a determination on the part of the [B]lack laborers to tax property and administer the state primarily for the benefit of labor.” The title was important, he insisted, because it “revolutionizes our attitude toward Reconstruction” [19].

While the title was eventually changed to “the Black proletariat in South Carolina,” the book still speaks of the struggle between the dictatorship of capital and labor. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Du Bois laments how the reunited U.S. “delivered the lands into the hands of an organized monarchy of finance while it overthrew the attempt at a dictatorship of labor in the South” [20]. In chapter 14 of the book, Du Bois argues that “in the South universal suffrage could not function without personal freedom, land and education, and until these institutions were real and effective, only a benevolent dictatorship in the ultimate interests of labor, Black and white, could establish democracy” [21]. For Du Bois, as for Marx, reconstruction was a struggle over state power, over how and in whose interests the state would be used. In the vision of united labor’s dictatorship, “unjust differences” would still exist, and the dictatorship was necessary for creating the conditions for real equality.

Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme was an internal response to debates and figures that belong to a different era, and Marx didn’t write it as a blueprint or roadmap for communism. Yet it remains a rich resource for our own struggles and agitation, for winning workers over to Marxism rather than liberalism, and for clarifying the socialist program in the U.S. Over the last 130 years, the struggle has persisted between reformists, who falsely claim that the capitalist state can be adjusted to serve the interests of the working class, and revolutionary communists, who insist that fundamental change is only possible when the working class smashes the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and constructs its own workers’ state through the dictatorship of the proletariat.

References

[1] Engels, Friedrich. (1888/1967). “Preface to the German edition of 1883,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The communist manifesto(New York: Penguin), 200.
[2] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1891/1966). “Appendix I: From the correspondence of Marx and Engels concerning the Gotha Programme,” in Karl Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers), 27.
[3] For the historical impact of The state and revolution, see Becker, Brian. (2018). “How “The state and revolution” changed history.”Liberation School, September 30. Availablehere.
[4] See Ford, Derek and Mazda Majidi. (2021). “Surplus value is the class struggle: An introduction,” Liberation School, March 30. Availablehere; and Majidi, Mazda. (2021). “Relative surplus value: The class struggle intensifies.”Liberation School, 18 August. Availablehere.
[5] Marx, Karl. (1891/1966).Critique of The Gotha Programme, ed. C.P. Pruitt (New York: International Publishers), 7.
[6] Ibid., 8.
[7] Ibid., 10
[8] “Programme of the German Workers’ Party: Draft,” inCritique of the Gotha Programme, 89.
[9] Ibid., 90.
[10] Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, 17.
[11] Marx, Karl. (1871/1966).The civil war in France(Peking: Foreign Languages Press), 64.
[12] Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, 18.
[13] Marx and Engels, “Appendix I,” 34.
[14] Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, 13.
[15] Lenin, V.I. (1918/1964). “The state and revolution,” inLenin: Collected works (vol. 25): June-September 1917, ed. S. Apresyan and J. Riordan (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 471.
[16] Ibid., 472.
[17] Ibid., 474.
[18] Ibid., 477.
[19] Du Bois, W.E.B. (1934). “Letter from W.E.B. Du Bois to Ben Stolberg, October 1.” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries,1, 2.
[20] Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935). Black reconstruction in America: An essay toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 580.
[21] Ibid., 585.

Relative Surplus Value: The Class Struggle Intensifies

By Mazda Majidi

Republished from Liberation School.

Toward the end of our earlier introduction to surplus value, the heart and motor of the class struggle, we wrote that:

The rate of surplus value for the capitalist is the rate of exploitation for the worker. By merely prolonging the working day, the capitalist accrues more (absolute) surplus value. Increasing the working day from eight to 10 hours results in two more hours of surplus value for the capitalist and of exploitation for the worker.[1]

For any working period—whether it be a day, an hour, or five minutes—part of the period is “necessary labor” and another part is “surplus labor.” The former is when the worker produces the value of their own wage, and the latter is when the worker produces surplus value for the capitalist. The ratio between the two is the rate of surplus value for the capitalist and the rate of exploitation for the worker.

Absolute surplus value, Marx says, is “produced by prolongation of the working-day” [2]. In other words, if the ratio between necessary and surplus labor is fixed, then prolonging the working day will result in more surplus value for the capitalist and a greater degree of exploitation for the worker.

Capital’s entire reason for being is to produce surplus value, to increase the exploitation of the working class. As a result, there’s a logical impulse for each capitalist to extend the working day as much as possible. Yet not only might this produce problems for capitalism as a whole (in that it could exhaust the supply of labor-power available), but the working class fights back against exploitation, and at times is able to force limits to the length of the working day.

What happens, then, when political legislation limits the working day to, say, eight hours? This is obviously a limit to capitalist accumulation. For capital, however, “every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome” [3]. Relative surplus value is capital’s strategy for overcoming this limit.

Relative surplus value

If absolute surplus value is produced by lengthening the working day, then relative surplus value is produced by “the curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working-day” [4]. Let’s say the working day was previously 10 hours, and that 10 hours was divided between four hours of necessary labor and six hours of surplus labor. If the working day is reduced to eight hours and wages remain the same, capital will lose two hours of surplus value. The only way to overcome this barrier and to reclaim those two hours of surplus labor is to reduce necessary labor by two hours.

How can this happen?

Remember that necessary labor time is variable capital, or the value of labor power. The value of labor power is, like all values, determined by the socially-necessary labor time required for its production and reproduction, which as we saw in the last part was largely the product of class struggle. The value of labor power can be represented by the bundle of commodities that go into the worker’s production and reproduction, like the value of housing, clothing, education, child-rearing, electricity, and so on.

If the conditions are right, the capitalist can—and sometimes does—merely decrease workers’ wages in this scenario. The state can also step in and provide some of the basic commodities that factor into the value of labor power. However, in Capital, Marx sets these aside because he wants to show us how it can happen within the very logic of a “perfectly” functioning capitalist system.

Two interrelated forms of relative surplus value

There are two interrelated ways that capitalists drive down necessary labor. One way it happens is by decreasing the value of the commodities that factor into the value of labor power:

Whenever an individual capitalist cheapens shirts, for instance, by increasing the productiveness of labour, he by no means necessarily aims at reducing the value of labour-power and shortening, pro tanto, the necessary labour-time. But it is only in so far as he ultimately contributes to this result, that he assists in raising the general rate of surplus-value.[5]

The second form explains the reason the capitalist producing shirts ends up raising the rate of surplus value even though they don’t intend to.

To understand this, we have to distinguish between two values: individual value and social (or real) value. Remember that part of the reason Marx calls value socially-necessary labor time is because it’s the average labor time required to produce some useful good or service “under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time” [6]. This is the social or real value: the average of all production times.

The individual value is the labor time required for production in a particular factory or under a particular capitalist.

Capitalists are always in competition with each other. They’re subjected to “the inherent laws of capitalist production” the “external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist” [7]. Each capitalist is always seeking to gain an edge over their competitors, and as a result, they’re trying to produce more (and sometimes better) commodities faster.

If the socially-necessary labor time required to produce a commodity is two hours, then every capitalist wants to find a way to produce it in less time. If a capitalist can, by employing some new method or technology, produce the same commodity in one hour, then the individual value of the commodity is half of the social value. As Marx writes:

“If therefore, the capitalist who applies the new method, sells his commodity at its social value… he sells it… above its individual value, and thus realizes an extra surplus-value” [8]. Suppose the social value of a shirt is $4 but a capitalist’s individual value is $2. In this case, they can gain an extra $2 in surplus value.

However, whereas previously a working day of eight hours was represented by two shirts, it’s now represented by four shirts. In order to sell the extra shirts, the market needs to be twice as large or the capitalist will sell the shirt at, say, $3—above its individual value but below its social value. In this case, necessary labor is shortened, and the capitalist captures more relative surplus value.

The contradictions of relative surplus value production

Just as capital sees barriers as obstacles to overcome, each new limit it surpasses only creates new contradictions and intensifies existing ones. There are several contradictions that arise from the pursuit of relative surplus value.

The first contradiction is that the capitalists are producing more commodities in terms of use values, yet each commodity contains less value (and therefore exchange-value). This can potentially benefit workers. If wages remain the same, they can either spend less on shirts or purchase more shirts than before. Such a scenario will depend on the class struggle, of course.

This drive to decrease necessary labor can also contribute to a crisis of overproduction. All capitalists are trying to decrease necessary labor time, which means more and more commodities are produced in a given time frame. For the commodities to be realized (sold), there must be an expansion of the market. But at some point, there will be a glut in the market, and there will be more commodities than can be sold at a profit.

The third contradiction is that the “external coercive laws of competition” compel competing capitalists to decrease their own production times, and “this extra surplus-value vanishes, so soon as the new method of production has become general, and has consequently caused the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value to vanish” [9]. Consequently, the overall rate of surplus value also declines, and the need for even faster production re-emerges. Moreover, the competing capitalists don’t only want to match the new innovation and production time but they want to beat it, thereby exacerbating the above contradictions.

Initial methods of producing relative surplus value

There are two initial methods of producing relative surplus value that don’t entail capitalism revolutionizing the means of production. These take place when capital “formally” subjects production to its command, meaning that it takes existing production processes but without fundamentally altering their nature.

One is cooperation, which is a quantitative distinction that leads to a qualitative change. Merely by bringing workers together in one place, capitalists help facilitate the cooperation of workers. “Even without an alteration in the system of working, the simultaneous employment of a large number of labourers effects a revolution in the material conditions of the labour-process. The buildings in which they work, the store-houses for the raw material, the implements and utensils used simultaneously or in turns… in short, a portion of the means of production, are now consumed in common” [10].

Cooperation results in “an increase in the productive power of the individual” worker as well “the creation of a new power, namely, the collective power of masses” [11]. A collective of workers “working in concert has hands and eyes both before and behind and is, to a certain degree, omnipresent” [12]. Importantly, this doesn’t cost capital anything, although it looks like it’s a power of capital itself.

This is the beginning of the collectivization of labor or the production of the collective laborer, which is another contradictory process because “as the number of the co-operating labourers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital” [13]. Workers can more easily agitate and organize, distribute literature and build class consciousness when we’re together in one place.

The other is the division of labor. Capitalism also, without revolutionizing the production process, produces relative surplus value by increasing the division and specialization of labor. When the worker is no longer producing the entire commodity but merely performing one action in the production process, the productivity of labor increases. In other words, “a labourer who all his life performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialized implement of that operation” and “takes less time in doing it” [14].

Taken together with cooperation, it also decreases any gaps in the labor process: the worker doesn’t have to get up and move to different stations, sit back down, use different tools, and so on.

Capitalism encounters a crucial limit to these methods of relative surplus value production, namely that it is still the workers who are the active agents in production or who serve as the “regulating principle of social production” [15]. The production processes above still rely on the workers’ bodies, skills, knowledges, and so on. Living labor still had the upper hand over dead labor, or the means of production.

Real subjection: Machinery

Marx says capitalists first take existing production processes as they find them and “formally subject them” by, for example, lengthening the working day or instituting cooperation. In order for capitalism to come into its own, it had to totally or really subject labor to its command, and it could only do so by taking the skill and knowledge of the worker and absorbing it into machinery, so that machinery, and not the workers, would drive production; so that dead labor dominates living labor.

Thus is born the industrial factory:

An organized system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, in the place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out in the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.[16]

The worker becomes, Marx says, “a mere living appendage” to the machine [17].

As constant capital, the machine can’t produce new value; it can only transfer its existing value to the finished product. However, machinery can produce relative surplus value by decreasing necessary labor time for the individual capitalist and lowering the value of labor-power.

Yet again, this is never finished. It’s only when the capitalist employs new labor-saving technologies that they can produce relative surplus value.

During this transition period… the profits are therefore exceptional, and the capitalist endeavours to exploit thoroughly ‘the sunny time of his first love’.[18]

The love doesn’t last, as other capitalists match or beat the new technologies with more productive ones. The overall rate of surplus value is driven down and, moreover, there are fewer workers engaged in production. The capitalist ends up investing more in machinery and less in labor-power and, overall, surplus value decreases (this is also tied to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall).

This explains why, as Marx and Engels wrote in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society” [19]. The search for relative surplus-value in the face of the limits imposed on capital by the class struggle compel the constant revolutionizing of productive forces like technologies and machinery.

Contradictions intensify

There are numerous other key impacts technological transformations have on capitalism, workers, the class struggle, colonialism, imperialism, and more. Marx addresses many of these, some of which previous Liberation School articles cover [20]. For this introductory article, we want to touch on just a few more issues.

In their ruthless search for surplus value, capitalists work to increase the productivity of labor and the mass of commodities in the world. They produce unemployment and induce crises of overproduction. As Marx puts it:

The enormous power, inherent in the factory system, of expanding by jumps, and the dependence of that system on the markets of the world, necessarily beget feverish production, followed by over-filling of the markets, whereupon contraction of the markets brings on crippling of production. The life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, a crisis and stagnation[21].

The expansion and intensification of capitalism’s command over life and work is accompanied by an enlargement and escalation of its internal contradictions. The capitalist system produces ever more and ever greater misery and destruction.

At the same time, this destruction of the worker, the earth, and its inhabitants produced by modern industry—which is spurred on by the search for relative surplus value—can lay the foundations for socialism: “By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements of the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one” [22].

There’s nothing deterministic or mechanistic about this argument. Marx isn’t saying it will automatically happen or that it will only or universally happen after a certain level of technological development takes place. It’s important to remember that Marx’s case study in Capital is England, where the capitalist mode of production was most developed [23].

Absolute and relative surplus value as tactics

Absolute and relative surplus value are dialectically related. On the one hand, Marx says, they’re the same in that relative surplus value is absolute in the sense that it lengthens the part of the working day that the worker works for the capitalist (by reducing necessary labor time), and absolute value is relative because it compels an increase in the productiveness of labor.

On the other hand, when we look at the matter practically, they’re distinct. The difference between the two, he writes, “makes itself felt, whenever there is a question of raising the rate of surplus-value” [24]. In other words, sometimes capital will try to get absolute surplus value, and other times it will try to get relative surplus value.

They are each class tactics in its arsenal of exploitation. If workers can limit the working day, capitalists will go back to relative surplus value. But if capital can lengthen it, either by peeling back legislation or by destroying the entire concept of the working day, like it’s done with the “gig economy,” then it will pursue absolute surplus value.

For the working class, it’s imperative to know the tools in capital’s arsenal. When we fight for a normal working day and a living wage, we can make gains by limiting absolute and relative surplus value, but capital can change tactics and exploit us in different ways. If capital can’t increase absolute surplus value by lengthening the work day due to the united struggle of the workers, it will try to increase relative surplus value by increasing the intensity of work through introducing new technologies to the productive process. Conversely, when capital is unable to overcome the workers’ resistance to increase relative surplus value, it will look for ways to extend the workday. For example, capital might increase the number of salaried workers, whose wages do not increase when they work longer workdays.

Class struggle is conducted in many spheres–political, ideological, cultural, and of course the most easily observable, economical. The economic struggle between workers and capitalists over the rate of absolute and relative surplus value, and hence the rate of exploitation, is yet one more facet of class struggle between labor and capital.

Notes:

[1] Ford, Derek and Mazda Majidi. (2021). “Surplus value is the scass Struggle: An introduction,”Liberation School, March 30. Availablehere.
[2] Marx, Karl. (1967).Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): The process of production of capital, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers), 299.
[3] Marx, Karl. (1993).Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books), 408
[4] Marx,Capital, 299.
[5] Ibid., 299-300.
[6] Ibid., 47.
[7] Ibid., 257.
[8] Ibid., 301.
[9] Ibid., 302.
[10] Ibid., 307.
[11] Ibid., 309f1. In a footnote, he quotes John Bellers, who writes “As one man cannot, and ten men must strain to lift a ton of weight, yet 100 men can do it only by the strength of a finger of each of them.”
[12] Ibid., 310.
[13] Ibid., 313.
[14] Ibid., 321.
[15] Ibid., 347.
[16] Ibid., 360.
[17] Ibid., 398.
[18] Ibid., 383.
[19] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1848/1967).The communist manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin), 222.
[20] Hernandez, Estevan, John Prysner, and Derek Ford. (2019). “A Marxist approach to technology,”Liberation School, December 9. Availablehere.
[21] Marx,Capital, pp. 425-7.
[22] Ibid., 472.
[23] In fact, later on he wrote that the Russian “rural commune” can “by developing its basis, the common ownership of land… become a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends.” Marx, Karl. (1881). “First draft of letter to Vera Zasulich,” trans. A. Blunden. Availablehere.
[24] Marx,Capital, 479.