Capital, chpt. 6: "The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power"

Here comes the punch-line. We learn right away where surplus-value comes from: the peculiar commodity that is labor capacity.

Marx claims that the change in the value cannot happen in the money itself, nor can it happen in the second act of circulation, for this is when the commodity is converted back into its money form. It must happen therefore in the first step--the first M-C. Now it can't be a change in the value (this is a bit confusing, though it is what he explained in last chpt) because from M to C, equivalents must be exchanged. Therefore, it must happen when C is consumed. "Our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labour, hence a creation of value" (270). He's a lucky fella, because he finds this commodity--labor-power.

Definition of labor-power or labor-capacity: "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physitcal form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind" (270).

Okay, how does it come to pass that the money-owner meets this special commodity?
1. no slavery or relations of dependence (laborer can only sell his labor for a time)
2. laborer and money-owner meet as equals insofar as they are both commodity-owners
3. laborer has nothing else to sell
4. money-owner has money, and means of production, and means of subsistence. lots of stuff.

Marx is emphatic that this is a historical moment. "Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, hte product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production" (273).

The production of commodities is not enough to bring about capitalism. We need the conditions by which the owner of commodities and the laborer meet.

Value of labor-power: how much he needs to live and produce and feed children. (this is not a purely scientific number. It contains a "historical and moral element"; that is, what one needs to live will be different in different societies at different times.)