Quick Notes on Chapter 11, "The Rate and Mass of Surplus Value."

1.) First sentence of the chapter: "In this chapter, as hitherto, the value of labour-power, and therefore the part of the working day necessary for the reproduction or maintenance of that labour-power, is assumed to be a given, constant magnitude" (417). This is exactly what Castoriadis takes issue with in Marx in that interview we read last week: that this is precisely what can't be assumed because to do so is to neutralize the antagonistic nature of labor by way of which that value is determined. But I'm wondering if C. underestimates (at least in that interview) the wiley ways of Capital and the manner of its co-opting of labor. That's my next point.
2.) I'm really fascinated by the disjointed nature of this chapter. I read pages 417-424 as on the rate of the worker's exploitation ("Rate of Surplus Value") and on the quantified product of such exploitation ("Mass of Surplus Value"). But I read 424-426 as about "compulsion," and not exploitation--an apparently sudden change of gears.
I understand the link between the first part of the chapter (exploitation) to be linked to the second (compulsion) in the three--what seem to be more or less distinct--pictures of what he means by "compulsion".
(a) The first one looks like a pretty straight-forward compulsion: Capital "takes care" that the worker does his job "regularly" and with the proper degree of "intensity" (24). Here, we might say compulsion is exterior to exploitation--an external force that secures the exploitation of the worker (more like the direct compulsion of earlier relations of production).
(b) But Marx uses the word "also" to distinguish another and what seems to be a more subtle kind of compulsion: "Capital ALSO developed into a coercive relation, and this compels the working class to do more work than would be required by the narrow circle of his own needs." So compulsion AND coercion--or compulsion AS coercion. What's interesting here, I think, is that the kind of exploitation delineated earlier now seems "interiorized": the compulsion of capital seems to be indistinguishable from the self-compulsion of the workers: "As an agent in producing the activity of others," (this is what I'm reading as the key phrase of this paragraph) "as an extractor of surplus labor and an exploiter of labour-power, it surpasses all earlier systems of production, which were based on directly compulsory labour…" (25). In order to satisfy his own needs, he must sell himself into exploitation (for which Capital will attempt to pay him no more than the value of his labor). That's why it's a surpassing of the earlier forms of direct compulsion (which are nevertheless maintained by Capital).
(c) This second notion of "compulsion"/"coercion" bleeds into and probably belongs with the third: having sold himself into exploitation, the worker finds himself subordinated to capital and beholden to it (25). With the development of capital, the means of production become quite simply machines for the extraction of surplus value. That the worker is subjected to a kind of compulsion (in which he is implicated) means that "[i]t is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker" (25).
This is where I find the connection to the first part of the chapter. The rate of surplus value (ate of exploitation) and the mass of surplus value (mass of exploitation), are possible only on the basis of an exterior AND interior compulsion. At a certain point in the development of Capital, the worker, in order to fulfill his daily needs, must produce more than he needs (be subject to a certain rate of exploitation to produce a certain mass of exploited labor)--and he is therefore both driven and drives himself to such exploitation. Compulsion and exploitation are united in a way never before seen, and this is because the worker is both watched exteriorly by capital and has himself been co-opted by Capital ("interior" or "constitutive" compulsion) to sell himself.
The goal of Capital, then, seems to be the total subsumption of labor to capital while simultaneously being driven by labor--seems to be, in other words, to take labor as its presupposition and driving force and at the same time to produce labor, in a certain sense, within itself.