Phases through which capital first comes to direct and then to transform the labor process when it absorbs a pre-capitalist productive structure, moving from centring its growth on the increase of absolute surplus value to centring it on the growth of relative surplus value, revolutionizing the labor processes and the means of production to that end.
Formal subsumption of labor under capital
When capital absorbs a pre-existing production, characteristic of an earlier mode of production and carried on under its characteristic relations, at first it simply subordinates it, subsumes it, placing itself in between what is a basically intact productive process and the market in which capital realizes surplus value in order to accumulate. This subordination, this subsumption, is still "formal".
The labor process becomes the instrument of the valorization process, of the process of the self-valorization of capital: of the creation of surplus value. The labor process is subsumed under capital (it is its own process) and the capitalist takes his place in it as director, manager; for him it is at the same time, directly, a process of exploitation of the labor of others. This is what I call the formal subsumption of labor under capital. It is the general form of every capitalist process of production, but it is at the same time a particular form alongside the specifically capitalist, developed mode of production, since the latter includes the former, but the former does not necessarily include the latter.
The process of production has become the process of capital itself, a process carried out with the factors of the labor process into which the capitalist's money has been converted, and which takes place, under his direction, with the aim of making more money out of money.
When the peasant who was formerly independent and produced for himself becomes a day-labourer working for a farmer; when the hierarchical structure characteristic of the guild mode of production fades away before the simple antithesis of a capitalist who makes the artisans, turned into wage earners, work for him; when the former slave-owner employs his ex-slaves as wage earners, etc., we have production processes socially determined in other ways transformed into the production process of capital. [...]
The formerly independent peasant falls, as a factor of the production process, under the subjection of the capitalist who directs it, and his very employment depends on a contract which he, as a commodity owner (owner of labor power), has previously concluded with the capitalist as a money owner. The slave ceases to be an instrument of production belonging to his employer. The relation between master and journeyman disappears. The master, who used to stand apart from the journeyman by his knowledge of the craft, now confronts him merely as the owner of capital, just as the other confronts him purely as a seller of labor.
Before the production process they all confronted one another as commodity owners and maintained only a monetary relationship with one another; within the production process they face each other as personified agents of the factors involved in that process: the capitalist as "capital", the direct producer as "labor", and their relationship is determined by labor as a mere factor of self-valorizing capital.
The capitalist also sees to it that labor attains the normal degree of quality and intensity, and prolongs the labor process as much as possible in order to increase the surplus value produced by it. The continuity of labor increases when, instead of the old producers, dependent on particular customers, the new producers, who no longer have commodities to sell, find in the capitalist a permanent paymaster.
The mystification inherent in the capitalist relation also makes its appearance. The power of labor to preserve value appears as the self-preserving power of capital; the power of labor to create value, as the self-valorizing power of capital; and as a whole, and by definition, objectified labor appears as if it employed living labor.
Despite all this, with that change (change) no essential alteration has taken place a priori in the real form and manner of the labor process, of the real process of production. On the contrary, it lies in the nature of the case that the subsumption of the labor process under capital takes place on the basis of a pre-existing labor process, prior to this subsumption under capital and shaped on the basis of various earlier production processes and other conditions of production; capital subsumes a given existing labor process, such as, for example, handicraft labor or the type of agriculture corresponding to the small independent peasant economy. [...]
That labor becomes more intense or that the duration of the labor process is prolonged; that labor becomes more continuous and, under the interested eye of the capitalist, more orderly, etc., does not in and of itself alter the character of the real labor process, of the real mode of labor.
Here, then, there arises a great contrast with the specifically capitalist mode of production (large-scale labor, etc.), which, as we have indicated, develops in the course of capitalist production and revolutionizes not only the relations between the various agents of production, but at the same time the nature of that labor and the real mode of the labor process as a whole.
It is in contrast to the latter (to a mode of labor already developed before the capitalist relation arose) that we call the subsumption of the labor process under capital considered so far the formal subsumption of labor under capital. The capitalist relation as a relation of compulsion aimed at extracting more surplus labor by prolonging labor time -a relation of compulsion that is not based on personal relations of domination and dependence, but springs simply from different economic functions- is common to both modes, but the specifically capitalist mode of production nevertheless knows other ways of extorting surplus value. On the basis of a pre-existing mode of labor, on the other hand, that is, of a given development of the productive power of labor and of the mode of labor corresponding to that productive power, surplus value can only be produced by resorting to the prolongation of labor time, that is, in the form of absolute surplus value. To this mode, as the sole way of producing surplus value, corresponds, then, the formal subsumption of labor under capital.
"Chapter VI (unpublished) of Book I of Capital", Karl Marx, 1863-1864
In other words, with the formal subsumption of the labor process by capital, the peasant and the artisan are proletarianized, but the way in which they work and confront capital is not yet that of the proletariat. Capital has not yet transformed the organization of labor, and the increases in its profitability are obtained exclusively by increasing absolute surplus value. That is, for the first day-labourers and worker-artisans subjected to capital, capitalism presents itself as a worsening of their situation, not as a new situation. This explains the birth, which has left deep scars, of movements such as Lassalleanism or craft unionism in the Germany of early industrialization or in the USA.
Lassalleanism represented the last artisan strata in the process of settling out between the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between the conversion of the feudal privilege of the skilled worker into an "independent" petty bourgeois and his proletarianization as a deskilled worker within a chain whose aim is to reproduce money as capital through surplus value.
It thus expressed ambiguous, if not openly reactionary, aspirations, such as that the bourgeois state should take "socialist measures" by creating cooperatives or by being handed the education of children, ideas that the Marxists in the German party would have to confront from the moment of the merger and for a long time afterwards, as can be seen in Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme" and Engels's critique of the Erfurt programme.
Transplanted to the conditions of the southern USA, that attachment to the feudal and identitarian distinction of the artisan, that faded aspiration to a democratic petty bourgeoisie, turned into racism and the defense at all costs of small property hand in hand with the state. The Lassallean leadership went so far as to declare that it would collaborate with the state authorities to prevent damage to property. Instead of helping to build the strength and disciplined organization of the workers, the Lassalleans ended up dividing and paralyzing the workers in order to uphold the arm of legality and the state.
Real subsumption
It will be, however, the search for an increase in exploitation in relative terms, for relative surplus value, that will give shape to a specifically capitalist organization of production. This radical transformation of the place and organization of the workers in the productive process will be characteristic of rising capitalism, and it is what will shape the proletariat as a universal class.
We have set out in detail how, with the production of relative surplus value (for the individual capitalist, insofar as he takes the initiative spurred by the circumstance that value = the socially necessary labor time objectified in the product; stimulated by the fact that consequently the individual value of his product is below its social value and that, therefore, it can be sold above its individual value), the whole real form of the mode of production is altered and a specifically capitalist mode of production arises (even from the technological point of view), on whose basis, and at the same time as it, the relations of production -corresponding to the capitalist production process- develop between the various agents of production and in particular between the capitalist and the wage earners.
The social productive forces of labor, or the productive forces of directly social labor, socialized (collectivized) by means of cooperation, of the division of labor within the workshop, of the application of machinery and in general of the transformation of the production process into a conscious application of the natural sciences, mechanics, chemistry, etc., and of technology, etc., for specific purposes, as well as the large-scale labor corresponding to all this (only such socialized labor is in a position to employ in the direct process of production the general products of human development, such as mathematics, etc., just as, on the other hand, the development of these sciences presupposes a certain level of the material process of production); this development of the productive force of objectified labor, as opposed to the more or less isolated labor activity of scattered individuals, etc., and with it the application of science -that general product of social development- to the immediate process of production: all this presents itself as a productive force of capital, not as a productive force of labor, or only as a productive force of labor insofar as the latter is identical with capital, and in any case not as a productive force either of the individual worker or of the workers combined in the production process. The mystification implicit in the capitalist relation in general now develops much further than it had developed, or could have developed, in the case of the purely formal subsumption of labor under capital. Moreover, it is here that the historical significance of capitalist production first emerges plainly (in a specific way), precisely thanks to the transformation of the immediate process of production and the development of the social productive forces of labor.
We have shown that not only "conceptually" but "in fact", the "social" character, etc., of his labor confronts the worker not merely as something alien, but as something hostile and antagonistic, and as something objectified and personified in capital.
Just as the production of absolute surplus value can be regarded as the material expression of the formal subsumption of labor under capital, the production of relative surplus value can be regarded as that of the real subsumption of labor under capital.
Be that as it may, the two forms of surplus value, absolute and relative -if one wishes to consider each of them by itself, as separate existences (and absolute surplus value always precedes relative)- correspond to two separate forms of the subsumption of labor under capital, or two separate forms of capitalist production, of which the first is always the precursor of the second, although the more developed one, the second, may in turn constitute the basis for the introduction of the first into new branches of production.
"Chapter VI (unpublished) of Book I of Capital", Karl Marx, 1863-1864
It is interesting to note how the preponderance of absolute surplus value, which returns temporarily during the brief crises of rising capitalism, regains prominence throughout decadence until it manifests itself as a permanent and generalized tendency towards precarization and pauperization.