Labor-Process and Valorization Process

In the labor-process, “labor is at first a process between man and nature, a process by which man mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism with nature through his own actions”, which covers three simple factors: “purposive activity, that is work itself, the object on which that work is performed, and the instruments of that work”. The labor-process is the process in which human activity, through the instruments of labor, effects an alteration in the material worked upon which was intended from the outset, thus labor is objectified, its object is processed and a product is created.

Examined from the perspective of the product, the instruments of labor and the object of labor manifest themselves as the means of production, and labor itself as productive labor. Marx profoundly elaborated on the features of the instruments of labor as a thing, or a complex of things, which the laborer interposes between himself and the object of labor, and which serves as the conductor of his activity; the worker directly possesses himself the instrument of labor rather than the object of labor; among the instruments of labor, those of a mechanical nature, which, taken as a whole, we may call the bone and muscles of production, offer much more decided characteristics of a given epoch of production. Instruments of labor not only supply a standard of the degree of development to which human labor has attained, but they are also indicators of the social conditions under which that labor is carried on.

However, on the one hand, as the general condition for effecting exchange of matter [metabolism] between man and Nature, the labor-process is common to all forms of human society and is the material content of the social production process; on the other hand, the labor-process always takes place in certain social relations of production, presenting different social forms. In other words, the differences in the mode of combination of workers with the means of production divide human society into essentially different stages.

In the simple commodity economy prior to the period of capitalism, each worker owned a certain amount of the means of production and the products of labor produced by their own labor belonged to each worker: the production process was the unity of the labor-process and the process of producing value.

The social form of the production process in capitalist society is characterized by the possession of all means of production by the capitalist and that the worker who he has no other commodity for sale, i.e., he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects, and can only sell his labor to the capitalist. The characteristic of this labor-process is that the worker’s labor and the products of labor all belong to the capitalist. The latter aims to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity also; not only use-value, but value; not only value, but at the same time surplus-value. The characteristics of the commodity labor-power, i.e., “the value of labor-power, and the value which that labor-power creates in the labor-process, are two entirely different magnitudes. This difference of the two values was what the capitalist had in view, when he was purchasing the labor-power… What really influenced him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. This is the special service that the capitalist expects from labor-power.” Therefore, the symbolic feature of the process of capitalist production is the unity of the labor-process in which workers produce commodities or use-values and the valorization process [also translated as “process of producing surplus-value”] in which capital achieves an increase in the value of the capital advanced. The production in the capitalist society is the production of commodities in pursuit of surplus-value.

In a word, the difference between these two major periods of the production process by labor is that: “the process of production, considered on the one hand as the unity of the labor-process and the process of producing value, is production of commodities; considered on the other hand as the unity of the labor-process and the process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist process of production, or capitalist production of commodities.”

Further, in the process of capitalist production, on the one hand, laborers’ labor transfers old values from the means of production, and on the other, congeal their own labor into the product to produce new value. This is the duality of the labor-process. “Since, however, the addition of new value to the subject of his labor, and the preservation of its former value, are two entirely distinct results, produced simultaneously by the laborer, during one operation, it is plain that this twofold character of the result can be explained only by the twofold character of his labor; at one and the same time, it must in one character create value, and in another character preserve or transfer value.” The significance of this assertion in the history of economic thought is that it has solved the “Smith’s dogma” that Smith’s successors, including Ricardo, were unable to solve.