Theories of Surplus Value, Part II, Chapter 8 - Part 62

Marx clarifies what he means by more or less productive, when it comes to comparing two different industries. As set out in Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, Chapter 4, Marx's definition of productive labour is that which produces surplus value. This is quite different to a definition of productive based on the production of value or use value. In fact, labour, which produces a large quantity of use values, in a given time, will embody less value in each use value than labour which produces a much smaller quantity of use-values. So,

“It is nonsense to talk of the greater or lesser productivity of two different branches of industry when merely comparing the values of their commodities.” (p 110)

Its possible if you take a starting point, to compare the ratio of the value of one commodity to that of another to discern how productivity in one industry has changed relative to the other, by then comparing the relation of the values of their commodities at some later date, but that does not tell you what the productivity of one is compared to the other.

What Marx really means by productivity here is the organic composition of capital, i.e. the ratio of the value of constant capital to the value of variable capital. So, to return to the earlier point, in pre-capitalist modes of production, agriculture could be more productive than industry, because in agriculture, nature replaced some labour in the production process, whereas in industry labour had to do all the work. By contrast, under capitalism, not only does the division of labour and co-operation, only possible when production is undertaken on a large scale, enable each unit of labour to process more material, but labour itself is increasingly replaced by machinery in the production process.

As described in Capital III, these machines are only introduced where the labour they require for their production (both dead and living labour, i.e. constant capital and newly created value) is less than the paid labour they replace. Consequently, their introduction is synonymous with a rise in productivity.

What Marx means by productive here then is the opposite of what he meant previously when discussing productive labour in Part I. There productive labour meant productive of surplus value. Here, a productive capital is one that produces use values, and is more productive the more use values it produces with a given quantity of labour. And, because a capital that produces a larger mass of use values, with a given quantity of labour-power thereby produces a relatively smaller mass of surplus value, the more it is less productive in that previous sense. This is indeed the basis of the contradiction at the heart of Marx's Law of the Tendency For The Rate of Profit To Fall. In other words, the more a capital becomes productive in the second sense, of producing more use values with a given mass of labour, the less productive it is in the first sense of producing surplus value, because each one of these increased mass of use values, contains proportionately less variable capital and surplus value (and proportionately less fixed capital), but proportionately more value of materials, and consequently the profit margin, p/k, or rate of profit, s/(c+v) falls.

“... (in other words, not so productive of surplus-value, because it is more productive of produce)” (p 111)

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