What is wrong with Mill's argument, here, is that the amount of corn the worker must consume is not determined by the value of the corn, but the quantity of use value required to reproduce the worker's labour-power. So, the worker does not have to consume 1.20 kilos of corn, rather than 1 kilo, as a result of the change in the value of corn. If the value of corn falls, then the kilo of corn that the worker must consume as wages falls in value. It represents a smaller portion of the working-day, leaving a larger portion of the working-day as surplus labour, thereby raising the rate of surplus value. If, as Marx said earlier, this is just a short term change in the market price, the money wage may remain the same, and, in that case, the worker might buy 1.20 kilos corn, but equally, they might use the savings on their purchases of corn to buy more meat, fish, beer, or just to take the opportunity to save money for another day.
Marx now addresses himself to this point, and consequently sets out the argument whereby, contrary to what was said at the start of the section, in relation to short-term fluctuations in the price of wage goods, he shows that changes in the value of wage goods changes the value of labour-power, and consequently the rate of surplus value, with potentially then a change in the rate of profit.
“Now comes the real question: How far can a change in the value of constant capital affect the surplus-value?” (p 226)
This analysis is also fundamental to understanding Marx's insistence on the use of the value of the commodities that comprise the productive-capital, i.e. their current reproduction cost, as opposed to their historic cost, when calculating the rate of profit. It flows into Marx's analysis, in the coming chapters, in which Marx analyses the errors that flow from the use of historic prices, for that purpose, and the illusion that such use can create of the production of surplus value/profit from other sources than labour. It is what leads to the confusion of capital gains/losses with profit/losses derived from the production of surplus value.
In the earlier example, Marx assumed a 12 hour working-day, in which 10 hours are necessary labour, equivalent to the labour-time required to reproduce the labour-power. The other 2 hours constitute surplus value. This could be represented as £100 wages, £20 profit. The £100 of wages is the value of labour-power, and is equal to the value of the commodities that the worker must consume to reproduce their labour-power. But, the value of these commodities is determined, as with any other commodity, not only by the living labour required for their production, but also by the congealed labour contained in the constant capital required for their production. So, to answer the above question, the answer is that not only is the value of these wage goods changed by the amount of immediate labour required for their production, i.e. a change in its productivity, but it is also affected by any change in the labour required to produce the constant capital used in their production.
“This would lead either to a rise or to a fall in the production costs, i.e., the value, of labour-power; in other words, if previously out of the 12 hours the worker worked 10 hours for himself, he must now work 11 hours, or, in the opposite case, only 9 hours for himself. In the first case, his labour for the capitalist, i.e., the surplus-value, would have declined by half, from two hours to one; in the second case it would have risen by half, from two hours to three. In this latter case, the rate of profit and the total profit of the capitalist would rise, the former because the value of constant capital would have fallen, and both because the rate of surplus-value (and its amount in absolute figures) would have increased.” (p 226-7)
The consequence of this, contrary to the argument that Mill presented, is that the value of labour-power, in any industry, is determined, not by the productivity of labour in that industry, but by the productivity of labour in all industries that produce commodities that either directly are consumed by workers, or else produce constant capital used in the production of those wage goods – and by extension the constant capital used in the production of constant capital used in the production of wage goods, and so on.
“What appears as the product in one industry appears as raw material or instrument of labour in another; the constant capital of one industry thus consists of the products of another industry; in the latter it does not constitute constant capital, but is the result of the production process within this branch. To the individual capitalist it makes a great deal of difference whether the increased productivity of labour (and therefore also the fall in the value of labour-power) takes place within his own branch of industry or amongst those which supply his industry with constant capital. For the capitalist class, for capital as a whole, it is all the same.” (p 227-8)
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