For capitalism, therefore, the only relation between the value of labour-power/wages and the value produced by labour is that capital will not knowingly employ labour-power whose value is greater than the expected new value to be created by the labour it performs. If a situation arises where that is no longer the case, because, as Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 15, wages have risen, due to the increased demand for labour-power, resulting from capital accumulation, this represents an overproduction of capital, a situation where capital can no longer act as capital, as self-expanding value.
“It is true that the particular social form of these things in relation to labour and their real determinateness as factors of the labour process are as confused and inseparably interwoven with one another in the minds of the economists as they are in the mind of the capitalist. Nevertheless, as soon as they analyse the labour process, they are compelled to abandon the term capital completely and to speak of material of labour, means of labour, and means of subsistence.” (p 264)
But, spoken of in this way, simply as material objects, in relation to labour, the specific social relation that exists, in each mode of production disappears from view.
“One can only speak of the productivity of capital if one regards it as the embodiment of definite social relations of production. But if it is conceived in this way, then the historically transitory character of this relationship becomes at once evident, and the general recognition of this fact is incompatible with the continued existence of this relationship, which itself creates the means for its abolition.” (p 265)
As Marx points out, the distinction between means of production, as commodities, as use values, as opposed to their existence as capital, is brought out precisely in this.
“Wheat is nourishing not because it is capital but because it is wheat. The use-value of wool derives from the fact that it is wool, not capital. In the same way, the action of steam-powered machinery has nothing in common with its existence as capital. It would do the same work if it were not “capital” and if it belonged, not to the factory owner, but to the workers. All these things serve in the real labour process because of the relationship which exists between them as use-values—not as exchange-values and still less as capital—and the labour which sets them in motion. Their productivity in the real labour process, or rather the productivity of the labour materialised in them, is due to their nature as objective conditions of real labour and not to their social existence as alienated, independent conditions which confront the worker and are embodied in the capitalist, the master over living labour.” (p 264)
Bourgeois economists cannot analyse capital in terms of this social relation, as opposed to merely a relation between things (products of past labour) and labour, because to do so would mean accepting the transitory nature of capital and capitalism. Capital, viewed only as things, products of past labour, cannot be productive of new value. It can only transfer that value it has into the end product. And, Marx here also sets out an early warning shot against the proponents of historic pricing, which he pursues more thoroughly in the next chapter, in his critique of Ramsay.
“Insofar as they hold that capital produces “value”, the best of them and [especially] Ricardo, admit that it does not produce any value which it has not received and constantly continues to receive from labour, since the value of a product is determined by the labour-time necessary to reproduce it, that is, its value is the result of living, present labour and not of past labour. And as Ricardo emphasises, increase in the productivity of labour is marked by the continuous devaluation of the products of past labour.” (p 265)
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