“In his investigations into the productivity of capital, Hodgskin is remiss in that he does not distinguish between how far it is a question of producing use-values or exchange-values.” (p 267)
Labour creates value, and can only create more value via more simultaneous labour. In other words, if one labourer works for 5 hours, then 5 hours of new value is created, and if that labourer works for 10 hours, then 10 hours of new value is created. However, 10 hours of new value is also created if two labourers work for 5 hours, or ten labourers work for 1 hour, simultaneously. In a day, one labourer might only be able to create 15 hours of new value, but, a thousand labourers, in a factory, as a collective labourer, working 15 hours each, simultaneously, create 15,000 hours of new value.
Labour, as concrete labour, also produces use values, but, unlike value, the quantity of use value is not dependent on the duration of the labour. It is dependent on the productivity of the labour. In one hour, a labourer may produce 10 or 10,000 units of some particular use value. The productivity of the labour is also a function of the instruments of labour. Land is an instrument of labour, and the more fertile the land the more use values labour will produce, in a given amount of time. A windmill or a watermill will enhance the productivity of labour, as will a steam engine, and various kinds of machines. All of these will increase the quantity of use values that a given amount of labour produces, but none increase the amount of value that labour produces in that time.
It only appears that way, in the case of individual capitals, because they sell their output, not at its individual value, but at the market value. Any capital that enjoys the benefit of more fertile soil, or a machine that other capitals have not yet introduced, is thereby enabled to produce commodities with a lower individual value, whilst continuing to sell them at the higher market value. As soon as other capitals introduce the same machine, this situation disappears, as the market value falls to this lower level.
Because only labour creates value, and more value is only created by more labour, an increase in productivity, which results in more use values being produced, cannot result in more value being created. But, it does result in the total value of output rising, because this output now consists of more use value as inputs, of more elements of past labour, relative to living labour. In other words, if ten hours of labour spins 100 kilos of cotton, with a value of ten hours of labour, into yarn, a rise in productivity might result in 200 kilos of cotton being spun into yarn by the same 10 hours of labour. The new value created, thereby remains 10 hours, but the value of cotton contained in the new production has doubled from 10 hours to 20 hours. The total value of output has risen from 20 hours to 30 hours.
Although productivity has doubled, only the same 10 hours of new value has been created, but it is now divided amongst 200 kilos of yarn, so that the labour content for each kilo is halved. Each kilo now represents 0.05 hours of new value, rather than 0.10 hours. But, each kilo contains the same amount of past labour, in the shape of cotton. Each kilo of yarn contains a kilo of cotton, and a kilo of cotton still represents a value of 0.10 hours of labour. So, the value of each kilo falls from 0.20 hours of labour to 0.15 hours of labour, because it contains less living labour, as a result of the rise in productivity. In terms of the total output, it still only comprises 10 hours of new value, but, because it comprises 200 kilos of yarn, not 100 kilos, the total value of this output rises from 20 hours of labour (10 hours cotton, 10 hours new labour) to 30 hours of labour (20 hours cotton, 10 hours new labour).
Viewed in terms of commodities, and of capital as nothing but these commodities, combined in the production process, this is the framework in which Hodgskin is also constrained to view the relation between capital and labour, rather than as a specific, historically determined social relation.
“On the one hand (insofar as it operates in the real process of production) as a merely physical condition of labour, and therefore of importance only as a material element of labour, and (in the process of the production of value) nothing more than the quantity of labour measured by time, that is, nothing different from this quantity of labour itself. On the other hand, although in fact, insofar as it appears in the real process of production, it is a mere name for, and re-christening of, labour itself, it is represented as the power dominating and engendering labour, as the basis of the productivity of labour and as wealth alien to labour. And this without any intermediate links. This is how he found it. And he counterposes the real aspect of economic development to this bourgeois humbug.” (p 267)
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