Falling Unit Values
It is not the machine that creates additional new value, only its own value is transferred to the value of output, as wear and tear. It simply enables a greater quantity of use values to be produced, each with a lower individual value, but which are sold at the higher market value, until such time that all producers adopt the same machine, and the market value itself falls. And, indeed, as Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 23, and in Capital III, Chapter 6, even if a new machine is nominally more expensive than the machine it replaces, its own greater productivity (producing, say, 1,000 units rather than 100), means that the value of wear and tear per unit of output, constantly falls, as well as the value of wages and profits.
“The value of raw material, therefore, forms an ever-growing component of the value of the commodity-product in proportion to the development of the productivity of labour, not only because it passes wholly into this latter value, but also because in every aliquot part of the aggregate product the portion representing depreciation of machinery and the portion formed by the newly added labour — both continually decrease. Owing to this falling tendency, the other portion of the value representing raw material increases proportionally, unless this increase is counterbalanced by a proportionate decrease in the value of the raw material arising from the growing productivity of the labour employed in its own production.”
(Capital III, Chapter 6)
In Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 23, Marx notes that this proceeds on the basis of this lower relative value of fixed capital/machines, despite an increased absolute value.
“But the spinning-machine is cheaper than the spinning-wheel in relation to the number of workers it employs. Otherwise it would not have displaced the spinning-wheel. The place of the spinner is taken by a capitalist. But the capital which the former laid out on the spinning-wheel was larger relative to the size of the product, than that which the capitalist lays out on the spinning-machine.”
However, as I've set out in many other posts, its often not just a relative decrease in costs, but an absolute decrease too. The PC's costing a few hundred pounds, in the 1980's, had as much power, and replaced mainframe computers that cost more than a million pounds; fibre optic cable not only carries thousands of times more information than copper cable, but is cheaper to produce too, and so on.
Similarly, it is not more fertile land that creates additional value, because, unlike fixed capital, it has no value to transfer, but that, like fixed capital, it facilitates a greater number of use values to be produced, each with a lower individual value, which are sold, not at their individual value, but at their market value. So, bourgeois economics is wrong that every factor of production creates new value, as against facilitating the production of use values. That fact can be seen by the reality that the vast amount of fixed capital, introduced in place of labour, has resulted not in the value of commodities rising, but continually falling.
The total value of output rises, for the reason set out above, because total output of use values rises by an even greater proportion, so that, both the proportion of new value, and value of wear and tear declines. But, its obvious why the owners of these factors of production – land and capital – and their ideologists amongst bourgeois economists, make that claim, because the only basis upon which the owners of those factors can claim a share in the new value produced – as against simply being compensated for the value of capital consumed, and land – is on that basis. To come back to the rest of the paragraph in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, referred to earlier,
“since precisely from the fact that labour depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labour power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labour. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.”
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