The fetishism of commodities now takes the form of making it seem that creativity does not lie with living human beings but with the products of their labour, so that people talk of capital creating wealth and employers "providing people with work", whereas in reality it is labour that adds to the value of capital and the worker who provides labour to the employer.
Absolute and relative surplus value
Marx distinguished between two ways in which firms could raise the ratio of surplus value to wages. One was by the crude method of lengthening the working day. He called this "absolute surplus value". This method of forcing up profits was very widespread in the early days of industrial capitalism, and Marx in Capital provides many examples of it. But Marx also noted in Capital that prolonging the working day over much could be counterproductive for the capitalist:
A point must inevitably be reached, where extension of the working day and intensity of the labour mutually exclude one another, in such a way that lengthening of the working day becomes compatible only with a lower degree of intensity. 25
So it was that, after putting up massive opposition to successive attempts to provide a legal limit to the working day for children, major capitalist interests gave way to working class pressure-and sometimes found that production actually increased once hours were shorter. For much of the 20th century the method of prolonging the working day seemed to belong to the past. In the advanced industrial countries, at least, workers' resistance had forced capitalists to concede a shorter working week and holidays with pay. The 72-hour week of Victorian times had become the 48-hour week and then the 44-hour week.
But there was another range of methods for increasing the amount of surplus value to be obtained from each worker, which
Marx's Concepts
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