100–1). As Marx says of his procedure in Capital, ‘the various forms of capital, as evolved in this book . . . approach step by step the form which they assume on the surface of society .. . and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves' (1865a: 25). I see this second stage of analysis as being above all a historical enterprise (Sayer, 1983: Afterword). Essential relations are concretized through a genuinely historical analysis of the actions of real, living individuals' in which, in the end, they entirely consist, and this is this ultimate explanatory (and demystifying) level of Marx's theory. Let me exemplify.
On 'the surface of society', in immediate experience, ‘capital’ is encountered simply as a sum of money which when productively invested is capable of expanding its value: the mysterious formula M - M'. Marx asks how this expansion is possible. Otherwise put, what conditions are necessary in order that mere possession of a sum of value grants access to surplus-value. His answer is furnished by the theory of surplus-value. The increment, the surplus-value, the capitalist's profit or interest derive from the discrepancy between the value of labour-power (variable capital) and the value added in the productive employment of labour-power, which exceeds that of the reproduction costs of the variable capital. The possibility of this occurring stems from a unique capacity of the commodity labourpower: more value can be created in its productive consumption than it itself embodies. But for this process to take piace, certain conditions are necessary.3 First, the society must be a commodityproducing one. This supposes a definite historical form of social division of labour. Second, labour must be ‘free' in Marx's double sense: free from constraints of serfdom or slavery, and free of means of production of its own through which it could reproduce itself without entering the wage relation. Only then will labour-power become a commodity. Third, the means of production must be constituted as the private property of capitalist employers. Only then will labour-power have a buyer capable of profiting from its unique capabilities. All of these, as Marx makes clear, presume a requisite level of development of the productiveness of labour. He concludes thus:
One thing . . . is clear. Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production. (1867a: 169)
Marx goes on from here to argue that capital is in fact a social relation: contrary to its appearance, it is ‘not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a definite social character' (1865a: 814). He elaborates:
A negro is a negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cottonspinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar the price of sugar. (1847b: 211; Marx quotes the same passage again, evidently not having changed his mind in the intervening twenty years, in 1867a: 776n)
Capital is not then the means of production or money as such, but specifically ‘the means of production monopolized by a certain section of society, confronting living labour-power as products and workingconditions rendered independent of this very labour-power, which are personified through this antithesis in capital'(1865: 814). It is thus command over unpaid labour' (1867a: 500), ‘a coercive relation, which compels the working class to do more work than the narrow round of its own life wants prescribes' (ibid.: 293). Recall here The German Ideology's view of what is ‘property'.
What Marx does here is to reconceptualize capital in terms of the essential relation which explains its phenomenal form M – M', selfexpanding value. In his own words, severance of the conditions of production, on the one hand, from the producers, on the other, forms the conception of capital' (1865a: 246, emphasis added). This analysis is paradigmatic. Marx does the same when he argues exchange-value - in appearance a property of things - to be ‘a cipher for a social relation', or that thing-like entity 'the state' to be an abstracted idealized form of class power. Ostensibly natural and universal ‘selfunderstood forms of social life’ are revealed as more or less mystified forms of historically specific relationships between people, and reconceptualized accordingly.
132
THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
THE HISTORICITY OF CÓNCEPTS
133