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| Term Paper 817: Essay about Chapter Seventeen: Changes in Wages and Surplus Value |
| [538] Jeffkang, Lancer, and Franky: For our term paper we want to focus on section 2 of chapter 17 in Marx's Capital. Section 2 primarily discusses the working-day and productiveness of labor as constants, and intensity of labor as a variable. Marx discusses how this situation would decrease the value of each commodity produced. Why? As labor is intensified, more products are produced in a less amount of time. According to the Labor Theory of Value, when less time is spent on a product the value is less. |
| Looking at this situation from the standpoint of the employer and employees will help one understand more fully what Marx is trying to say. From the employer's viewpoint they would want the employees to intensify their labor because this results in higher production and more surplus-value. From the employees standpoint they would want to intensify their labor only if there was a certain incentive to. Employees who are employed at an hourly wage have only one reason to intensify their labor, and that is competition between fellow laborers. Other than this situation, the laborers have no reason to intensify their labor at an hourly wage, and this would only increase the surplus value for the employer. |
| Marx discusses a situation in which the intensity of labor is increased equally in every branch of industry. He says that this “...new and higher degree of intensity would become the normal degree for the society, and would therefore cease to be taken account of.” Any company, in this situation, who labors with less intensity than this new “norm” would, eventually, be forced out of business. |
| Increasing the labor intensity with no change in the working-day would be ideal for the capitalist because if the intensity is increased then he is getting more for his money. The capitalist is buying these laborers for the product they will produce. If they labor with increased intensity and get paid the same if they were working at normal intensity, you could say the capitalist is getting more out of his laborers for what he is paying them. This situation would be unfair to the laborers, because they would increase intensity without having their wages increased. Decreasing the labor intensity would be bad for the employer, because he would no longer receive a surplus value. This is very unlikely, because if the laborers decrease their labor intensity, the employer has grounds to terminate their job. |
| From this section we learn more about the capitalist's exploitation of their laborers. If the laborers originally are working at a normal intensity, and that intensity is increased in that particular industry throughout the world, they are required to work at this new intensity level, if they don't they will lose their jobs. Capitalists have this advantage over their workers. |
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