Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey Page B

a principle of equality – we exchange use values with each other and the value of those use values should be roughly the same. This contradicts the presumption that there will be more value for all capitalists because in a well-functioning capitalist system all capitalists should earn a profit. So where does the extra value come from to assure a profit when the market system in principle depends on equality ofexchanges? There must exist a commodity that has the capacity to create more value than it itself has. And that commodity is labour power. And that is what capital relies upon for its own reproduction.
    The effect is to transform social labour – the labour we do for others – into
alienated
social labour. Work and labour are exclusively organised around the production of commodity exchange values that yield the monetary return upon which capital builds its social powers of class domination. Workers, in short, are put in a position where they can do nothing other than reproduce through their work the conditions of their own domination. This is what freedom under the rule of capital means for them.
    While the relation between the labourer and the capitalist is always an individual contractual relation (by virtue of the private property character of labour power), it is not hard to see how in both the labour market and the labour process there will arise a general class relation between capital and labour that will inevitably – like all private property relations – involve the state and the law as arbiter, regulator or enforcer. This is so by virtue of the systemic contradiction between individual private property rights and state power. Nothing stops the labourers individually or collectively agitating and fighting for more and nothing stops the capitalists from striving (also individually or collectively) to either pay the labourer less than their fair market value or reduce the value of labour power (by either trimming the market basket of goods deemed necessary to the labourer’s survival or reducing the cost of the existing market basket). Both capital and labour are within their rights to struggle over these issues and, as Marx famously put it, ‘between equal rights, force decides’. 1
    The more that capital is successful in the struggle against labour, the greater its profits. The more the labourers succeed, the higher their standard of living and the more options they have in the labour market. The capitalist likewise typically struggles to increase the intensity, productivity and/or length of time of the labour rendered to it in the labour process, while labourers strive to diminish both the hours and the intensity as well as the physical hazards implicitin the activity of labouring. The regulatory power of the state – for example, legislation to limit the length of the working day or to limit exposure to hazardous working conditions and materials – is often involved in these relations.
    The forms and effectiveness of the contradictory relation between capital and labour have been much studied and have long played a critical part in defining the necessity of revolutionary as well as reformist political struggles. I can therefore be mercifully brief here, since I presume most of my readers are broadly familiar with what is entailed. For some analysts of a left-wing persuasion (Marxists in particular), it is this contradiction between capital and labour that constitutes the primary contradiction of capital. For that reason, it is often regarded as the fulcrum of all meaningful political struggles and the seedbed for all anti-capitalist revolutionary organisation and movement. It is also cited by some as the sole underlying source of all forms of crises. There have certainly been places and times when what is called the ‘profit squeeze’ theory of crisis formation seems to have been prominently at work. When workers become very powerful relative to capital, then they are likely to push wage levels