Is the ‘leftist study guide’ confused about surplus value?

[Anonymous]

http://leftiststudyguides.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/capital-vol-1-pt1/

Q12: What is Surplus-Value and how does it originate?

A12: Surplus-value is capital as represented by the money form. This originates when the capitalist extracts from the worker more labor-power then the worker produces for wages; this extra bit is appropriated to the capitalist’s personal wealth as well as placed back into circulation within the factory system, spent to purchase machines which enable the capitalist to reduce the value of a commodity thus enabling him to extract more surplus-value from his workers (this because the workers are still working the same amount of time per day/shift).

 

Is it just me or is this confusing?

 Surely it is value the capitalist extracts not labour power. The capitalist buys labour power and that labour power produces more value than the value of the labour power itself.

 

 

 

[ALB]

You're right. This is wrong. As you say, the author is confusing "labour power" and "labour" (the exercise of labour power). Fairly common but generally the other way round, as when people talk of workers selling their "labour" for a wage or salary.The second bit about a reduction in the value of the commodities produced enabling the capitalist employer to extract more surplus value is odd too. Wouldn't this simply mean that the same new value would be distributed amongst a greater number of commodities (so that the price of a unit would go down)? But, other things being equal, this wouldn't alter the total amount of surplus value created either.  The rate of exploitation would remain the same.This could be a confused reference to what Marx called "relative surplus value", when a fall in the cost of living due to a cheapening of the products workers consume to reproduce their labour-power results in a fall in the value of labour-power (though not necessarily a fall in what workers consume) and so to an increase in the proportion of new value created being surplus value. But this applies across the whole economy, not to a single employer (and would only apply when the cheapened commodities are ones consumed by workers)..

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