Formal and Real Subsumption of Labour under Capital
형식적 포섭과 실질적 포섭
Marx's distinction between two stages in which capital brings the labour process under itself. Formal subsumption takes artisans or peasants working in their inherited ways, employs them as wage labourers and puts them under the capitalist's command without changing their methods; surplus value is obtained mainly by lengthening the working day (absolute surplus value). Real subsumption transforms the labour process itself through cooperation, the division of labour and large-scale machine industry, raising productivity and yielding relative surplus value; Marx called it the "specifically capitalist mode of production".
In depth
How does capital take hold of labour?
Capitalism did not appear overnight with factories and machines. At first capital bought up existing labour as it found it. Marx analysed this process with the word "subsumption" (Subsumtion). In the philosophy of Kant and Hegel the word meant the logical procedure of placing a particular under a universal; Marx turned it into a term for the historical and social process by which labour is actually brought under the rule of capital.
In "Results of the Immediate Process of Production", the manuscript he wrote in 1863–1865 as the last chapter of Capital, volume I, Marx explained: "The labour process becomes the means of the valorisation process, the process of capital's self-valorisation, the manufacture of surplus value. The labour process is subsumed under capital (it is capital's own process), and the capitalist enters the process as its conductor and manager; for him it is at the same time directly a process of exploiting the labour of others. This I call the formal subsumption of labour under capital."
Der Arbeitsprozess wird zum Mittel des Verwertungsprozesses, des Prozesses der Selbstverwertung des Kapitals – der Fabrikation von Mehrwert. Der Arbeitsprozess wird subsumiert unter das Kapital (es ist sein eigner Prozess) und der Kapitalist tritt in den Prozess als Dirigent, Leiter; es ist für ihn zugleich unmittelbar Exploitationsprozess fremder Arbeit. Dies nenne ich die formelle Subsumtion der Arbeit unter das Kapital.
What changes under formal subsumption, and what stays the same?
Under formal subsumption what changes is the relation of workers to the means of production and to the product. Artisans who once worked for themselves with their own tools, or as journeymen under a guild master, now become wage labourers under the direct control of a capitalist; Marx gave exactly this example in chapter 14 of volume I. But methods, tools and techniques stay the same. The weaver weaves on the same loom in the same way, but loom, yarn and cloth now belong to a merchant capitalist and the weaver receives a wage.
Wenn zur Produktion des absoluten Mehrwerts die bloß formelle Subsumtion der Arbeit unter das Kapital genügt, z.B. daß Handwerker, die früher für sich selbst oder auch als Gesellen eines Zunftmeisters arbeiteten, nun als Lohnarbeiter unter die direkte Kontrolle des Kapitalisten treten
That is why Marx called this form "formal": it differs only formally from the earlier modes of production on which it arises. What differs is the kind of compulsion. Slaves and serfs are made to work through personal domination and dependence; under formal subsumption the compulsion that extracts surplus labour is purely economic. Marx called it "a relation of compulsion that rests on no personal relations of domination and dependence but arises simply from different economic functions". The worker is legally free, but without means of production cannot live without working.
Since methods stay the same, productivity changes little. Under formal subsumption, therefore, the capitalist increases surplus value mainly by lengthening the working day: absolute surplus value. Marx said that formal subsumption corresponds to absolute surplus value as the only form of producing surplus value.
How does real subsumption transform labour?
When capital has grown to a certain size and takes direct hold of production, the labour process itself begins to change. In chapter 14 of volume I Marx wrote that "the real subsumption of labour under capital takes the place of the formal". A specifically capitalist mode of production, growing up on the basis of formal subsumption, creates its own methods, means and conditions.
Sie unterstellt also eine spezifisch kapitalistische Produktionsweise, die mit ihren Methoden, Mitteln und Bedingungen selbst erst auf Grundlage der formellen Subsumtion der Arbeit unter das Kapital naturwüchsig entsteht und ausgebildet wird. An die Stelle der formellen tritt die reelle Subsumtion der Arbeit unter das Kapital.
The first step is cooperation. Bringing many workers together in one workplace is, for Marx, "the first change that the actual labour process undergoes through its subsumption under capital". Next, the division of labour in manufacture breaks one person's work into small pieces and makes each worker a detail labourer performing one simple operation for life. Finally large-scale machine industry reverses the relation between worker and tool: "In manufacture and handicraft the worker makes use of the tool; in the factory he serves the machine ... In the factory a dead mechanism exists independently of the workers, and they are incorporated into it as its living appendages."
In Manufaktur und Handwerk bedient sich der Arbeiter des Werkzeugs, in der Fabrik dient er der Maschine. Dort geht von ihm die Bewegung des Arbeitsmittels aus, dessen Bewegung er hier zu folgen hat.
In the "Results" manuscript Marx noted a further change brought by real subsumption: the productive powers of social labour, enlarged by cooperation, division of labour, machinery and the application of science, all appear as productive powers of capital, not of labour. The mystification contained in the capital relation develops much further than under formal subsumption.
dies alles stellt sich dar als Produktivkraft des Kapitals, nicht als Produktivkraft der Arbeit
How do the two forms relate to absolute and relative surplus value?
Absolute surplus value corresponds to formal subsumption, relative surplus value to real subsumption. When higher productivity cheapens workers' means of subsistence, the value of labour-power falls, necessary labour shrinks and surplus labour grows. But Marx did not divide the pairs mechanically. Large-scale industry was also used to lengthen the working day without limit, so the methods of producing relative surplus value are at the same time methods of producing absolute surplus value. He also pointed out that "hybrid forms" close to formal subsumption, such as modern domestic outwork, reappear against the background of large-scale industry.
An example (an assumption): ten village weavers employed by a merchant, each weaving at home, have their day lengthened from 12 to 14 hours: intensified exploitation under formal subsumption. When the merchant gathers them in a factory and installs power looms so that the same cloth is woven in half the time, the worker is no longer master of the craft of weaving but a minder keeping pace with the machine. That is real subsumption.
Where does the distinction first appear?
The "Results of the Immediate Process of Production", where the distinction is set out most fully, is a manuscript Marx wrote as the "sixth chapter" of Capital, volume I, but left out of the published book. It first appeared in 1933 in the Marx-Engels-Archiv published by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow but long attracted almost no attention. When this "lost chapter" and the Grundrisse were republished in the mid-twentieth century, the concept of subsumption gained renewed interest in Western Marxism.
How did later Marxists extend it?
The American Marxist Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), argued that twentieth-century Taylorist scientific management stripped workers of knowledge of their work and transferred it to management, dissolving skill. The book started "the labor process debate" and became the starting point for studies of how real subsumption proceeded in the twentieth-century workplace. Scholars such as David Noble held that Braverman was too pessimistic about how far labour had been subordinated to capital and documented workers' resistance.
Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri of the Italian autonomist movement argued that real subsumption spreads beyond the factory to the whole of society, which becomes a "social factory". Negri claimed that under this "total subsumption" the law of value is superseded by direct political command. Marxist feminists such as Leopoldina Fortunati and Silvia Federici argued that unpaid domestic and reproductive labour, being essential to the reproduction of labour-power, is informally subsumed under capital. More recently, discussions of how digital platforms and algorithms subsume communication, knowledge and social interaction also draw on the concept.