Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The market acts like a giant calculating machine, rewarding those who guessed correctly what the socially necessary cost was, and penalizing those who used too much labour.

If we forget money and measure everything in ‘hours of necessary work’, we can see how profit is generated. If the cost of putting Nazma at the factory gate six days a week is thirty hours work by other people spread across the whole of society (to produce her food, clothing, energy, childcare, housing and so on), and she then works sixty hours a week, her work is providing double the amount of output for the inputs. All the upside goes to the employer.

One clue as to the truth of this is that wherever they can get labour for free – as in the American prison system or Nazi death camps – capitalists immediately take advantage of it. Another clue lies in the fact that, wherever they need to pay labour below its average value, as during the rise of the Chinese export industry, managers resort to providing the inputs collectively: dorms, uniforms and canteens. The labour of a dormitory workforce is much cheaper than the social average, which is based on the living costs of a family in a home – and of course dormitory workers can be disciplined more easily.