Letters from Tomis

An ongoing series of reflections on Marxist economics after reading What is Marxism: An Introduction into Marxist Theory by Rob Sewell and Alan Woods. The thoughts, opinions, and any errors are mine alone.

There is, I think, something distinctly amusing about the modern bourgeoisie’s tendency to congratulate itself on having overcome the crude mechanics of Marx’s grim industrial tableaux. The gentleman in the corner office, sipping his oat-milk flat white while staring at a Bloomberg terminal, may chuckle at the notion that he is a participant in the same exploitative machinery that Marx sketched amid the smoggy skies of 19th-century Manchester or the sweat-drenched fields of Lancashire. The story, or so they tell themselves, has moved on.

But has it?

In Marxist economics, the core antagonism remains elegantly simple and stubbornly unresolved: the division between constant capital and variable capital. The former — the machinery, the factory walls, the raw materials, the fleet of delivery trucks — is passive and mute. It is the scaffolding of production, inert and incapable of begetting surplus value without the spark of human labor. The latter — variable capital — is what Marx identified as the expenditure on labor power, the hiring of human beings who, through toil, skill, and endurance, generate more value than they cost to employ.

This, Marx argues, is where profit is born: not in the clever purchase of steel or the commissioning of engines, but in the wringing out of surplus labor from the working class.

Let us take this theory and apply it to our own glistening, neoliberal epoch. Consider the supply chains of Apple Inc. Here is a company perched atop a mountain of constant capital so vast it would have given even the robber barons of Marx’s day pause. Foxconn factories in Shenzhen, humming with robotics and precision engineering tools, spitting out iPhones with mechanistic efficiency. Automated systems track and ship these devices around the world, as supply chain algorithms optimize down to the nanosecond.

Yet, like a stage magician performing an elaborate distraction, the narrative fixates on the brilliance of design, the sleekness of the hardware, or the genius of Cupertino’s engineers. The labor — the human, bloody, variable capital — remains ghostlike, deliberately obscured. Behind every iPhone is a litany of workers laboring under conditions Marx would have found grimly familiar. Reports of suicides, twelve-hour shifts, and anti-union repression echo faintly in the background, like a Greek chorus drowned out by the applause of shareholders.

Does this not reveal the continued relevance of Marx’s analytical tool? The constant capital — those magnificent machines and algorithms — cannot, by themselves, produce surplus value. It is the workers, whether soldering chips in Shenzhen or answering customer service calls in Manila, who remain the source of that surplus. The “genius” of modern capitalism lies largely in its ability to disguise this fact beneath layers of abstraction.

Or consider another supposedly post-industrial marvel: Amazon. A name now synonymous with logistical wizardry and the commodification of nearly every human want and need. The media narrative, often gushed from the business pages of the Financial Times or The Economist, focuses on the glories of artificial intelligence, drone deliveries, and warehouse automation.

But descend from Bezos’s penthouse view and you find the grist in the mill. The Amazon warehouse worker sprinting to meet inhuman targets, penalized for bathroom breaks, monitored by Orwellian software that quantifies every twitch and stumble. Here is the reality of variable capital, alive and sweating, generating surplus value in the shadow of constant capital’s towering infrastructure. The conveyor belts and robotics may reduce the labor time per package, but the unpaid labor extracted from the worker — in stress, in exhaustion, in precarity — remains the lifeblood of Amazon’s profit model.

Marx’s insight thus not only persists but becomes more piercing when confronted with the corporate doublespeak of the modern gig economy. The Uber driver, for example, owns their vehicle — their constant capital — but is forced into a position of pseudo-entrepreneurship that benefits only the company extracting rents from their labor. The gig worker is an atomized, precarious agent, yet remains, under the slick veneer of “flexibility,” nothing more than variable capital shorn of the bare protections once afforded by industrial unionism.

And still, the apologists of capital will clutch their pearls and assure you that the world has changed — that we now live in a realm of innovation, disruption, and frictionless commerce. What an enchanting tale, yet as fairy-tale as anything conjured by Dickens. What has changed, in truth, is the complexity of the disguise. The factory no longer stands grimly upon the horizon like some satanic mill; it is now distributed, invisibilized, and globalized. The constant capital has been made sleeker and shinier, but it still stands inert, awaiting labor’s kiss to come alive.

I would also point you to the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence — the current darling of Silicon Valley. Here too, one hears of machines that think and automate entire industries out of existence. But who trains these models? Behind every AI, there is an army of underpaid clickworkers, labeling images, moderating horrific online content, feeding the machine with the data upon which it depends. Their labor — precarious, outsourced, and frequently traumatic — forms the unacknowledged variable capital upon which the gilded castles of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and others are built.

And so, here is Marx, stubborn and unrelenting, tapping on the glass of our contemporary daydreams. His categories of constant and variable capital continue to reveal the skeleton beneath the skin of modern capitalism. Capital has grown cleverer, but it has not grown less exploitative. If anything, it has grown more so, capable now of reaching into every corner of the globe, atomizing labor, deskilling workers, and shifting the burden of risk onto those least able to bear it.

It would, of course, be the height of folly to treat Marx as a holy prophet, waving about Das Kapital like a holy scripture. Marx, for all his brilliance, was a creature of his time, blind to many forces — ecological collapse being the most urgent today — that now shape our world. Yet the core of his insight, that value does not emerge spontaneously from the cogs of a machine but from the living, breathing toil of human beings, remains a truth as sharp as broken glass.

And so, let the merchant princes and tech lords sip their wine and toast the new age of automation. The workers still build the stage, still hoist the curtain, still write the play. The machinery — constant capital — remains the backdrop. The drama unfolds, as ever, upon the shoulders of the variable.