Racialised Gradients of Human Value and Marx’s Working Day, Today

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-2026

Publisher

Brill

Source Publication

Historical Materialism

Source ISSN

1569-206X

Original Item ID

DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-bja10104

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the ‘working day’ discussion in chapter ten of Capital and how it centres two parameters in the generation and appropriation of surplus value. The first parameter is the cost of labour-power paid by the capitalist and the second is the time that the worker must yield to the capitalist: the ‘length of the working day’. The first parameter represents the amount of pay required to keep the worker alive and able to work. Marx understood it as a lower limit below which capitalism would cease to function. This paper argues that, while analytically coherent, this understanding of a lower limit runs contrary to many ways that actual historical capitalism has found to exploit the working class. Capitalism regularly exceeds this limit and, in this sense, hyper-exploits. What we find instead of a limit are racialised gradients of human value – generated and fostered by capitalism – in which there are regular and persisting areas of hyper-exploitation with devalued racialised gendered workers. Supplemented by the notion of gradients of human value, Marx’s two-parameter account with its unifying analytic of time, in particular human-time, neatly encompasses the phenomenon of hyper-exploitation and provides an incisive analysis of today’s capitalist exploitation.

Comments

Historical Materialism (2026). Online before print. DOI.

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