Marx’s absolute-to-relative surplus value shift anchors superstructure theory concretely

Evidence

This involves a “reading”—some would say another “reading”—of Capital , treating it neither as the theoretical analysis of a “pure” mode of production (whatever that is), nor as a history of British capitalism in the nineteenth century, which seem at this point in time to be the two prevailing alternatives on offer. We would have to try, instead, to understand, for example, as Marx does, the shift from the extraction of absolute to the extraction of relative surplus value as one of the key dynamics of the developing capitalist mode of production; as not merely a theoretical distinction but one which can be made concrete and historically specific in, say, the capitalist mode in England after the factory legislation of the mid-century. We can then see this shift as providing the baseline of solutions to the contradictions to which capitalism, as a fully established mode of production, is progressively exposed. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 516

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains what ‘relative surplus value’ means and why its historical shift matters for theory.