All of the French currents put at center stage a text of Marx which, in the long run, may be more important than all the other new material that started to come to light in the 1950′s and 1960′s: the so-called “Unpublished Sixth Chapter” of Vol. I of Capital.36 It is not known why Marx removed it from the original version of Vol. I. But it is a materialist Phenomenology of Mind. Ten pages suffice to refute the Althusserian claims that Marx forgot Hegel in his “late period”. But the affirmation of the continuity with Hegel’s method is the least of it; the fundamental categories elaborated in the text are the distinctions between absolute and relative surplus value and what Marx calls the “extensive” and “intensive” phases of accumulation, corresponding to the “formal” and “real” domination of capital over labor. These are introduced in a very theoretical way; Marx doesn’t attempt to apply them to history generally. But the French ultra-left started to periodize capitalist history around exactly these distinctions. “Extensive” and “intensive” phases of capitalist history are not unique to Marxists; they have also been used by bourgeois economic historians as descriptive devices. One current summarized the distinction in its essence as “the phase which de-substantiates the worker to leave only the proletarian“.37 In that sentence is the condemnation of the whole Gutman school of the new labor history. The transition to “intensive” accumulation in the 6th chapter, is presented to the “reduction of labor to the most general capitalist form of abstract labor”, the concise definition of the mass production labor process of the 20th century in the advanced capitalist world. The new labor history is one long nostalgia song for the phase of formal domination.
translation for luke:
at first capitalism invents lots of new things to create more goods (factories, new machines, etc.)
eventually it can't do that any more so it just focusses on making people more productive (each person making more goods per day)
during this first stage the bourgeois are just taking your profit (it's a bit complicated to explain, but marxists 'labour theory of value' means that profit is effectively stolen from the person who actually does the work)
during the latter the bourgeois will control everything. your ideas, your reproduction, the lot. very dystopian.
at this point the proletariat will become one collective rather than individual workers.