Chapter Text
Part 1: Commodities and Money; chapter 1: the Commodity
Capitalist societies are characterised by having an immense wealth of commodities. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.
The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing that satisfies human needs. The needs can be of whatever kind (needs of the stomach, needs of the imagination, etc.) and the way the commodity satisfies this need can be directly (e.g. when we consume a food) or indirectly (e.g. when we use brushes to produce a painting).
Every useful thing, for example iron, paper, etc., can be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. Every thing also has many useful properties, some of which were not always known and some of which are still left to be discovered.
The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value [a key Marx term to remember] but this use-value depends on the physical condition of the commodity itself, e.g. whether a table is beaten-up or shiny and new, whether an orange is fresh or moldy. This property, the use-value, is independent of the amount of labour that was required to produce it.
In capitalist societies, useful objects also carry an exchange-value [another key Marx term to remember]. At the beginning, exchange-value is the proportion at which one useful object trades for another, e.g. whether bringing 1 cake to the market will get you 5 oranges or more. The rate of exchange will be different in different places or times. Therefore, exchange-value appears to be accidental and purely relative.
1 cake might trade for 5 oranges, 10 apples or 2 baguettes, so the cake has many exchange-values instead of one. But (at least in our example) 5 oranges, 10 apples and 2 baguettes all represent the exchange-value of 1 cake, they are in a way exchangeable. It looks like there is another value property which they all have the same amount of. This property is also predictable: if we were to trade in 4 baguettes, we would expect to get 2 cakes.
Of course "value in cakes" is not the property we are looking for. Nor can the property be a geometrical, physical or chemical property of commodities. It can have nothing to do with objects' use-value. As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity. In order to find the property which expresses itself in exchange-value but is not exchange-value, let us for a moment disregard everything that makes a commodity a use-value: the material, the form, whether it is a table or a house or an orange, whether it is shiny or old, hard or soft, light or heavy and so on. What property remains that is common to all? The fact that these are products of labour. Specifically, not the labour of a carpenter, a mason or a gardener, but human labour in the abstract.
The human labour that went into one particular orange is not visible to us. We know that it has taken place and how much time it probably took, without being able to point out the place, the worker, or whether the harvest took twice as long as normal because of poor health. So whatever we still recognize of the human labour that went into a commodity, really just a residue or phantom of it, is a congealed quantity of homogeneous human labour. This is what we recognize as value (commodity value).
We have seen that when commodities are being exchanged, the exchange-value is totally independent from what the commodity will be used for. If one specific orange trades for 2 apples, the seller will not ask for 1 apple from the person who plans to make orange juice, nor 3 apples from the person who needs it for a wedding cake. In an ideal marketplace, the exchange-value is reflective of value, i.e. of how much labour went into it. This also explains how the exchange-value of oranges can be very different based on time and place.
Now let's investigate this value in the abstract. How is it measured? In terms of time spent. Not how much time was actually spent - then tables produced by lazy and unskillful workers would cost more than tables produced by master craftsmen. Rather, how much time society would have spend, on average, in order to produce an equivalent item. This is the socially necessary labour time [key Marx term].
Socially necessary labour time can differ widely across societies, depending for example on the education/skill of its labourers or on the availability of power tools. The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by one half the labour required to convert yarn into woven fabric. If weavers with power-looms needed one hour to produce a given amount of fabric, but weavers who continued to use hand-looms still needed two hours to produce the equivalent, then suddenly they could only sell this amount of fabric for one hour's worth of someone else's labour; the commodity was suddenly only worth half its former value. What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the labour-time socially necessary for its production.
Commodities which contain equal quantities of labour, or which can be produced in the same time, have therefore the same value. The exchange-value, i.e. the proportion at which oranges trade for apples or commodity A trades for commodity B, is the same as the proportion between the labour-time necessary to produce commodity A and the labour-time necessary to produce commodity B.
The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant if the labour-time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter is determined by a wide range of circumstances which can change all the time, e.g. the season, the availability of resources, the workers' average degree of skill, the level of science and technology, the effectiveness of production and so on.
- A thing can be a use-value without being a value, when no labour is required to make it useful. Examples: air, virgin soil, natural meadows, unplanted forests and so on.
- A thing can be a use-value and a product of human labour without being a commodity, when it is not produced for others or not part of an exchange. Examples: a cake baked for oneself or one's friends, some corn paid as rent to a feudal lord.
- Nothing can have value without being an object of utility (we shall include art in this category). If a baker puts a lot of work into baking a fancy cake, and the cake burns so spectacularly that it has to be thrown away, the labour contained in it does not count as labour and therefore creates no value.