Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 1 — mind map

The Commodity

A commodity has both Use Value and Exchange Value

Exchange value appears first of all as the qualitative relation, the proportion in which use values of one kind exchange for use values of another kind.

As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an-atom of use-value.

Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal or a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.

Use values like coats, linen etc., in short; the physical bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature and labour.

When examining use-values, we always assume we are dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter One — marxists.org

Capital Vol. I : Chapter One (Commodities)

Value is what is passed on in the process of commodity exchange. But the exchange value is not the commodity value. Exchange value is a representation of value.

Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity ; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values - commodity values.

We have seen that when commodities are in the relation of exchange, their exchange-value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract from their use-value, there remains their value, as it has just been defined. The common factor in the exchange relation, or in the exchange value of the commodity, is therefore its value. The progress of the investigation will lead us back to exchange-value as the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearance, of value.

§1 — magnitude of value, and its limits

The magnitude of value is set by socially necessary labour-time, so it varies inversely with the productivity of labour: more productive labour, less value per article. Diamonds are dear because they are rare in the earth and take much labour to find; if they could be made cheaply, they would fall below the value of bricks.

Three limits. A thing can be a use-value without being a value — air, virgin soil, natural meadows: no labour in them. A thing can be useful and a product of labour without being a commodity — the peasant who produces for his own needs. And nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it. To be a commodity, a product must be a use-value for others, a social use-value, transferred through exchange.

§2 — The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities

Take the coat and the linen. As use-values they are products of two different kinds of concrete, useful labour — tailoring and weaving. Such labour is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society, the eternal metabolism between man and nature.

But as values, coat and linen are congealments of the same abstract human labour — the expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, without regard to the form of its expenditure. Tailoring and weaving are here only two different ways of spending the same labour-power.

One act of labour, two characters: concrete labour produces the use-value, abstract labour forms the value.

Two consequences.

Simple and skilled labour. The value-forming substance is simple average labour — what any ordinary person can do without special training. Skilled labour counts as multiplied simple labour, the reduction being made by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers.

Productivity and wealth. A change in productivity changes the quantity of use-values produced in an hour, but never the value created in that hour. So material wealth can grow while value falls: twice the coats, the same value. An increase in the quantity of use-values constitutes an increase in material wealth — it may go with a fall in the magnitude of value.

§3 — The Value-Form, or Exchange-Value

Value is a social reality, so it can appear only in the relation between one commodity and another. The task is to trace the genesis of the money-form from its simplest germ.

A. The simple, isolated or accidental form: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat.

Two poles. The linen is in the relative form — it expresses its value in something else. The coat is in the equivalent form — it serves as the material in which that value is expressed. The two are inseparable, and mutually exclusive: the same commodity cannot occupy both poles in one expression. The coat’s body becomes the mirror of the linen’s value.

Three peculiarities of the equivalent form.

1. Use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value. The coat’s body stands for value as such.
2. Concrete labour becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, abstract human labour. Tailoring counts as labour in general.
3. Private labour takes the form of its opposite, labour in directly social form.

And Aristotle — who saw that 5 beds = 1 house must mean the two are somehow equal, and then declared it impossible that such unlike things could be commensurable. He could not find the common element because Greek society rested on slavery, on the inequality of men and their labour-powers. The secret of value could only be deciphered once the equality of all labour had become a popular prejudice — a society of commodity-owners.

B. The total or expanded form: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat = 10 lb of tea = 40 lb of coffee = 1 quarter of corn = 2 oz of gold = …

Now the linen’s value is expressed in the whole world of commodities, and it becomes clear that value is indifferent to the particular use-value it appears in. The exchange ratios are no longer accidental.

But the series is interminable, a motley mosaic — every commodity has its own endless chain, and none of them expresses value in a single unified form. The defect points to its own remedy.

C. The general form of value: reverse the series. 1 coat, 10 lb of tea, 40 lb of coffee, 1 quarter of corn … each = 20 yards of linen.

Now all commodities express their values in one and the same commodity, simply and in unified form. The linen has been set apart as universal equivalent — and it can only have been set apart by the joint action of the whole world of commodities. One commodity is excluded so that all the others can relate to it as their common value-body.

The general form is thus the first form that actually makes commodities appear as values to one another — as values in general.

D. The money form. Nothing changes in the form itself when gold replaces linen as universal equivalent — only which commodity holds the position. Gold has it by social custom, because it won the role historically. Once welded to that place, the specific commodity is money.

The money form is only the reflection thrown upon a single commodity by the relations between all other commodities. And the simple expression of a commodity’s value in the money-commodity is its price: 20 yards of linen = 2 oz of gold, or £2.

The difficulty was never money; it was the simple form A. Everything is already there in 20 yards of linen = 1 coat.

§4 — The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. A table stays wood as a use-value; as a commodity it stands on its head, evolving grotesque ideas out of its wooden brain.

Where does the mystery come from? Not from use-value, and not from the content of the determinations of value — that labour costs effort, takes time, is done in society, is nothing new. It comes from the form itself: the commodity form.

The commodity form reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour back to them as objective characteristics of the products — as natural properties of things. Equal human labour appears as the value-objectivity of the products; its duration appears as the magnitude of their value; and the relations between producers appear as a social relation between the products.

This is because producers do not come into social contact until they exchange their products. Their private labours are only proven social through exchange — so the social relation between persons takes on the fantastic form of a relation between things. Marx names the analogy: the religious world, where the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures. This he calls fetishism.

Four counter-examples, to show the veil is historically specific.

Robinson Crusoe — all the determinations of value are there (needs, labour, time-budgets) but in simple, transparent form.

The European Middle Ages — personal dependence: serf, lord, vassal, tithe. Labour and product enter social life as services and payments in kind; relations are disguised as social relations between things precisely not — they are seen for what they are.

The peasant family — the different labours are directly social functions of the family, measured in time.

An association of free men — working with communal means of production; the social relations of labour are transparent in their simplicity, in production and distribution alike.

Political economy analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and discovered the content concealed within these forms. But it never asked why this content takes that form — why labour is expressed in value, and its duration in the magnitude of value. Formulae which bear the stamp of a society in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, seemed to it as self-evident as productive labour itself.

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value in a pearl or a diamond. Value does not have its description branded on its forehead; it transforms every product into a social hieroglyphic which men later try to decipher.

Three inversions in the equivalent

use-value → appears as value concrete labour → appears as abstract labour private labour → appears as social labour

Each time the concrete, particular, private thing is made to stand for its opposite. This is the germ of fetishism (§4): the social character of labour appearing as a natural property of an object.

The ladder of value-forms

A. Simple — x A = y B one relative, one equivalent; accidental

B. Expanded — x A = y B = z C = … one relative, many equivalents; interminable

C. General — y B, z C, … = x A many relative, one equivalent; social exclusion

D. Money — … = 2 oz gold the general form welded by custom to one commodity

Price = the money form of a single commodity.

Let us now take two commodities, for example corn and iron. Whatever their exchange relation may be, it can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron, for instance 1 quarter of corn = x cwt of iron. What does this equation signify ? It signifies that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things, in 1 quarter of corn and similarly in x cwt of iron. Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third thing.

Deriving labour as source of value. This comes from Ricardo

If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour has already been transformed in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we abstract also from the material constituents and forms which make it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished.

Use-value is the bearer of value, never its measure. And the use-value must be for others — value is a social relation from the first sentence, even before exchange is discussed.

Marx calls the dual character the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns — his own claim to originality against Smith and Ricardo. Every labour process is both concrete and abstract at once (session note).

§3 is what the classical economists never did. Ricardo asked about the magnitude of value; Marx asks about its form — why does labour have to appear as the value of a thing? This is the section Althusser told readers to skip, and the one Marx said was hardest.

The exclusion of one commodity is a social act, not a convention or a decision. This is the logical version of what Ch.2 tells as a social process — In the beginning was the deed.

Fetishism is not a mistake to be dispelled by thought. The appearance is objective — this is genuinely how private labours relate in a commodity society. Knowing the secret does not make it go away (session note: an objective appearance, the necessary way things appear).

The counter-examples do one job: show that value is historically specific, not eternal. Wherever social relations are direct — personal dependence, the family, association — the veil is absent. It appears only where independent private producers meet through their products.