This page will describe Marx’s Capital 1. As Capital 1 is such a long text Davis Harvey’s companion to it will be drawn upon to keep this description within bounds.
Book 1; The Process of production of capital
Part One; Commodities and Money
Chapter 1 : The Commodity
1 The two factors of the Commodity; Use Value and Value (substance of value, magnitude of value)
Marx begins by saying,
“The Wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ’immense collection os commodities’ ; the individual commoditiy appears as its elementary form. Our investigationtherefore begins with the analysis of the commodity” (125)
But David Harvey warns us that the word ‘appears’ twice in Marx’s passage, and ‘appears’ is not the same as ‘is’. He adds that Marx uses the word frequently during Capital 1, and that it means that Marx is saying that something else is going on beneath the surface appearance (01).
Marx then spends a page describing the usefulness of commodities, and introduces the notion of use-value, a concept that covers all commodities. He then introduces the idea of exchange-value,
“Use-values are only realised in use or consumption. They constitute the materialcontent of wealth, whateverits social form may be. In the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers of … exchange- value.” (126)
Again Marx uses a phrase ‘bearers’, as bearing something is not the same as being something.
Exchange-value appears when considering echange processes in the market. Harvey adds that,
“Commodities are bearers of something else, which has yet to be defined…. Commodities can keep changing hands and keep moving in a system of exchanges. Something makes all commodities commensurable in exchange” (16 to 17).
So all commodities must be reducible to the thing that makes them commensurable.
Marx examines this problem on pages 127 to 128.
On page 127 Marx points out that the third element cannoy be geometrical, or physical, or chemical or any other natural property oc commodities.
Only one property of commodities remains says Marx, and that is that all commodities are products of human labour; and he concludes that all commodities are reduced to the same type of labour and that is human labour in the abstract. He adds that,
“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 homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these thngs 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”128).
But Marx reaches further than this,
“We have seen that when commodities are in the relation of exchange, their exchange-value manifersts itself as something totally indepemdent of their use-value. But if we abstract from their use-value, there reains 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, For the present, however, we must consider the nature of value independently of its form of appearance.” (128).
Marx continuous (129) that a use-value or useful article only has value because abstract human labour is objectified or materialised in it. How then can the magnitude of this value be measured?
Only by the quantity of labour – the value forming substance – contained within the article. This is measured by its duration, by hours, by days etc.
It might seem that if a slower worker produced the article, them more time would result.
But the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the use of identical human labour power. The total labour power of society, manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one homogenous mass of human labour power – made up of innumerable units of labour power.
Each of these units is the same as any other, to the extent that it has the character of a socially average unit of labour power and acts as such, and only needs to produce a commodity the labour time which is necessary on an average – or in other words is socially necessary.
“Socially necessary labour time is the labour time to produce any use-value under the conditions normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society” (129).
What exclusively determines, says Marx (129), the magnitude of value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its production.
Marx continues (130), that commodities which contain equal quantities of labour, or which can be produced in the same time, have therefore the same value.
He adds that the value of a commodity is related to the value of any other commodity as the labour time necessary for the production of one is related to the labour time necessary for the production of the other.
“as exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour time” (130)
Sections 2 and 3 are covered by David Harvey in a concise manner, and will be used for these two sections.
Section 2: The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities
Marx says this,
“Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc., and in this sense both human labour. They are merely two different forms of the expenditure of human labour power. Of course human labour power must itself have attained a certain level of development before before it can be expended in this or that form. But the value of a commodity represents human labour pure amd simple, the expenditure of human labour in general” (28).
As such, Marx adds, it is what he calls ‘abstract labour’. This kind of generality of labour contrasts with the myriad concrete labours producing actual use–values.
Harvey adds (29) that Marx’s point is that abstract (homogeneous) and concrete (heterogeneous) aspects of labour are unified in the unitary act of labouring…..The duality resides within a singlular labour process: making the shirt that embodies the value. This means there could be no embodiment of value without the concrete labour of making shirts and furthermore, that we cannot know what value is unless shirts are being exchanged with shoes, apples, oranges and so on. There is, therefore, a relationship between concrete and abstract labour. It s through the multiplicities of concrete labours that the measuring rod of abstract labour emerges.
Profit, Wealth and Value 