In the Foreword to his magnum opus, Karl Marx wrote
Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences.
If you begin with a false premise you aren't doing science.
To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty.
It is easy to understand. Sadly it is utter shit.
That which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised.
You have shat on it. The substance of value is the substance of a thing which is valuable. In the case of bullion, it is a precious metal. In the case of sheep, it is mutton & wool. The magnitude of value is expressed by numbers. One sheep is less valuable than two sheep. Marx was too stupid to understand this.
The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form,
Money is a one type of asset. There were already far more sophisticated types of negotiable instrument.
is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all,
But Karl was such a genius he didn't just get to its bottom but made it his bitch.
whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body.
Now the fucker thinks he is a medical genius.
In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use.
Nor is a head full of shit.
The force of abstraction must replace both.
Abstraction has no force. If a stupid shithead is doing the abstracting, it is shit. Karl was a cretin.
Chapter 1: Commodities Section 1: The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value (The Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value) The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”
Nonsense! You might see big big piles of wool or wheat in some feudal shithole. You won't see any at all on the Stock Exchange or the conference rooms of Merchant Banks.
its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
None is needed. It is a Tarskian primitive. If the thing is on sale, its a commodity. If you can't buy or sell it, it isn't.
A commodity is, in the first place,
fungible- i.e. interchangeable rather than unique. But, for such to be the case, there must be market-makers who procure & & make merchantable a standardized product.
an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.
Nobody knows what 'satisfied human wants'. Market makers & entrepreneurs have expectations in this regard as do consumers.
The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.
Yes it does. There are somethings which stomachs are capable of digesting. There are other things which are poison. That is why if you are in the food business, you have to observe different health codes than if you are in the entertainment business.
Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.
Because what Marx is here concerned with is useless shite. If you are a producer or consumer you need to know the determinants of demand & supply.
Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity.
this may be done by those engaged in a wholly useless or mischievous activity.
It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history.
No. It is the work of scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, inventors etc. Marx had shit for brains.
So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects.
Fuck that! A better standard of measure is like a better mouse-trap. A path to your door will be beaten by- not society as a whole- but those interested in making more money or producing a thing more economically.
The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.
because that's how language works. But language doesn't matter greatly in economics.
The utility of a thing makes it a use value.
Only if the smell of a thing makes it a smell value or the fact that you shove it up your arse makes it an anal dildo value. People have expectations regarding the usefulness of a thing. Often they are wrong. I keep buying kitchen appliances which I never use.
But this utility is not a thing of air.
Expectations could be described as such. They don't exist in any tangible manner though we can infer them easily enough. This is called 'revealed preference'.
Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity.
Nonsense! Gold is a commodity. A legal claim to gold has great utility and has an existence apart from the commodity. But this is true of anything which is fungible in a certain manner.
A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful.
No. Lots of things which existed in Marx's time had no 'use value' but would become very valuable at a later point. Uranium was discovered in 1798. It became useful a century later.
This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.
It is not a property of the commodity. It is an expectation in the mind of a user or potential user of it. Marx might as well say 'Kingliness is a property of Kings. A King is a king even if no labour is expended on his coronation or other ceremonies of state. Also, his Mum wouldn't have needed to go into labour in order for him to be born.'
When treating of use value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron.
No. You work with estimates & probability distributions.
The use values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities.
As commerce burgeons, the statistical sciences burgeon. This cunt knew nothing of a developments in commercial insurance which had been going on in London since the late seventeenth century.
Use values become a reality only by use or consumption:
They are not a reality. They are a predicate applied to something which may or may not be tangible. Marx commits the fallacy of accident- fallacia accidentis- by thinking what is true of a merchantable commodity is true of thing being sold. Thus, when I buy a k.g. of potatoes, I am buying something merchantable. This does not means any and every potato is merchantable. It is likely that some processing has to supervene before merchantability is attained. I may say 'potatoes are found in the grocery store'. But it is no part of the 'essence' (what is true of a thing in all possible worlds) of a tuber that it be found in a shop.
they also constitute the substance of all wealth,
A lot of wealth is a legal claim to future payments- e.g. rent, interest, profits- or a claim to assets of various sorts- e.g. land, buildings, intellectual property etc.
whatever may be the social form of that wealth.
There is a legal form of wealth. That is its social form. True, as a manner of speaking, we may say 'health is the true wealth' or 'love alone is worth prizing' or 'gaining God's grace is the best of treasures'.
In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.
There is realty- which is specific. For commodities, there is fungibility- the ability of an asset or commodity to be exchanged or substituted with other identical units of the same type and value, with no loss of value.
Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.
The commodity is defined by merchantability- i.e. is fit for its ordinary purpose, being of average quality, adequately packaged, etc. It is not an inherent attribute.
Let us consider the matter a little more closely. A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. – in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions.
Only if there is a market with market makers. Otherwise, all we can say is that x was exchanged for y at time t.
Instead of one exchange value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many.
If there are market makers then there may be a vector of this sort. Otherwise, there is only the value at which a particular exchange took place.
But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold &c., each represents the exchange value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c., must, as exchange values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other.
Only if some market-maker stipulates thus. But they won't. They will offer a 'spread'- i.e. a buy price and a sell price.
Therefore, first: the valid exchange values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.
It is a predicate & isn't any more or less phenomenal than anything else.
Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron.
No. There will always be a 'spread'- i.e. a profit for the market-maker. Otherwise, all there is is a particular transaction at a particular time and place- e.g. Smith exchanged 1 ton of corn for 1 ton of iron with Jones last Tuesday at Paddington.
What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both.
No. We merely learn that Smith & Jones made such and such transaction. We don't know if this is the 'market clearing' price- i.e. everybody could sell & buy at this price.
The two things must therefore be equal to a third, 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.
No. A market-maker (or a bunch of them) may offer a 'spread' & this may 'clear the market'- i.e. there is no excess supply or demand at the end of trading.
A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles.
Rectangles, not triangles.
But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by
some guy for some purpose
something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base multiplied by the altitude.
This assumes the embedding space is Euclidean.
In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed
by some guy for some particular purpose
in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.
One particular commodity can be used as the 'numeraire'. Every price can be expressed in its terms- e.g. in prison, we might say a can of soup is worth five cigarettes while a tube of toothpaste is worth ten cigarettes. But this depends on the existence of 'market-makers'- i.e. guys with a bunch of ciggies who trade them in the hope of making a profit- i.e. ending up with more ciggies or stuff which can be exchanged for them.
This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities.
It could be. Suppose some ciggies contain more tobacco than others. They will trade at a premium.
Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value.
No. It is characterised by total contingency. I need my ciggie now and trade it for toothpaste though I will regret this later on.
Then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says, “one sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value ... An hundred pounds’ worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold.”
Only if a market maker makes this stipulation- except, there won't be an equation. There will be a spread between selling and buying price. Marx lived in a City where there were a lot of brokers and arbitrageurs of various sorts. He is pretending they didn't make a profit. They risked their money & expended their time in a purely altruistic spirit.
Even if a non-profit enterprise undertook market making, it would charge a commission to cover its costs- including cost of funds, & the price of 'hedging' (insuring against risks).
As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.
No. They are still of different qualities. The more perishable the commodity the more it will trade at a discount. Non perishables which are high value to weight trade at a premium. This means the 'spread' is differs because of specific qualities- e.g. perishability.
If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour.
No. The only common property is that market-makers are involved. They may be trading cowrie shells they picked up at the beach or using such cowrie shells to bet on a cock fight.
Incidentally, most of the things which are the product of labour aren't commodities.
But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands.
Which is why we don't want your grubby hands touching anything we produced with much labour.
If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing.
Nonsense! If you bid on a house at an auction you see it as a house. True, you may expect to 'flip' it at a profit but that is because of the type of house it is and where it is located and what value you think you can add to it.
Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.
Utterly false. Nobody is thinking of the human labour which went into a thing. They are thinking of who might want to buy it at a higher price at some later time. True, there is an element of risk involved. But some people may be better at assessing risk & they can succeed as market-makers.
Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure.
Nonsense! The fact that some labour has been expended on a thing does not protect it from destruction. In any case, human labour is not homogenous.
All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them.
Energy of various types has been expended on producing a thing and this will be reflected in its cost of production which is a determinant of the market supply of the commodity. The number of man-hours involved may be insignificant relative to the cost of electricity expended.
Not all products are traded on open markets. Where there is 'administered pricing' & excess demand is denoted by longer waiting time- one might say that the per unit labour cost plays a role in determining price. If this is equated to the marginal cost- i.e. the wage is determined by the marginal productivity of the last worker hired- then, in a Malthusian society, you would have 'the iron law of wages'- i.e. population expansion would keep wages at just the subsistence level. But wages are not set on open markets and, in any case, this would only hold true for the 'fix-price' sector of the economy.
When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.
No. Only stuff taken to market gets assigned a price- if it sells. The 'crystals' of society are people. It is foolish to pretend every man has his price & is constantly selling himself for filthy lucre.
We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use value.
We have seen the opposite every day. You buy x but find it not to be of merchantable quality. You return it and get a refund. Maybe the seller can sell it at a lower price for some other purpose- e.g. spoiled milk may be sold to the cheesemaker for a lower price.
But if we abstract from their use value, there remains their Value as defined above.
No. Use value is itself an abstraction or generalisation from something observed- viz. people buying some things but not others. We assume they get some use from it. But they may be speculators- e.g. the Dutch tulip mania where people drove up the price of the thing hoping to sell at a bigger profit.
Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value.
But those values differ. Sure you can say all value is Value or all weight is weight or all height is height. But, this is non informative. It is a tautology of a puerile type.
The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed.
Nonsense! Consider the gold in a gold mine. Specialist surveyors with knowledge of geology will give different estimates as to the quantity of recoverable ore. Valuation will be based on some such estimate. The gold mine may be sold- i.e. have exchange value- on the basis of this estimate.
For the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form.
This is like considering the nature of the height of a person independent of his body.
A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it.
A person has height only because height has been embedded in him. All three dimensional things have height. If they have value or are useful or are capable of being inserted into your anus it is because height is the property common to all. This proves that History must ineluctably empower tall people over shorties.
How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by
money or the numeraire (e.g. cigarettes used as currency in a prison)
the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article.
It is irrelevant. That is why my books- upon which I have expended a lot of labour- are worthless.
The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.
Time is measured in that way. The quantity of labour is established by 'head-count'.
Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be,
Nobody has ever thought that. They did think that if labour was more productive, things would be cheaper for everybody.
because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour,
there is no such thing. Sadly, there is also no homogenous Capital or Entrepreneurship or Sexiness. Capital theory is as useless as Marxian theory.
expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society,
Fuck off! An oil rich Emirate may not have much labour power but it may have very high per capita GDP
counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society,
all people are the same height in so far as they have the character of average height.
and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary.
Nobody knows what that is. If asked how tall you are, you reply that you are as tall as it is socially necessary to be, you have not revealed any information save that you have shit for brains.
The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.
Some 'work study' experts may establish this for a particular industry at a particular time. But no 'social necessity' is involved.
The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth.
Mechanisation of spinning meant that yarn became cheaper thus permitting handloom weavers to gain higher wages for a couple of decades before weaving itself became mechanised. This was a brief golden age.
The handloom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.
No. If the handloom weaver produced the same type of cloth as the power loom then his wage fell. But if he shifted to producing something differentiated by quality (higher thread count) or style then the market might permit him to take home a higher wage than previously- more particularly if he could afford to buy one of the new 'dandy looms'. But the number of people in that line of work would tend to drop. There was little point being apprenticed to a dying trade.
We see then that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its production.
We would see that only if we were stupid enough to see that a person is as tall as it is socially necessary for him to be. But why stop there? Why not speak of the smelliness of one's farts as being no more than is socially necessary?
Each individual commodity, in this connexion, is to be considered as an average sample of its class.
No. Each is compared to the average and either marked down or up on that basis. The price of cotton is 10. Inferior cotton sells at 7. Superior cotton can go up to 15. We also speak of people as being taller or shorter than average.
Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value.
They may do. They may not. Chances are, if inferior cotton was used, this will be reflected in the price of the finished article.
The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other.
My height is to your height as is the height it is socially necessary for me to be relative to the height it is socially necessary for you to be. Does that answer your question as to whether I am taller than you or, as you suspect, a malignant little dwarf?
“As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time.”
None are. Also your height isn't congealed tallness.
The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour time required for its production also remained constant.
No. The price of raw materials & the interest rate & cost of transport & level of taxes etc. would also be relevant.
But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour.
It may do. It may not. If labour can capture the reward for the increase in productivity, then per unit labour cost remains the same. England, when Marx first arrived, had seen some decrease in real wages for certain types of manual labour. This is why about a million emigrated between 1814-1845. But England was also attracting immigrants & had strong demographic growth. In the second half of the nineteenth century there was real wage growth for all classes as well as increased social mobility. With the ending of the Corn Laws, the landed gentry's ability to extract rent declined though rising agricultural productivity meant that there was no depression till the 1880s. However, the Ricardian complaint against the landlords no longer had the same 'bite'. Still, Henry George's theories were welcomed in the UK though, because of the importance of collective bargaining, a modified Marxian theory became mainstream on the Left. Still, Marx was seen more as a polemicist than a systematic thinker. His labour theory of value was interpreted merely as the cry that it was the English worker who had raised the country to greatness. Nothing wrong with that. The English genuinely were and are hard workers with a gift for innovation. This does not make the country immune to structural unemployment but it does greatly ameliorate the welfare effects of economic change.
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