cannot confront each other as commodities unless the useful labour contained in them is qualitatively different in each case. In a society whose products generally assume the form of commodities … this qualitative difference between the useful forms of labour which are carried on independently and privately by individual producers develops into a complex system, a social division of labour. (133)
Here Marx broaches a methodological theme that echoes throughout these chapters: the movement from simplicity to greater complexity, from the simple molecular aspects of an exchange economy toward a more systemic understanding. He then deviates from the rule of looking at relations in order to examine some of the universal properties of useful labor. He does so because “labour … as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society.” Useful labor is “an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself” (133).
This idea of “metabolism,” with labor as the mediator between human existence and nature, is central to Marx’s historical-materialist argument. He will come back to it at various points in Capital even as he leaves the idea rather undeveloped. This, too, is often typical of his approach. He says, in effect, “Look, there is something important here you should think about [in this case, the relation to nature]. I am not going to work with it in any detail, but I want to put it on the table as significant before going on to matters of more immediate concern.” “Use-values,” he writes, “are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour.” Hence, “when man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself” (133). This again is an important foundational point: whatever we do has to be consistent with natural law.
[We] can only change the form of the materials. Furthermore, even in this work of modification [we are] constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. (133–4)
With the help of this gendered metaphor (which dates back at least to Francis Bacon), Marx introduces a crucial distinction between wealth—the total use-values at one’s command—and value—the socially necessary labor time these use-values represent.
Marx then returns to the question of values in order to contrast their homogeneity (all products of human labor) with the vast heterogeneity of use-values and of concrete forms of laboring. He writes,
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 it can be expended in this or that form. But the value of a commodity represents human labour pure and simple, the expenditure of human labour in general. (134–5)
As such, it is what Marx calls “abstract” labor (135–7). This kind of generality of labor contrasts with the myriad concrete labors producing actual use-values. In creating this concept of abstract labor, Marx holds that he is merely mirroring an abstraction produced by extensive commodity exchanges.
So Marx conceptualizes value in terms of units of simple abstract labor; this standard of measurement “varies in character in different countries and at different cultural epochs, but in a particular society it is given.” Here again we encounter a strategy frequently deployed in Capital. The standard of measurement is contingent on space and time, but for the purposes of analysis we assume it is known. Furthermore, in this instance, he then goes on to say, “complex labour,” i.e., skilled labor, “counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour”:
Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the outcome of the most complicated labor, but through its value it is posited as equal to the product of simple labor … In the interests of simplification, we shall henceforth view every form of labour-power directly as simple labour-power; by this we shall simply be saving ourselves the trouble of making the reduction. (135)
Notably, Marx never specifies what “experience” he has in mind, making this passage highly controversial. In the literature it is known as the “reduction problem,” because it is not clear how skilled labor can be and is reduced to simple labor independently of the value of the commodity produced. Rather like the proposition about value as socially necessary labor time, Marx’s formulation appears cryptic, if not cavalier; he doesn’t explain how the reduction is made. He simply presumes for purposes of analysis that this is so and then proceeds on that basis. This means that the qualitative differences we experience in concrete labor, useful labor and the heterogeneity of it, is here reduced to something purely quantitative and homogeneous.
Marx’s point, of course, is that abstract (homogeneous) and concrete (heterogeneous) aspects of labor are unified in the unitary act of laboring. It is not as if abstract labor occurs in one part of the factory and concrete labor occurs somewhere else. The duality resides within a singular labor process: making the shirt that embodies the value. This means there could be no embodiment of value without the concrete labor 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 labor. It is through the multiplicities of concrete labors that the measuring rod of abstract labor emerges.
On the one hand all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values. (137)
Note that this argument mirrors that of the first section. The singular commodity internalizes use-values, exchange-values and values. A particular labor process embodies useful concrete labor and abstract labor or value (socially necessary labor-time) in a commodity that will be the bearer of exchange value in the market place. The answer to the problem of how skilled or “complex” labor can be reduced to simple labor partially lies, it turns out, in the next section, where Marx follows the commodity into the marketplace and takes up the relation between value and exchange-value. So let us move on to section 3.
Section 3: The Value Form, or Exchange-Value
This section incorporates, in my view, a lot of boring material that can all too easily mask the significance of the argument being made. Marx sometimes puts on, as I pointed out earlier, an accountant’s hat, and the result is a form of exposition that can be tedious in the extreme: when this equals that and that equals this and this costs three pence and this fifteen, then the result is that something else is equivalent to … and so it goes, with the help of all manner of numerical illustrations to follow. The woods-for-the-trees problem, which often arises in Marx’s writing, is at its worst here, so this is a good point to figure out how to approach it. I shall deal with this at two levels: I will skim over what is often a simple, technical argument, and then comment on its deeper significance.
Marx’s objective is to explain the origin of the money-form. “We have to perform a task,” he (again, so modestly!) claims, “never even attempted by bourgeois economics.”
That is, we have to show the origin of this money-form, we have to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value-relation of commodities from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-form. When this has been done, the mystery of money will immediately disappear. (139)
He
