qualities. Thus:
The value of the linen as a congealed mass of human labour can be expressed only as an ‘objectivity’, a thing which is materially different from the linen itself and yet common to the linen and all other commodities. (142)
The problem is: how does value, this “thing which is materially different from the linen,” get represented? The answer lies in the money-commodity form. But there are, he notes, some peculiarities in this relationship between value and its expression in the money-form. “The first peculiarity which strikes us,” he writes, is that a particular use-value “becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value,” and this “conceals a social relation” (148–9).
Hence the mysteriousness of the equivalent form, which only impinges on the crude bourgeois vision of the political economist when it confronts him in its fully developed shape, that of money. He then seeks to explain away the mystical character of gold and silver by substituting for them less dazzling commodities, and, with ever-renewed satisfaction, reeling off a catalogue of all the inferior commodities which have played the role of the equivalent at one time or another. (149–50)
“The body of the commodity,” he goes on to say, “which serves as the equivalent, always figures as the embodiment of abstract human labour, and is always the product of some specific useful and concrete labour” (150). What does this say? Gold, for example, is a specific use-value, a specific commodity, produced under specific conditions of production, and yet we are using it as a means of expression of all human labor everywhere—we are taking a particular use-value and using it as a stand-in for all social labor. This raises complicated questions, as we will see when we get deeper into the theory of money in chapter 2.
The second peculiarity is that “concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour,” and the third peculiarity is that “private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form” (150). This means not only that the universal equivalent, the money commodity, is subject to the qualitative and quantitative problems that beset the production of any use-value, but that the production and marketing of the money commodity as well as its accumulation (eventually as capital) lie in private hands even as it performs its universalizing social function. When gold was still a dominant commodity underpinning global money at the end of the 1960s, for example, the two primary gold producers were South Africa and Russia, neither of which was particularly friendly to international capitalism. The dematerialization of the whole financial system in the early 1970s and the system of floating exchange rates, free from any gold standard, that then came into being had the effect of disempowering the gold producers (even if this was not the primary reason it occurred).
These are the sorts of contradictions that Marx’s analysis leads us to contemplate, and we later see—particularly in Volume III but also in chapter 3 of this volume—how these peculiarities and contradictions start to play out in the creation of possibilities for financial crises. In any case, the fundamental conclusion has to be that the relation between values and their representation in money-form is fraught with contradictions, and so we can never assume a perfect form of representation. This mismatch, as it were, between values and their representation turns out to have advantages even as it is deeply problematic, as we will see.
This brings us to an important passage on Aristotle. “There can be no exchange,” says Aristotle, “without equality, and no equality without commensurability.”1 The relationship between the relative and equivalent forms of value presupposes an equality between those doing the exchanges. This attribute of equality within the market system is terribly important; Marx understands it as being fundamental to how capitalism theoretically works. Aristotle, too, understood the need for commensurability and equality in exchange relations, but he couldn’t figure out what lay behind it. Why not? Marx’s answer is that “Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers” (152). In a slave-holding society there can be no value theory of the sort that we are going to find under capitalism. Again, note the historical specificity of the value theory to capitalism.
This then brings Marx back to expand on the three peculiarities of the money-form in order to identify an emergent opposition:
The internal opposition between use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition, i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value. (153)
This opposition between the expression of value and the world of commodities, an opposition that results in an “antinomy” between commodities and money, has to be interpreted as an externalization of something that is internalized within the commodity itself. Once externalized, the opposition becomes explicit. The relationship between commodities and money is a product of that dichotomy between use-value and exchange-value which we spotted as internal to the commodity at the very beginning.
So, what do we take from this? First, socially necessary labor-time cannot operate as a regulator of what is happening directly, because it is a social relation. Indirectly, it will do so through the medium of the money-form. Furthermore, the rise of the money-form is what permits value to start to crystallize out as the guiding principle of how a capitalist economy will work. And, always remember, value is immaterial but objective. Now, this creates quite a lot of problems for commonsense logic that assumes value can actually be measured; even some Marxist economists spend a lot of time explaining how they can do so. My argument would be: you can’t do it. If it is immaterial, you cannot measure it directly. To find value in a commodity by just looking at a commodity is like trying to find gravity in a stone. It only exists in relations between commodities and only gets expressed materially in the contradictory and problematic form of the money commodity.
Let me now take a moment to reflect further on the status of the three fundamental concepts of use-value, exchange-value and value that Marx sets out. In doing so, I will impose some of my own reflections that arise out of my specific interests, which you may accept or reject as you like. These three different concepts internalize fundamentally different spatiotemporal referents. Use-values exist in the physical material world of things that can be described in Newtonian and Cartesian terms of absolute space and time. Exchange-values lie in the relative space-time of motion and exchange of commodities, while values can be understood only in terms of the relational space-time of the world market. (The immaterial relational value of socially necessary labor times comes into being within the evolving space-time of capitalist global development.) But as Marx has already convincingly shown, values cannot exist without exchange-values, and exchange cannot exist without use-values. The three concepts are dialectically integrated with one another.
In the same way, the three forms of absolute, relative and relational space-time are dialectically related within the historical-geographical dynamics of capitalist development. This is my argument as a geographer. One of the major consequences is that the space-time of capitalism is not constant but variable (as happens with speed-up and what Marx elsewhere calls “the annihilation of space by time”2 wrought through perpetual revolutions in transport and communications). I cannot refrain from injecting this into the discussion for your consideration! If you want to follow up on the question of spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism, though, you will have to look elsewhere.3
Section 4: The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret
This section is written in a completely different, rather literary, style—evocative and metaphoric, imaginative, playful and emotive, full of allusions and references to magic, mysteries and necromancies. There is a marked contrast with the dull accountancy style of the previous section. This is rather typical of Marx’s tactics throughout Capital; he often shifts linguistic styles according
