in terms of their material qualities and how they are described quantitatively (pounds of flour, pairs of socks, kilowatts of electricity, yards of cloth, etc.). But Marx pushes all this immense diversity to one side, saying that the discovery of “the manifold uses of things is the work of history,” as is the “invention of socially recognized standards of measurement for the quantities of these useful objects” (125). But he needs to find some way to talk about the commodity in general. “The usefulness of a thing,” can best be conceptualized as a “use-value” (126). This concept of use-value will be vital in everything that follows.
Notice how quickly he abstracts from the incredible diversity of human wants, needs and desires, as well as from the immense variety of commodities and their weights and measures, in order to focus on the unitary concept of a use-value. This is illustrative of an argument he makes in one of the prefaces, where he says that the problem for social science is that we cannot isolate and conduct controlled experiments in a laboratory, so we have to use the power of abstraction instead in order to arrive at similar scientific forms of understanding (90). In this opening passage you see this process of abstraction at work for the first, but certainly not the last, time.
But “in the form of society to be considered here” (i.e., capitalism), commodities “are also the material bearers … of … exchange-value.” Be careful about the word “bearer,” because bearing something is not the same as being something. Commodities are bearers of something else which has yet to be defined. So how do we discover what the commodity is a bearer of? When we look at actual exchange processes in the market, we witness an immense variety of exchange ratios between, for example, shirts and shoes and apples and oranges, and these exchange ratios vary a great deal even for the same products according to time and place. So at first sight it seems as if exchange ratios are “something accidental and purely relative” (but note the word “relative”). From this it would “appear” that the idea of “an intrinsic value, i.e. an exchange value that is inseparably connected with the commodity, inherent in it, seems a contradiction in terms” (126). On the other hand, everything is in principle exchangeable with everything else. Commodities can keep changing hands and keep moving in a system of exchanges. Something makes all commodities commensurable in exchange. From this it follows that “the valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance’, of a content distinguishable from it.” I cannot dissect a commodity and find that element within it that makes it exchangeable. What makes it exchangeable must be something else, and that something else is discoverable only when the commodity is being exchanged (and here the idea of movement and process starts to emerge as crucial). As the commodity changes hands, so it expresses something about not only its own qualities but the qualities of all commodities, i.e., that they are commensurable with one another. So why are they commensurable, and whence does that commensurability derive? “Each of them” (the commodities), “so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third thing” (127).
“This common element,” Marx then argues, “cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities” (127). This leads to a significant turn in the argument. Marx is usually depicted as an unwavering if not fundamentalist materialist. Everything has to be material in order to be validly considered as real, but here he is denying that the materiality of the commodity can tell you anything you might want to know about what it is that makes them commensurable. “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.” The commensurability of commodities is not constituted out of their use-values. “If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains”—and here we are going to make another of those a priori leaps by way of assertion—“that of being products of labour” (128). So commodities are all products of human labor. What commodities have in common is that they are all bearers of the human labor embodied in their production.
But, he then immediately asks, what kind of human labor is embodied in commodities? It can’t be the actual time taken—what he calls the concrete labor—because then the longer taken to produce the commodity, the more valuable it would be. Why would I pay a lot for an item because somebody took a long time making it when I can get it at half the price from somebody else who produced it in half the time? So, he concludes, all commodities are “reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract” (128).
But what does this human labor in the abstract look like? Commodities are residues
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 … As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values—commodity values. (128)
What a crisp passage, yet with what incredibly condensed meanings! If human labor in the abstract is a “phantom-like objectivity,” how can we possibly see it or measure it? What kind of materialism is this?
It has, you will notice, taken a mere four pages of rather cryptic assertions to lay out the fundamental concepts and move the argument from use-value to exchange-value to human labor in the abstract, and ultimately to value as congealed quantities of homogeneous human labor. It is their value that makes all commodities commensurable, and this value is both hidden as a “phantom-like objectivity” and passed on in the processes of commodity exchange. This poses the question: is value really a “phantom-like objectivity,” or does it merely appear that way?
This allows us to reinterpret exchange-value as “the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearance, of value” (128). Notice the word “appearance” here once more, but now we can look at the relation the other way round because the mystery of what makes all commodities exchangeable is now understood as a world of appearances of this “phantom-like objectivity” called value. Exchange-value is a necessary representation of the human labor embodied in commodities. When you go into the supermarket you can find out the exchange-values, but you can’t see or measure the human labor embodied in the commodities directly. It is that embodiment of human labor that has a phantom-like presence on the supermarket shelves. Think about that the next time you are in a supermarket surrounded with these phantoms!
Marx then returns to the question of what kind of labor is involved in the production of value. Value is “abstract human labour … objectified … or materialized” in the commodity. How can this value be measured? In the first instance, this plainly has something to do with labor-time. But as I already argued in setting up the difference between concrete and abstract labor, it cannot be the actual labor-time, because then the commodity would be “more valuable the more unskillful and lazy the worker who produced it.” So “the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power.” In order to get at what the “expenditure of identical human labour-power” might mean, he needs, he says, to look at “the total labour-power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities” (129).
This a priori assertion has huge implications. Marx does not, however, elaborate on them here. So let me do so, lest you misconstrue what the value theory is about. To speak of “the total labour-power of society” is tacitly to invoke a world market that has been brought into being under a capitalist mode of production. Where does this “society”—the world of capitalist commodity exchange—begin and end? Right now it’s in China, it’s in Mexico, it’s in Japan, Russia, South Africa—it’s a global set of relations. The measure of value is derived out of this whole world of human laboring. But this was true, though obviously on a lesser scale, of Marx’s time, too. There is a brilliant description of what we now call globalization in the Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … it has drawn from under the feet
