have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
It is on this dynamic global terrain of exchange relations that value is being determined and perpetually redetermined. Marx was writing in a historical context where the world was opening up very fast to global trade, through the steamship, the railways and the telegraph. And he understood very well that value was not determined in our backyard or even within a national economy, but arose out of the whole world of commodity exchange. But he here again uses the power of abstraction to arrive at the idea of units of homogeneous labor, each of which “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,” as if this reduction to the value form is actually occurring through world trade.
This allows him to formulate the crucial definition of “value” as “socially necessary labour-time,” which “is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.” He concludes, “What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production” (129). There is your definition. But it is plainly a contingent definition, because it is internal to the concept of “society”—but where does society begin or end? Is it closed or open? If that society is the world market, as it surely must be, then … ?
One reason Marx could get away with this cryptic presentation of use-value, exchange-value and value was because anybody who had read Ricardo would say, yes, this is Ricardo. And it is pure Ricardo with, however, one exceptional insertion. Ricardo appealed to the concept of labor-time as value. Marx uses the concept of socially necessary labor-time. What Marx has done here is to replicate the Ricardian conceptual apparatus and, seemingly innocently, insert a modification. But this insertion, as we shall see, makes a world of difference. We are immediately forced to ask: what is socially necessary? How is that established, and by whom? Marx gives no immediate answers, but this question is one theme that runs throughout Capital. What are the social necessities embedded within a capitalist mode of production?
This, I submit, continues to be the big issue for us. Is there, as Margaret Thatcher famously remarked, “no alternative,” which in a way is like saying that the social necessities that surround us are so implacably set that we have no choice but to conform to them? At its foundation, this goes back to a question of by whom and how “values” are established. We all like to think, of course, that we have our own “values,” and every election season in the United States there is an interminable discussion about candidates’ “values.” But Marx is arguing that there is a certain kind and measure of value which is being determined by a process that we do not understand and which is not necessarily our conscious choice, and that the manner in which these values are being imposed on us has to be unpacked. If you want to understand who you are and where you stand in this maelstrom of churning values, you have first to understand how commodity values get created and produced and with what consequences—social, environmental, political and the like. If you think you can solve a serious environmental question like global warming without actually confronting the question of by whom and how the foundational value structure of our society is being determined, then you are kidding yourself. So Marx insists that we must understand what commodity values and the social necessities that determine them are all about.
Commodity values are not fixed magnitudes. They are sensitive, for instance, to changes in productivity:
The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by one half the labour required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. In order to do this, the English hand-loom weaver in fact needed the same amount of labour-time as before; but the product of his individual hour of labour now only represented half an hour of social labour, and consequently fell to one half its former value. (129)
This alerts us to the fact that value is sensitive to revolutions in technology and in productivity. Much of Volume I is going to be taken up with the discussion of the origins and impacts of revolutions in productivity and the consequent revolutions in value relations. But it is not only revolutions in technology that are important, because value is “determined by a wide range of circumstances; it is determined amongst other things by the workers’ average degree of skill, the level of development of science and its technological application”—Marx is very taken with the significance of technology and science to capitalism—“the social organization of the process of production, the extent and effectiveness of the means of production, and the conditions found in the natural environment” (130). A vast array of forces can impinge on values. Transformations in the natural environment or migration to places with more favorable natural conditions (cheaper resources) revolutionize values. Commodity values, in short, are subject to a powerful array of forces. He does not here attempt a definitive categorization of all of them; he simply wants to alert us that what we are calling “value” is not a constant, but is subject to perpetual revolutionary transformations.
But then comes a peculiar twist in his argument. Right in the last paragraph of this section, he suddenly reintroduces the question of use-values. “A thing can be a use-value without being a value.” We breathe air, and so far we haven’t managed to bottle it and sell it as a commodity, although I am sure someone is already trying to figure out how to do that. Also, “a thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity.” I grow tomatoes in my backyard, and I eat them. Lots of people within capitalism actually do a lot of things for themselves (particularly with a bit of help from do-it-yourself stores). A lot of laboring (particularly in the domestic economy) goes on outside commodity production. The production of commodities requires not only the production of use-values “but use-values for others.” Not simply use-values for the lord of the manor, as the serf would do, but use-values that go to others through the market. But the implication of this is that “nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value” (131). Marx earlier seemed to dismiss and abstract from use-values in order to get to exchange-value, and it was this that got him to value. But now he says that if the commodity doesn’t meet a human want, need or desire, then it has no value! You have, in short, to be able to sell it to someone somewhere.
Let us reflect a moment on the structure of this argument. We begin with the singular concept of the commodity and establish its dual character: it has a use-value and an exchange-value. Exchange-values are a representation of something. What is it a representation of? A representation of value, says Marx. And value is socially necessary labor-time. But value doesn’t mean anything unless it connects back to use-value. Use-value is socially necessary to value. There is a pattern to this argument, and it looks like this:
Consider, then, the implications of this argument. You own a commodity called a house. Are you more interested in its use-value or its exchange-value? You will likely be interested in both. But there is a potential opposition here. If you want to fully realize the exchange-value, you have to surrender its use-value to someone else. If you have the use-value of it, then it is difficult to get access to the exchange-value, unless you do a reverse mortgage or take out a home-equity loan. Does adding to the use-value of the house for oneself add to the potential exchange-value? (A new modern kitchen, probably yes;
