value theory, this specificity consists in the ability of the labour engaged in production to offer a particular skill or capacity that endows the product of that labour with an individual use value carrying with it a practical, aesthetic or sensual application that makes the product of labour desirable as a commodity in itself. The commodity’s use value – its usefulness to the purchaser – therefore pertains to its endowment with a specific characteristic or feature rendering it superior or unique in some way with reference to other products. Exchange value, meanwhile – its power to command money in the market – is the criterion of the exchangeability of one commodity with one another, and dictates the proportion in which this can be done. In order to be considered exchangeable, two or more commodities must possess some common characteristic which brings them into relation with one another. The most immediate way in which two equivalent commodities might be said to be exchangeable is that they are products of human labour. From this flows the notion, common to the substantialist Marx and classical political economy, that value must have something to do with the labour expended in a product’s creation.48
Commodities are traded not directly with one another, but by means of money. This is most auspiciously because capitalist societies are not societies of independent commodity producers who take the good or service they produce to market. The capitalist system of organizing economic relations is based upon the separation of workers from the means of production through which they would be able to provide themselves with their own commodities. The ownership of the means of production by a class of capitalists concentrates into the hands of this latter class control over the fruits of the process of production. It is therefore the capitalist who oversees and organizes the aggregate efforts of their workforce, who, structured in accordance with a division of labour, are unable to achieve the production of any good or service individually.
It is partly in explaining how this state of affairs came to be that Marx’s developed value theory represents a distinctive step both within and beyond substantialism.49 Specifically, Marx’s theory of labour power follows through on the unfulfilled potential of cost-of-production approaches to value by uncovering the historically determinate character of labour power and its value as a stake in the conflict between workers and capitalists. For Marx, at the inception of value is a prior act of valuation conditioned normatively and politically, even if value thereafter is taken to flow as if by osmosis from its substantial foundation. Certain historical preconditions must be in place to render labour as an act not for itself but for exchange, and these must be institutionally reproduced. It is only by virtue of these conditions being in place that labour can be posited a value to begin with, and, from this, a value notionally posited to that in which labour is embodied thereafter.50
In embedding the study of value within an account of its prehistory, Marx’s labour theory of value surpassed the naturalization of labour and exchange in the work of Smith and Ricardo. This is not to say that Marx’s work was free of transhistorical concepts. Marx saw work – in the sense of the human metabolism with nature through which the world around us is transformed into useful things for us to use, wear, eat and so on – as a necessity specific to humans alone, in that we exist, unlike the animal kingdom, at one remove from nature.51 Unlike the bee which acts upon nature as a matter of instinct, building its hive, humans conceive of designs upon the world before executing them.52 Nature does not give over easily to human purposes but – with sometimes disastrous consequences – must be made to bend to our will. This is not a ‘natural’ state of affairs but expresses the development of humankind as a specific sort of social animal that defines itself through its domination and objectification of nature as a means to establish its own subjective presence in the world.53 Thus, the need to produce the world around us is a constant part of human life. Humans require means of production – tools, machines – to use to do this, and the application of human effort, in the form of work, to accomplish the transformation of nature.
What differentiated Marx’s account of the transhistorical character of the human intercourse with nature from Smith and Ricardo’s naturalization of human economic life was its critical confrontation with the contemporary mediation of this essence in the historically specific form of wage labour. The selling of one’s capacity to labour for a wage, Marx suggested, was the result of a social and political process characterized by violence, struggle and the unintended consequences of movements for reform and liberty. Feudalism – in most cases, the mode of production that preceded capitalism – was characterized by a direct relationship of power and dependence between feudal landlords and their tenant serfs. The serf relied on the landlord for the land that they in turn farmed to subsist, with a payment to the landlord as rent. Whilst their freedom was limited, their subsistence was guaranteed, directly or in collaboration and exchange with others. With the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth century in countries like England, France and the Netherlands, these relationships were restructured.54 From a relationship of mutual interdependence and personalized power with the feudal landlord, tenant serfs were cast free, with nothing to call their own but their capacity to work for pay. Deprived of the independent individual or collective means of producing the things they needed to live directly, the rising proletariat were therefore doubly free: free of feudal domination, and free to dispose of their capacity to labour in the labour market for a wage in order to subsist.55
For most, the selling of labour power for a wage became the dominant means of reproducing the conditions of life. In order for them to deploy that capacity to labour, means of production were needed, which a combination of new regimes of property and the rule of law, and brute force and violence, had placed in the hands of a rising merchant and industrial class at precisely the time their technological sophistication was accelerating. The ascendant bourgeoisie was therefore placed in a position to acquire the capacity to labour – the ‘labour power’ – sold by the new proletariat on the newly created market for labour. The consumption of the commodity labour power enabled the bourgeoisie to reproduce the conditions of their business operations, whose success workers depended on in turn, in order to continue being employed. The things produced were the property of the owners of the means of production. The results of production were sold as commodities on the market by means of money. The producers of these goods – the workers – in turn survived by purchasing their means of living with the wages paid for the disposal of the labour power they sold.
It should be noted here that, whilst these political and economic conditions were central to the rise of capitalism and a society that reproduces itself through the valorization of value, this understanding of the evolution of ‘free labour’ only gets us part of the way. For Marx, at the same time as ‘freeing’ labour, capitalism is historically and continuingly constituted in various states of unfree labour, including, notably, slavery.56 Rather than seeing these as a remnant of pre-capitalist modes of production contravening the intrinsically ‘free’ character of labour in capitalist society, Marx recognized that the revolution in social relations that paved the path for the rise of capitalism implied the exploitation and appropriation associated with plantation slavery and colonialism.57 Marx observed that ‘without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry’, and that ‘the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World’.58 Likewise, Marx contended that slavery was itself capitalist insofar as it was driven by the valorization process and the pursuit of profit through productivity gains.59 Unfortunately, this has not stopped subsequent Marxists neglecting or relegating not only the importance of slavery to the analysis of capitalism, but also the racial domination around which slavery was and is organized.60 Marx’s analysis, then, has also been used to locate – as well as class – racism, and specifically anti-blackness, not as an epiphenomenal consequence or superstructural distortion of capitalist social relations, but as a constitutive factor in its development.61
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In Marx’s account of the violence and subjugation at the origin and basis of capitalism, then, the development of labour, exchange and value looks very different than it does in the work of the classical political economists. Marx improved upon prior political economy
