MARX BOOK DAY EIGHT

Capital opens: with these words:  “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, appears as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”^[its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.”

 

The principal verb of the opening sentence of Capital is erscheinen als, “appears as.” Marx chooses to begin his analysis of capitalism, and of the theories of capitalism advanced by his predecessors, at the level of appearances, thereby invoking the distinction between appearance and reality on which his entire theoretical enterprise depends.

 

The image conjured by Marx is a striking one. We begin with the marketplace, the sphere of circulation, where what we first encounter as we look about us are enormous heaps of consumer goods. At the most superficial level, capitalism is a cornucopia from which tumble in great profusion coats, shoes, carriages, loaves of bread, and bottles of wine.

 

We can compare Marx’s figure with Engels’s vivid description of the city of Manchester in his early book The Condition of the Working Class in England. Manchester, Engels tells us, “is a sort of architectural embodiment of the contrast between appearance and reality: The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people’s quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks… Manchester contains, at its heart, a rather extended commercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and warehouses… The members of [the] money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops.”

 

What is a commodity?  “A commodity” Marx says, “is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.”  The properties of a commodity in virtue of which it satisfies human wants are aspects of it as a natural object – its weight, colour, texture, potentiality for chemical interactions, and so forth. The commodity, qua natural object, possesses these properties wherever and whenever it exists. Magically remove a loaf of bread ten thousand miles or ten thousand years from the place where it has been baked and it will nourish as well. A coat will protect us from the elements under any social, historical, or ideological conditions. Hence it would appear, if we are hard-headed, sensible empiricists, that the natural properties of commodities are its real properties, and anything science can tell us about these real properties will serve to reveal their essential nature to us. In fact, however, this inference is merely the first of a series of misleading and mystifying inversions by which, in the realm of the economic, reality is made to change places with appearance.

 

The natural properties of commodities, the properties that first strike our senses as we window-shop along the shop-lined avenues of Manchester, are strictly speaking not properties of commodities at all. For, as Marx tells us, a commodity “is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”  Indeed, a commodity, strictly speaking, is not an object of sense perception at all. Ten yards of linen, qua cloth, can be seen, felt, cut, sewn, folded, packaged, and transported from a factory to a retail outlet. But ten yards of linen, qua commodity, cannot be seen, felt, or physically manipulated. For a commodity is a queer thing, a thing full of metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. Only the doubting Thomases of this world sniff the sacramental wine as the chalice is passed to them, expecting somehow that through the miracle of transubstantiation the sweet odour of wine will give way to the stench of blood.

 

But if commodities are not physical objects, what then are they? Or, to put the same question somewhat differently, in virtue of what are the linen, the coat, the corn, and the iron commodities? Here is Marx’s answer, which I shall quote at some length.

 

“If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use-value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

 

Let us now consider the residue of each of these products. It consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour-power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour-power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.”

 

 

 

The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous labour, expenditure of one uniform labour-power.  The exchange value of a commodity – or, more precisely, the exchange value in virtue of which a commodity is a commodity, the exchange value that constitutes the commodity-ness of a commodity – is a crystal of abstract homogeneous social labour. The quantum of exchange value congealed or crystallised in each commodity can neither be seen nor felt nor smelt nor tasted. This homogeneous, infinitely divisible, non-sensory stuff, this value, is contained in the products of labour as a consequence of their being produced by workers hired by capitalists in a system of market exchange regulated by competition. In the production process, portions of this stuff congealed in previously produced commodities are transmitted or passed on to newly produced commodities. As the spindle turns, it smoothly, invisibly, magically passes on infinitesimal bits of its value to the thread that collects around it. When the spindle breaks and must be discarded, it is emptied of its crystals of value, exhausted, spent – unless of course, it has yet some resale value as a used spindle, in which case it will be found to have held back a little cache of its secret value to bring, as a dowry, to its new owner.

 

The passionate aim and single-minded purpose of the hard-headed businessmen from Manchester and Liverpool, London and Sheffield, is to accumulate as much of this transcendent ectoplasmic stuff as possible, as fast as possible. They want it, not for its attractive and gratifying sensory qualities – for it has no sensory qualities at all – but for its magical ability to increase in quantity. They want it, that is to say, so that they may get more of it, which they want in order to get still more. When they grow old and rich, these metaphysical entrepreneurs may decline into sensation, and cash in their crystals of value for inferior things of the flesh, for houses and clothes and rare paintings. But so long as they are young and vigorous, they shun all such temptations and pursue the holy grail of self-expanding value.

 

What can Marx possibly have in mind by advancing so manifestly absurd an account of the commodity? That he does consider this theory of “crystals of abstract homogeneous socially necessary labour” to be absurd is demonstrated by the language in which he chooses to expound it. The chapter on commodities, in which this extraordinary doctrine is introduced, is strewn with religious metaphors. Marx sets himself to trace the “genesis” of the money form of exchange value. As coats and linen change and exchange in a ghostly minuet, the linen, he says, “acquires a value-form different from its physical form,” an echo of the miracle of transubstantiation.

 

 “The fact that [the linen] is value,” Marx observes, “is made manifest by its equality with the coat, just as the sheep-like nature of a Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.”  Lest there be any reader so insensitive to even the broadest mockery as to imagine that this account of the inner essence of commodities is meant literally as a straightforward description of what makes anything a commodity, Marx breaks the ironic tone of his discourse momentarily, near the end of the chapter, to tell us that such talk is absurd, verrückt:

 

“If I state that coats and boots stand in relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of human labour, the absurdity [die Verrücktheit] of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, if the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold and silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour, and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.”

 

A word about the translation of Aveling and Moore.  They render die Verrücktheit  as “absurdity.” This is a perfectly fine nineteenth century translation, but twentieth century philosophers have, so to speak, given absurdity a good name.  It would be more accurate to translate die Verrücktheit as crazy, crack-brained, insane.

 

 It will require a good deal of analysis and exegesis to clarify Marx’s complex reasons for defining the commodity in this deliberately crack-brained way.  Let us begin with Ricardo’s claim that commodities exchange in proportion to the quantities of labor directly and indirectly embodied in them.

 

The farmer plants and hoes and weeds and reaps and brings to the market his baskets of wheat. The tailor cuts and sews and measures and fits and brings to market his coats. The labor performed by the farmer is nothing like the labor performed by the tailor. One works outdoors in the bright sun all day or in the rain, the other sits crosslegged in a shop. Clearly, if we are to think of the tailor and the farmer as exchanging commodities containing equal quantities of labor, we must abstract from the concrete particularity of the labors they perform. So it is not actual concrete laboring that is embodied in their products but abstract labor.

 

Now, no one performs actually abstract labor (with the possible exception of philosophers.) So already in this simplest example, we see that Ricardo’s formulation is covertly a good deal more mysterious than it seems.

 

But suppose there are a number of tailors in town cutting and sewing and stitching and fitting and bringing coats to market.  Most of them, we may imagine, are using the very latest techniques of tailoring – electric sewing machines, perhaps. But one old tailor, stuck in his ways, still makes coats in the manner of his youth, expending more labor on each coat then the other tailors because he has not adopted the new laborsaving techniques. When he comes to market, he offers his coats at a higher price, explaining that they required more labor for their production. The buyers, however, who are looking to buy coats are not interested in the particularities of his tailoring techniques.  They seek only the cheapest coat that fits them and suits their needs.

 

Let us look at this a bit more carefully. You will recall that when I set up my little equations for system C, I begin by constructing and then summing an infinite series of ever smaller bits of labor expended in previous cycles of production.  Very quickly and without much explanation I argued that in place of those infinite series we could set up and solve a system of simultaneous equations. However, suppose that over the time represented by that backward reaching series, there have been technical improvements in the production of corn or iron or wheat or cloth. In that case, the summation of those infinite series will be different from the solution of the system of simultaneous equations, for the infinite series will contain bits of labor expended at times when the techniques of production were less efficient than they are in the contemporary cycle, whereas the system of simultaneous equations represents the current level of efficiency in techniques of production.

 

In short, as Marx quite correctly says, but as Ricardo and the others seem not to have understood, the labor theory of value which they all adopted and endorsed implicitly states that commodities exchange in proportion not to the quantities of concrete labor actually expended in this or earlier cycles of production but rather in proportion to the quantities of abstract socially necessary labor expended on their production.

 

Let us explore this notion still further. Suppose a husband and wife both worked some years ago for the Ford Motor Company. The wife, we may suppose, worked on the production line making Thunderbirds while the husband worked on a different production line making Edsalls.  They were both efficient experienced automotive production workers, and each was working on a production line using the very latest techniques in automobile production. However, the wife was working on a production line making Ford’s most popular line of cars, while the husband, alas, was making Ford’s biggest mistake. Labor expended by the wife was embodied in the products she worked on at full value, while much of the labor expended by her husband, even though he was fully as efficient and competent a worker as she, conferred little or no value on the cars he helped to make, through absolutely no fault of his own.