MARX BOOK DAY NINE

The first chapter of Capital is so puzzling, so completely unlike anything that political economists had written before Marx – or indeed, since Marx – that it requires a number of implausible interpretive maneuvers to make sense out of. The third section of chapter 1, entitled “The Form of Value or Exchange Value,” can I think best be made sense of by comparing it structurally to the inversion of an old Jewish joke.

 

Mrs. Feinschmeck’s little boy Reuben developed a terrible phobia about blintzes. Whenever Mrs. Feinschmeck brought a platter of delicious cheese blintzes to the table, Reuben would let out a cry of terror and flee to his room. As blintzes were the pièce de résistance of Mrs. Feinschmeck’s culinary repertoire, this posed a serious domestic problem. Mrs. Feinschmeck pleaded and wept. Mr. Feinschmeck threatened and also wept. But nothing could woo Reuben from his irrational fear of blintzes. Finally, in desperation, Mrs. Feinschmeck sought the advice and counsel of the leader of the Reformed Temple, Dr. Lewis (son of Reb Levi, the leader of the Orthodox community). Dr. Lewis, who had studied abnormal psychology and psychiatric counselling at Brandeis University, opined that Reuben’s phobia grew out of nothing more than an inadequate understanding of the nature of the blintz. If Mrs. Feinschmeck would take Reuben into the kitchen and proceed step by step before his very eyes through the making of blintzes, Reuben would see that there was nothing mysterious or ominous in the component elements of the blintz. By accustoming himself slowly to the coming-in to-being of the blintz, Reuben would lose his phobic fear. For, as the great (albeit goyische) philosopher Immanuel Kant had observed, “Reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own.”

 

Mrs. Feinschmeck dutifully gathered up the ingredients, sat Reuben on a kitchen chair in full view of the worktable and stove, and began to make blintzes. At each stage, she turned to Reuben to see whether he was becoming frightened. She mixed up the filling. “Is it all right, Reuben?” “It’s all right, Mama.” She made the batter. “Is it all right, Reuben?” “It’s all right, Mama.” She made the first paper-thin pancake, laid it on the table, and placed a big spoonful of filling in the middle of the pancake. “Is it all right, Reuben?” “It’s all right, Mama.” She folded over the first corner. “I’m all right, Mama.” She folded the second corner. “I’m all right, Mama.” She folded the third corner. “I’m still all right, Mama.” Finally, she folded over the last corner. “And there it is, Reuben.”

 

“Heeeeeellllllpppp!!!! BLINTZES!!!!!!”

 

The joke is, if I may put it this way, an Enlightenment joke. Phobias are superstitions grounded in an inadequate understanding of nature, society, or culture (the blintz being, at one and the same time, a natural object, a social product, and a cultural icon). The appropriate way to dispel a phobia is to offer a rational explication of the origin and structure of its object. The humor of the joke – such as it may be – derives from the fact that Reuben remains atavistically, irrationally afraid of blintzes, even though it has been demonstrated to him with the clarity of a Voltaire that there is nothing frightening, unexpected, or inexplicable in the pancake, the filling, or the fourfold process by which the two are combined.

 

In chapter one of Capital, Marx inverts this joke, thereby calling into question the underlying Enlightenment premise of the rationality of social reality. For twenty-five pages he stirs and cooks his mystified metaphysical categories of value until at the end, with a last turn of the pancake, he presents us with the most commonplace, unmysterious phenomenon of capitalist life – a list of prices. The contrast between the vexatious oddity of the derivation and the banality of the product forces us to recognise that our best-loved, most comforting economic concepts are through and through crazy. For, as Marx reminds us on the very next page, a commodity is a very queer thing, “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” .

 

 The story begins (for it is, in its way, the longest shaggy dog story in the annals of political economy) with the opening paragraph of the third section of chapter one: Commodities come into the world in the shape of use-values, articles, or goods, such as iron, linen, corn, etc. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only because they are something two-fold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value. They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form and a value-form.

 

The physical or natural form of commodities, their character as natural objects, poses no philosophical problems, however difficult it may be for science to give us adequate explanations of such properties as magnetism or color. But the value of a commodity is another matter. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will [Marx observes], yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. Commodities have a “value-form,” as Marx puts it, which contrasts markedly with their natural form. We experience commodities not only as physical objects with the most varied natural properties, but also as things having value. Commodities do not merely have price tags attached. They present themselves to us as value incarnate, as entities whose essence is their monetary worth. Marx proposes to trace “the genesis of this money-form,” to “develop the expression of value implied in the value-relation of commodities, from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling money-form.”

 

What exactly is the puzzle Marx seeks to solve? Where is the mystery to be dispelled? Ricardo and the classical economists explained money-prices as exchange ratios between a variety of commodities and a particular commodity arbitrarily selected as numeraire. Once we understand the notion of an exchange ratio – understand furthermore, how competition and market exchange bring about a system of stable, regular, consistent exchange ratios – there is nothing more to be explained. Money-prices are merely relative prices, or exchange ratios, expressed in terms of the numeraire. The classical account of relative price is perfectly correct as an explanation of exchange ratios, and Marx endorses it in the course of his discussion. But it is a grave mistake, he believes, to suppose that there is nothing more to be said. In fact, there is everything more to be said, for the classical account is utterly unable to explain the nature of money, unable consequently to explain the nature and inevitability of economic crises and the instability of capitalism.

 

The classical account of relative price, by portraying the system of relative prices as a rational representation of stable exchange ratios regulated by labor-costs of production, systematically conceals the inherent contradictions of capitalism and serves as an ideological mask for the craziness of bourgeois society.

 

Let us begin by reminding ourselves of the way in which we actually perceive commodities, as opposed to the way in which they are spoken of in economics textbooks. All of us, by the time we are old enough to buy candy at the corner store or play an arcade game, have learned to experience the price of a commodity, its cost, its value, as one of its intrinsic properties. A Mercedes-Benz looks expensive. We don’t need to rehearse its exchange ratios with potatoes or shoes or home computers. We simply see it as expensive, as worth a great deal, just as we see elephants as large or feel lead as heavy. Show me a side chair with carved legs, and I will admire it. Tell me that it is a Goddard piece worth twenty-five thousand dollars and the wood begins to glow. Prove to a collector of fine paintings that her Corot is a fake and it will dwindle in her eyes, not merely in her account book.

 

We speak of fabrics as having a “rich” texture, of furnishings as “reeking of money.” The value of commodities is as immediately given to us as their colors, tastes, and shapes. Marx subjects these commonplace beliefs and assumptions to a devastating critique. Like Socrates, he uses our unreflective convictions, our unexamined experiences, as a foil for his revelation of the exploitative foundations of capitalism. The starting point for his critique – and, as we shall see, the essential conceptual mystification – is the experience of commodities as quanta of value. Everything in Capital depends upon that starting point. The experience of commodities as quanta of embodied value is universal in capitalist society. Even we few who have achieved a critical ironic distance from capitalism have the experience countless times in every day. What is more – and this, of course, is at the heart of Marx’s argument – we must experience commodities in this way to function efficiently in a capitalist world. Those who are truly innocent of the value-form of commodities walk through the world, like Prince Myshkin, as idiots.

 

As an intellectual tour de force, Marx undertakes to draw the secret of money and the value form of commodities out of the most elementary value relation imaginable. He begins with what he calls the Elementary or Accidental Form of Value. The simplest value-relation is evidently that of one commodity to some one other commodity of a different kind. Hence the relation between the values of two commodities supplies us with the simplest expression of the value of a single commodity. x commodity A = y commodity B, or x commodity A is worth y commodity B. 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat. The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this elementary form. Its analysis, therefore, is our real difficulty.

 

The Elementary or Accidental form of value

 

20 yards of linen = 1 coat

 

With what appears to be deliberate perversity, but is actually deep insight, Marx insists that we begin by abstracting even from the quantitative aspect of the elementary relationship between twenty yards of linen and one coat, concentrating simply on the assertion that some amount of linen is equal in value to some number of coats. What exactly is involved in the assertion that an amount of linen equals a number of coats? The classical economists tell us that the assertion, x yards of linen = y coats, expresses a relation between linen and coats. The relation is, in the jargon of logicians, symmetric, for if x yards of linen = y coats, then y coats = x yards of linen. But the classical economists are wrong, Marx insists. The assertion x yards of linen = y coats expresses the value of the linen in coats. That is entirely different from the statement, y coats = x yards of linen, which does not express the value of the linen at all.  As Marx explains – if, indeed, such patent obfuscation can be labelled “explanation” -- the value of the linen is represented as relative value, or appears in relative form. The coat officiates as equivalent, or appears in equivalent form.

 

To grasp what Marx has in mind, we may begin by reflecting on our everyday experience of the sizes and weights of ordinary physical objects. Suppose that my baseball has rolled into a puddle of water, and I want to retrieve it without getting my feet wet. I need something about three feet long, rigid, not too heavy, and preferably long and thin, to reach over the puddle and push the ball out. My baseball bat just fills the bill, and I use it for the purpose. Being about three feet long, being rigid, being long and thin, and being not too heavy are all, in my immediate experience, properties of the bat. They are not relations between the bat and something else.

 

Although the length of the bat (like its weight, etc.) is a property of the bat itself, I cannot give expression to that property (or, speaking quixotically, the bat cannot give expression to its own length) merely by referring to the bat. How long is the bat? It is no help to say, “It is as long as itself.” That is no doubt true, but it does not express the bat’s length. To express the length of the bat, I must find some already existing measure of length, and set the bat in relation to that measure. I must say, for example, that the bat is three feet long. Perhaps I have a one-foot ruler which I use to measure the bat. I lay the ruler down alongside the bat consecutively and note how many lengths of the ruler can be laid off against the bat from one end to the other. I thereby discover that the bat is three feet long. In this case, the length of the bat (one of its own properties) can find expression only by being set in relation to some other object which, in this context, is officiating as standard of length.

 

The ruler, meanwhile, stands all by itself as length, as the equivalent of length. It is the standard unit of length even when there is no bat or stick handy to lay it off against. But so long as it plays this role, it cannot itself express its own length. How long is a foot-ruler? One foot is hardly a satisfactory answer. We can, of course, answer “one third of a yard,” but then the yardstick has become the standard of length, and has taken up the role of equivalent form of length. The foot-ruler is now able to express its length in relative form by being set in relation to the yardstick as standard of length.

 

The psychological shift in perception involved in considering the length of a stick first as the relative form of length and then as the equivalent form of length can be explored a bit more closely by considering the way in which we experience foreign weights and measures when we travel abroad. An American visitor to France who has never been out of the United States before will probably begin by translating prices, weights, and measures into their familiar American equivalents in order to find out how much things really cost, weigh, or measure. If the Euro is currently exchanging for $1.10 then a newspaper that costs two Euros really costs $2.20. A journey of 120 kilometers is really 75 miles long. When the thermometer reads 30°C, it is really 86 degrees.

 

At first, if I am the traveler, I must carry out this translation in order to grasp the properties of the objects and situations I encounter. I don’t know whether a restaurant is cheap or expensive until I convert its prices into dollars. So too, the two-Euro piece has a certain worth, or value (for I experience it as an object having value, not as the embodiment or equivalent of value). I find out what its value is, I express its value, by ascertaining how much a two-Euro coin will cost me (that is, $2.20). Little by little, a network of associations develops around the two Euro piece, or the meter stick, or the kilometer signs. I begin to know immediately whether a five-kilometer hike is a long walk or a short one, whether I ought to blanch at spending one hundred Euros for a meal, whether a prediction of a 30°C day means shorts and a t-shirt or a jacket and sweater.

 

Eventually, I may reach a point at which I genuinely switch over to Euros and kilometers and degrees centigrade, in which case the kilometer will take up, for me, the role of equivalent form of length, and the degree centigrade will become the equivalent form of temperature. In that case, when I ask how long a proposed journey is, I will conceive the journey as having a certain length, which is a property of that journey, and I will seek to express that length in terms of the equivalent form of length, namely kilometers. But I will no more experience the question about the length of the journey as an implicit question about the relation between the journey and something else than I did the original question about the length of a kilometer, back when the mile or the foot was, for me, the equivalent form of length.

 

Thus, statements to the effect that a stick is three feet long or that a book weighs two pounds are experienced by us as descriptions of the properties of the stick or the book, not as assertions of relationships between the stick and a foot-rule, or the book and a lead weight. In like manner, Marx says, we experience statements about the value of a commodity as a quantitative characterisation of a certain property of that commodity, namely its value.

 

Marx begins with the linen and the coat in order to force us to see that what happens in that rather fatuous example is logically identical with what happens when we say, familiarly, that the linen is worth ten shillings. In the case of the coat and the linen, since neither of those commodities has, in our experience, played the role of money, it seems odd and provocative to say that the value of the linen finds expression in the body of the coat. We are not accustomed to thinking of a length of linen as being worth so many coats, any more than we are accustomed to thinking of a stick as being so many centimeters long. Hence, when Marx forces us to transform the symmetric relation between coats and linen into an expression of the value of the linen by means of the equivalent, coats, we experience his assertions as cognitively dissonant. But, Marx points out, say the same thing in terms of gold or silver and it sounds quite comfortable to the ear.

 

Marx develops the transition from the simple relation between linen and coats to the full-blown system of monetary exchange of commodities with exquisite slowness and detail. First, as we have seen, he analyses the assertion, linen = coats, only then passing on to the assertion that 20 yards of linen = 1 coat. Finally, he is ready for the second corner of the blintz, which he calls the “Total or Expanded form of value.” At this stage, we have as many assertions of equality between pairs of commodities as there are possible pairs to be compared. Corn and iron, potatoes and shirts, shoes and bibles, tea and silver – for each pair, there is a statement expressing the simple, particular, or accidental form of value.

 

The Second Corner of the Blintz

 

The Total or Expanded form of value: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 lbs. tea or = 40 lbs. coffee or = 1 quarter corn or = 2 ounces gold or = ½ ton iron or = etc. The next step is the inversion and condensation of these pairwise comparisons so that each commodity, save one, expresses its value in the same commodity as equivalent. In Marx’s example, coats, tea, coffee, corn, gold, iron, and so forth, each express their value in a certain quantity of linen. This is the third corner of the blintz .

 

The Third Corner of the Blintz

The General form of value

                                               1 coat  =       

                               10 lbs of tea  =

                                  40 lbs of coffee  =

                                   quarter of corn  =  20 yds of linen

                                 2 ounces of gold  =

                                     ½ ton of iron   =

                                      x com. A, etc  =

 

At this point, for the first time, we as readers may begin to experience linen as truly the equivalent form of value – as money. Especially after a century of anthropological explorations among peoples who use seashells, cows, or glass beads as money, we may have sufficient flexibility of imagination to begin to feel linen as the equivalent form of value, in much the way that we all feel dollars or pounds or Euros as money. But Marx carries the development the final step, and by transposing the linen and the gold, arrives finally, by a turn of the last corner of the blintz, at the money-form of value.

 

The Last Corner of the Blintz

The Money-form

                                                     1 coat  =

                                             10 lbs of tea  =

                                         40 lbs of coffee  =

                                      1 quarter of corn  =  2 ounces of gold

                                         20 yds of linen  =

                                            ½ ton of iron  =

                                             x com. A, etc  =

 

To modern readers, the effect of this twenty-page-long development is somewhat blunted by the modern-day absence of gold and silver coins from circulation. Since we do not, today, experience gold as money, as indisputably the equivalent form of value, “20 yards of linen = 2 ounces of gold” may strike us as not too different from “20 yards of linen = 1 coat.” How much is gold selling for these days? we may find ourselves wondering, in an effort to ascertain just how much the 20 yards of linen are worth. But if Marx had carried the development one stage further, and transformed all of these equations into statements of the form “x yards of linen = 1 dollar,” then we could respond to the text in precisely the manner required to grasp its meaning.