What are the goods? Why are tennis shoes worth 80 times more than a bag of chips? How can we compare such different things?
And why is it so mysterious and misleading that we do it? Hello, I am Amilcar Paris Mandoki. Thank you for joining me in Philosophy of History.
Today we will finally start with what everyone has been waiting for: Karl Marx's Capital. We will see only the first chapter, the merchandise chapter. We will see their dual nature of use value and value, we will see the forms these natures take, and we will see the way in which they deceive us through commodity fetishism.
So let's get started --- After writing the Grundrisse, Marx will continue to research, write, revise, edit, and problematize everything that had to do with political economy in the British museum library for another 10 years. Despite Engels' insistence that he already publish his greatest work grew and grew, Marx waited until everything was settled before publishing the first volume of capital. In this volume he focuses on the capital production process.
The XXI century edition contains 5 prologues to different editions that were published during Marx's lifetime and after his death. I will not go into detail, in some moments it specifies the changes in the editions, in some it refers to questions of translation, sometimes it speaks of the reception that the book had, and in others it indicates political and historical questions of the time. However , there is a sentence that appears in the prologue of the first edition that I want to mention: "Here we are only dealing with people insofar as they are the personification of economic categories , carriers of certain class relations and interests.
" For Marx, and from the point of view of capital analysis, people are the embodiment of class relations and interests. Their moral or subjective condition is not the object of their study, but the place they occupy within economic relations. Marx's point of view conceives the development of economic and social formation, as a process of natural history, so it does not hold the individual responsible for the relationships that create it.
However, it maintains that, although economic relationships create the individual, he, subjectively, can rise above them. That is, it recognizes that, despite the forces of economic relations on individuals, subjectivity maintains a space of action that allows it the possibility of rising above them. --- "The wealth of the societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates is presented as a >, and the individual commodity as the elemental form of that wealth.
" Thus Marx begins the first chapter of capital, with a sentence that lands us on several things. It first places us in the context of the societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates. Marx takes into account that in all societies different modes of production interact and that when we refer to a society, especially a modern society, we cannot speak of a homogeneous mode of production, but of a dominant mode of production and secondary modes of production .
The second thing we can see in this sentence is that we are starting from the concrete represented: the enormous accumulation of merchandise, the appearance of wealth. We start from the immediate sensible, since that is where Marx's dialectical method starts from. And the most immediate and sensitive manifestation of this is individual merchandise.
This merchandise has a dual nature. Its first nature refers to its sensitive qualities: that of being the satisfier of human needs , either immediately or as a means of production. This nature is its qualitative aspect and this aspect is called “use value”.
The use value of a commodity is a historical fact, but it is conditioned by the properties of the body of the commodity. This means that, although it depends on their physical properties, whether they satisfy needs is not defined by economic laws but by the needs that society has at that time. For example, the use value of coltan depends on its physical properties, but those physical properties did not constitute a use value until society found a use for them: the production of microprocessors.
Furthermore, since the value in use depends on the needs to be satisfied, it becomes effective only until it is used or consumed. Now, to obtain the second nature of the commodity, Marx's procedure is similar. There is a second property that makes something that is a use value a commodity.
And this is, from the concrete level represented, its capacity to be exchanged. Goods are not only satisfiers of needs, but are also exchanged, some goods are exchanged for others in different quantities. Therefore, the immediate manifestation of this quality of being interchangeable is called exchange value.
Exchange value is a quantitative relationship between a use value and others. This means that it is the proportion in which a use value can be exchanged for use values of a different type. For example, the ratio in which a pair of shoes can be exchanged for rolls of silk.
Thus, the exchange value is always expressed in terms of other merchandise, for example 5 dresses, 3 rolls of silk, or 4 grams of gold. However, the exchange value, the quantitative relationship between the commodities that are exchanged, is only the manifestation of another property. A property that both the grams of gold and the pair of shoes contain , and this property is not physical, since the physical properties of the objects are only part of their use value.
Therefore, to find this property, what we have to do is abstract the use value and, therefore, all physical property of the merchandise. By doing this, the merchandise has only one property left: that of being the product of labor. But which job?
Carpentry, masonry, riveting, welding, assembling? These are concrete jobs , and they produce concrete and different use values. But since we want to talk about merchandise without its use value, we have to abstract from it all its physical qualities, and this means also abstracting all the particularities of work that give it those characteristics.
This means that we remove from the work that which is hammered, that that is cut, that that is painted, that that bends, that that beats, all determination that makes a work different from the others. When we do this, when we abstract all the peculiarities of work, we are left with work in the abstract. If we return to the merchandise with this same procedure, we can find the quality that the merchandise has and that is expressed as exchange value .
That is, if we abstract from the merchandise all its physical characteristics, it becomes a jelly of human labor indifference, expenditure of human labor power without regard to the way it was spent. This quality of the commodity is called value, and it is that which all commodities have and which allows them to be compared with each other as exchange values. It is important to understand the distinction between value and exchange value, as it is very easy to get confused.
Exchange value is a transitory category for Marx, it is a relational property of a commodity with others. Its existence occurs at the level of the concrete represented, but through the process of analysis, Marx obtains the value, his abstract determination. Value is the quality that merchandise has as a product of work, and it manifests itself in exchange value.
Does it mean that from whatever we get its use value we will get its value? No, because a thing can be use value and not be value. What does this mean?
It means that it satisfies human needs, but it is not the product of work. Marx talks about air, virgin land, grasslands and natural forests. I already saw them raise their hands and say that they sell air tanks , or that there are places with filtered air and they charge you for that air.
But to filter or to bottle the air you need someone to do it, to dedicate time to work. When someone works to put air into a bottle or tank, they turn that air into value. Another thing that Marx mentions is that something can be useful and the product of human labor and not be a commodity.
Here he mentions that someone who satisfies his own need with what he produces creates a use value, but not a commodity. For something to be a commodity, work must produce a social use value, a use value for others. In light of this, Engels made a very important note, since he indicates that, to be merchandise, it is not only necessary that it be value for others, but that the product has to be transferred through exchange.
For Engels this is important because he wants to indicate that it was produced by the serfs and that the feudal lords and priests appropriated it, it was not merchandise. Additionally, we can see that this is important because the use value produced in domestic work does not produce goods either , but there is work time and there is production of satisfiers of needs. Finally, nothing can be a value if it is not an object for use, if it is not a use value .
Useless things have useless work that does not count as work and does not constitute any value . So there are things that are use values and are not values, but there are no things that are values, but not use values. The value, the abstract determination, manifests itself in the concrete represented in the exchange value.
What we represent quantitatively in the exchange value through other commodities is the magnitude of the value that is contained in them . And since value is the quality of being a product of work in general, what you are quantifying is the quantity of abstract work, which is measured by its duration. Now, does this mean that, if it takes Peter 3 days to produce a chair and it takes Paul one day to produce the same chair, Peter's chair is worth 3 times what Paul's chair is worth?
No. Marx tells us that value is generated by undifferentiated human labor. This means that the work we are talking about is not that of the specific person who produced the specific merchandise, but the work of humanity.
To establish a magnitude in this work, we use the magnitude of socially necessary work time. This means that it is not the time Peter or Paul spent making the chair that determines the value, but the work it takes for society in general to make a chair; the average work required. This average job is obtained with the average time it takes for society to make a chair like that.
For example, in a society with a low degree of development of the productive forces, with simple tools and inefficient techniques, that time can be long and the chair can be worth 10 days of work. On the other hand, in a developed industrial society that time can be very short and the chair can be worth 20 minutes of work. Although work can be materialized in qualitatively different productive activities, all work has the quality of being a productive waste of the brain, muscle, nerve, hand and other parts of the human body.
That is why all jobs are human labor, ways of expending human labor power, and are broadly characterized as medium-simple work. This is the capacity that anyone would have to produce without the need for any type of special development. For Marx, jobs that are more specialized or require more training are equivalent to a greater amount of simple work.
Therefore, he warns, he will always work under the simple average job term . As Marx says: "The socially necessary labor time is that required to produce any use value , under the normal conditions of production in force in a society and with the average social degree of skill and labor intensity. " This means that the value of things decreases when the productive forces increase.
If before 8 hours of work were required to produce 10 kilos of corn, and after industrialization only 1 hour of work is required to produce the same quantity; the 10 kilos of corn have reduced their value 8 times. And since the value is manifested in exchange value, also what can be obtained in exchange for the 10 kilos of corn decreases 8 times. The laws of the market do not tempt the heart.
Although it could take 8 hours of work for a farmer to produce 10 kilos of corn, if he lives in a society of industrialized agriculture with huge crops and pesticides where only 1 hour of work is necessary to produce 10 kilos of corn, the The farmer will have no choice but to sell his 10 kilos of corn as if it had only taken him 1 hour of work. Therefore, it is not surprising that 85% of the crops of rural households in Mexico are destined for self-consumption. What then determines the magnitude of value in a commodity is the productive force of labor, which refers to the degree of efficiency of a productive activity oriented to an end and is determined by factors such as: the average level of skill of the worker, the degree development of science and technology, the social coordination of the production process, the scale and efficiency of the means of production and natural conditions.
This is changing over time and with society. Good or bad weather can change the productive force of agricultural work, altering the value of the products grown. Finding better or worse alter the productive mineral deposits mining work force, in a good vein of gold less time is required to obtain the same amount of gold in a vein poorer.
And let's remember that we are always speaking in general. The value of gold per kilogram will depend on the average labor time required to extract it. Regardless of whether the specific mine from which a specific amount of gold was mined is more or less rich than the average and therefore took more or less time to extract.
Thus Marx says: "In general terms: the greater the productive force of labor, the less labor time required for the production of an article, the less the mass of labor crystallized in it, the less its value. " Changing the productive force of labor will change the amount of use value that a specific time of labor can produce. If, for example, the productive force of jackets is doubled , in the same amount of time that 5 jackets were produced, now 10 can be produced .
However, this change in productive force will not change the value produced in the amount of time. This means that the value produced by making the 5 jackets has now been produced by making 10 jackets. --- Commodities are products of mutually independent autonomous private jobs that are pitted against each other.
For this confrontation to take place, the work on these commodities has to be qualitatively different and, therefore, the commodities must satisfy different needs. As they are private jobs of different autonomous producers, we speak then that for there to be merchandise a social division of labor is required. Goods are only so due to their duality, because they are objects of use and carriers of value.
This means that they have double objectivity, on the one hand, they have their sensory gross objectivity of being use value, on the other hand they have a purely social objectivity that expresses human labor. As value is a purely social objectivity, it is not expressed in physical characteristics , but only through social relationships, in this case through the social relationship between different merchandise. For example, in the social relationship that exists when a person exchanges a jacket for 5 silk canvases.
For this reason, because value only manifests itself in exchange, Marx is going to return to the representation of value as exchange value in its four basic forms of manifestation: the simple or singular form , the total or unfolded form, the general form and the form of money. It will make a reconstruction of these manifestations through the synthesis process, so it will not end with the concrete represented, but rather the concrete synthesis of determinations will be built. This is part of a rigor that might seem excessive.
It is certainly a rigor rarely seen in other philosophical, economic, or social science writing. But this concept of value, the labor theory of value, is fundamental to Marx's system of analysis of capital. For this reason, it is necessary to build in a concrete, synthetic way, each step traveled by political economy up to now, but with a more robust support.
--- Let's start with the simple or singular form of the value. This is the expression of the value of a commodity making use of another commodity. X merchandise A equals Y merchandise B or 20 yards of linen equals a jacket.
This formula would seem like a mathematical identity, and although in a sense it is, since both sides of the equation represent equal values, there is something beyond it. And it is that each side of the equation is fulfilling a different function. Yes, it is an expression of value, but the same value is taking two forms, the merchandise on the left side takes the relative form of value, while the merchandise on the right side takes the form of the equivalent of value.
The distinction is that the relative form is a commodity whose value is being expressed with another commodity, the equivalent form. The equivalent form is the way in which the relative form is directly interchangeable, in it the abstractly human work is expressed as concrete work. Equality, Marx notes, can only occur insofar as they are the same, because only insofar as they are values are they interchangeable.
In other words, when two commodities are equated, it is manifested that something equal exists in them, the work incorporated into them is being equated . We know that as a concrete job, different use value jobs are different jobs. Jacket work is different work from canvas work.
However, both jobs are matched at the time of exchange. The action of exchanging is an action of abstraction of the particularities that distinguish the works. It is abstraction in praxis, where goods take the objectivity of being products of labor in general, which allows them to be interchangeable.
Marx notes that Aristotle already knew the simple form of value, but was perplexed by it. He did not understand how such heterogeneous things could be commensurate. And this is, as Marx says, because it lacked the concept of value, the substance that is the same on both sides of the equation.
And why couldn't he conceive the concept of value? Because the basis of value is the equality of all jobs, something inconceivable in a slave society that is necessarily based on the unequal conception of people and, consequently, of their jobs. The simple form of value is an embryonic form, for it is extremely limited.
It only expresses the value of a certain merchandise by means of other certain merchandise. But starting from it, one arrives at the "total or unfolded form of value" in which the value of a commodity is expressed through various commodities. Marx expresses this as Z commodity A = U commodity B, o = V commodity C, o = W commodity D, o = X commodity E o = etc.
And use the example of 20 yards of linen = 1 jacket, or = 10 pounds of tea, or = 40 pounds of coffee, or = 1 quarter of wheat, or = 2 ounces of gold, or = half a ton of iron, or = etc. . When the value of a commodity is expressed by various other commodities, it is shown that the work that one commodity produces is not only equivalent to the work of another commodity, but is equivalent to the work of any commodity.
This in turn shows that the value of commodities is indifferent to the particular form in which it manifests itself. This is important for Marx, because if the value of a commodity remains unchanged regardless of why it is exchanged or with whom it is exchanged, it shows that it is not the exchange that produces the value, but vice versa, it is the value that governs exchange relations. However, this total or unfolded form of value is problematic because it consists of an infinite series of simple forms of value in which the relative form of value is expressed by an infinity of equivalent forms of value.
The problem here is that we are only expressing the value of a commodity, and we will never finish expressing it. The solution? Flip the formula, instead of expressing the value of one commodity through many others, we express the value of many commodities through only one.
Thus we arrive at the general form of value, which I am showing on the screen, well . . .
not me, but me from the future that I hope will put the formula on the screen and not a meme that nobody remembers anymore. In this way we see how all the different commodities express their value through a single one, the 20 rods of canvas. The advantage of this formula is that it is a simple and unitary expression of the value of all commodities.
A commodity reaches the general expression of value and, simultaneously, all other existing commodities, as well as those that enter the market, express their value in the same equivalent. This also allows the value of all goods to be compared with each other. If both 10 pounds of tea and 40 pounds of coffee are worth 20 rods of canvas, then 10 pounds of tea is worth 40 pounds of coffee, or each pound of tea is worth 4 pounds of coffee.
This shows us that the socially necessary work to produce a pound of tea is four times the socially necessary work to make a pound of coffee. In this way, the merchandise that serves as the equivalent, in this case the linen rods, becomes the general equivalent, it is the visible embodiment of all human labor; the general social chrysalis. It is the dialectical development of the equivalent form of value, since in the simple form it begins as a singular equivalent, in the total or unfolded form it appears as a particular equivalent, and now it unfolds as a general equivalent.
Now, when a specific commodity is socially grounded as a general equivalent, we move on to the last form of value, the form of money. The distinction between the general form and the money form is not an essential transition. The money form is only a specific instance of the general form, a historical real incarnation.
And, historically, money has taken the form of shells in ancient China, India, and Africa, of beans in Mesopotamia, of cocoa in Mesoamerica, and, since ancient Egypt, of gold. Marx asserts that gold becomes money when it gains the monopoly of being the general equivalent. And the simple relative expression of the value of a commodity when the equivalent is money is called price.
Thus, in the simple relative expression of the value of 20 rods of canvas in 2 gold coins, what is expressed is the price of gold, while still being the expression of the value of the rods of canvas through the use value of gold , without ceasing to maintain the equivalence of values between the two commodities, without ceasing to express that in the 20 yards of canvas the same amount of abstract human labor has been set as in the two gold coins. They may say that the prices are not given in gold, and they are right. But until the 70's, in theory all national currency was convertible into gold.
The national bank had to give you in exchange for your ticket, the equivalent amount in gold. Money, dollars, pesos, pounds sterling or francs, functioned as nationally determined units of measure for gold. Thus Marx solves the mystery of the value of money, of the general form of value.
Whoever has not elucidated its secret can easily take the path back to the general form, then to the unfolded form, and then to the singular form of value. --- However, there is a huge problem with value manifesting itself in these four forms, since they are social relations that take the form of relations between objects. For example, the equality of 20 yards of canvas with a jacket shows the equality of the tailor's work with the spinner.
The tailor and the spinner are in a social relationship where their jobs are equalized, but this social relationship takes the form of the relationship between the products of their work, the objects they create. Thus, it SEEMS THAT exchange is a relationship between inherent qualities of products, BUT it is a relationship between human activities. Thus, the social relationship between producers takes on a phantasmagorical relationship between things for people.
That is why Marx, to explain this phenomenon, makes use of analogies to the religious world, in which the products of the human mind seem autonomous figures, endowed with a life of their own, in relation to each other and to men. In the same way, in the commodity, the products of the human hand take an autonomous form, they seem to have their own life, their own subjectivity: “I call this the fetishism that attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities and which is inseparable from commodity production. " The famous fetishism of merchandise.
If this sounds familiar to you, it is because Marx has already dealt with the subject, he had been dealing with the subject all his life. From the introduction to the critique of the philosophy of law, passing through the manuscripts of '44 and the theses on Feuerbach, Marx had spoken of how human creations appear to him as alien and hostile. Fetishism is a new incarnation of this phenomenon, with very particular characteristics.
Why does the merchandise necessarily take on a fetishistic character? Let us remember that for something to be a commodity, it must be a use value for someone other than the one who produces it and that product must reach the producer to the consumer through exchange. This means that the commodity has two moments, the moment of production and the moment of exchange.
For this reason, the work that produces the merchandise is carried out separately from the other works, and its social character is not manifested until the exchange. That is, the work done on each merchandise is not done as social work until the moment of exchange. Therefore, it is not manifested as social work, but as a social relationship between things.
The equality of concrete works consists of an abstraction of their real inequality, which occurs at the moment of exchange. However: "By equating their heterogeneous products with each other in exchange as values, they reciprocally equate their various jobs as human labor. They don't know it, but they do it.
" Abstraction is objective and real, but it is not conscious. Without knowing it, the exchange abstracts from work what makes being concrete and determined, and abstractly human useful work remains . This is real because it is the only way you can match merchandise, that you can compare a stuffed cupcake to an internal combustion engine.
But it is not necessary to be familiar with the dialectical method to buy something in the store, in fact, neither the one most studied in Marx keeps in mind the process of abstraction that he participates in every time he buys some gum. By participating in the market, in the exchange of goods, we abstract, but we do it unconsciously. We don't know, but we do it!
It is inevitable, in everyday life, to live at the level of the concrete represented. When you are going to pay for a kilo of tortilla and you ask how much it costs, whoever attends you is going to tell you that 14 pesos, they will act as if the relationship between the tortilla and the 14 pesos were intrinsic to the tortilla and not the manifestation of a relationship social work that involves the corn farmer, the producers of the machines, their operators, those who produce electricity and extract gas, as well as your mother who gave you the twenty pesos that she obtained with her hard work for you to buy tortillas and not for you to have a discussion of materialistic dialectics with the tortillera. The determination of the magnitudes of value for the socially necessary human abstract labor time, is hidden under the exchange movements.
Marx says: “The reflection on the forms of human life, and consequently the scientific analysis of them, takes a path opposite to that followed by real development. It begins post-festum [after the events] and, therefore, already having the final results of the development process. " The analysis begins with the relationship between the prices of goods, analyzing the relationships of things as if they were social relationships between things.
The paradox is that thanks to the form of money it is possible to obtain the concept of value, but it is the same form of money that veils the social character of private jobs. Every worker ends up relating their work with the money they will get, with one thing, without seeing how it is that this is only a manifestation of the work they have done and of their social character related to the work that everyone does. For Marx the only way to separate himself from the fetishism of the merchandise will be when the circumstances of everyday life are shown as rational relations between people and with nature, this is when the production process is planned and conscious.
Meanwhile we will have to deal with the social and production relations of capitalism, for which it is convenient for us to continue reading capital. Next week we'll look at Chapter 2 and 3 on Capital to get a deeper insight into the mystery of money and its functions, so until then.
