Nasser Paydar
Chapter One: Commodities
Section 1: The Two Factors of a Commodity:
- Use value and value (The Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value)
All existing societies in the world are capitalist societies. In order to understand capitalism, we must explain capital, and in order to understand the labour of capital, we must turn back in history to reach the emergence of commodities. A commodity is, first and foremost, an object that satisfies a human need. This need can be physical or intellectual and psychological. Not every product of human labour is necessarily a commodity; what is produced as a commodity today may not be a commodity under the control of another economic and social system. The product of human labour has not been a commodity from the beginning; it has become a commodity under certain historical conditions. If someone produces something for their own personal use or, for example, to give to others, they have not produced a commodity. In the same vein, if all the people of society or the world, based on a unified council planning and with the penetrating, conscious, creative and effective intervention of all individuals, produce and distribute among themselves their subsistence, welfare, necessities of life and transcendent human growth, they still have not produced a commodity and the current economic relations between them are not commodity relations. The product of human labour becomes a commodity when it enters the process of exchange. In other words, it is transferred by trade to another person who uses it.
What makes an object have use value is the useful use it has. The use value of objects such as food, fruit, drink, wheat, iron, or silver is nothing apart from their material existence, it has nothing to do with the amount or type of labour that went into their production. History shows that since the beginning of time, mankind has only considered the use value of products. They have sought and used the products of labour to meet the needs of collective subsistence. They have not produced these products with the aim of buying and selling them. Even when individuals or groups have provided their surplus production to others or have received large quantities of other people’s production, all this transfer has been done with the aim of meeting common and collective needs. So far, there is no talk of the product of labour or the production of commodities being commodities. With the passage of time and of course the development of the tools of labour, this situation gradually changed. Instead of producing and consuming themselves or producing collectively and using the results of their labour jointly and collectively, humans began to produce for the purpose of trade and exchange. From this date on, the use value of products became merely a vehicle and stimulus for exchange or sale and purchase. This means that production for exchange and not for satisfying individual and collective needs was the beginning of a great, complex and mysterious event in human life. From this time on, albeit gradually, the use value of the products of human labour only gained meaning and relevance to the extent that it was the basis for their production for exchange and sale.
With this event, the results of human labour became commodities. Production acquired a commodity identity, selling became the fundamental purpose of production, and humans produced in order to sell. Work and production to meet the needs of life were removed from the context of human thought and consciousness. Living and living better became locked into selling, into trading, into producing for sale, into the increased ability to produce for sale. Here, the most fundamental and complex question that arises is what was and is the criterion and standard for this selling, buying or exchanging of goods with each other? Consider a certain commodity such as one kilogram of veal muscle meat, it can be exchanged for 4 kilograms of Tabriz chickpeas, 2 kilograms of almonds with skin, about one tenth of a gram of gold, 10 packets of Winston cigarettes, 10 kilograms of Pakistani basmati rice, 8 kilograms of sweet lemons and finally 32 kilograms of wheat. These commodities have no resemblance to each other in terms of appearance, their use values are very different to the extent that some of them are an absolute necessity for survival, while others, like cigarettes, are life-killing. One tenth of a gram of gold does not open the knot of life even for lovers of show-offs, makeup and show-offs because it is not visible enough to be a means of quenching these desires. The weight of these goods is not the same. Their taste, colour, properties, or composition of ingredients are distinct from each other. They are not even exact substitutes for each other in terms of meeting physical, physiological, and biological needs. Despite all these differences, they can be exchanged for each other in the proportions and quantities we have mentioned. One of these commodities can be taken as the standard of exchange for all of them. For example, one tenth of a gram of gold can be considered equivalent and said that 8 kilos of sweet lemons, 32 kilos of wheat, or two kilos of almonds, or other goods listed above are worth the same amount. The fundamental question is what is the secret behind this balance or the hidden secret of this sameness and where does it come from? What is present in all these goods in equal quantities and has such a role and position that it allows for their equalization and trade? One thing is clear. It is not the use value and the degree of usefulness of these commodities that form the basis for their exchange, the use value of each product is only relevant to a certain extent and is naturally important as it becomes the origin and source of its exchangeability, to be more precise, in order for the product of human labour to be exchanged and become a commodity, it must have a use value. It must satisfy some human need, so far it is obvious, but it is equally obvious that use value is not the basis and standard of exchange for equal goods. This form of value in no way explains why 32 kilos of wheat, with all its importance in keeping people alive, should be exchanged and traded on an equal basis with a tenth of a gram of gold, which has no connection with the life and death of a human being. So we have to delve into the matter.
If we ignore the use-value of commodities, or all their qualitative properties, their types of utility, and their formal distinctions, and set them aside and search for the secret of the highest good, there remains only one common characteristic for all commodities. They are all products of labour. This is quite an important point, but it must be expanded, deepened, and completed. When we set aside the use-value of a product, all its material and external components are also ignored. To put it more bluntly, the product of labour no longer loses its status as fruit, gold, table, carpet, house, computer or mobile phone, it distances itself from or exits all these states and qualities, all of these or all of these diverse forms of labour acquire a single spirit, a common character. All of these goods become reducible to quantities of individual human labour and are said to be a quantity of condensed labour. It is this crystallized labour that determines the value of the commodity, and the equal exchange of commodities is based on this value or the equal amount of labour concentrated in them. Now we come to another fundamental question. What is the measure of this value, this crystallized labour in the commodity? Nothing else can express this criterion except the factor of time. The value of every commodity depends on the labour time spent in its production, but this definition carries with it a gross contradiction up to this point and at this level. If the value of any commodity is determined by the labour time spent in its production, then the lazier and clumsier the producing worker is, the value of the commodity should increase!! Because more time is spent on its production, but the reality is something else. The value of a commodity is not determined by the labour time embodied in it, it is calculated and determined by the socially necessary labour time in it. The labour which constitutes the essence of value is the equal human or social average labour required, under given historical conditions, in each separate society, to produce that commodity. The total labour-power of a society constitutes the total value of the commodities produced by that society; these various and numerous labour-powers are, in so far as they represent a social average, the same or equal human labour-powers. On this basis, the total value of the goods of a given society is the total value of the socially necessary labour concentrated in these goods. The socially necessary labour time is the amount of time which, under the normal conditions of production of any given society with an average degree of skill and intensity of labour, is necessary to produce a given use value. The value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time inherent in it. Commodities for the production of which the same amount of labour time has been expended have equal value. The time required for the production of a given commodity changes with every change in the productivity of labour. The productivity of labour is subject to change under the pressure of factors such as the average skill of the workers, the level of development of knowledge and technology, the social organization of the production process, the degree of efficiency of the means of labour and the extent of their use, and finally, natural conditions. The higher the productivity of labour, the shorter the labour time required to produce a given commodity, the less labour is concentrated in that commodity, and the lower its value. The converse is also quite true.
Section 2: The Twofold Character of the Labour Embodied in
Commodities. Abstract and concrete labour
Marx was the first to recognize and explain the essential dichotomy between abstract and concrete labour. He emphasized that a correct understanding of this identity difference is crucial for a deep understanding of bourgeois political economy. The result of his explanation is that distinct commodities each satisfy a specific need and that their creation requires specific productive activities. A coat and 20 meters of linen are completely different use values, and we will assume for the time being that they have equal exchange values, and the tailoring and weaving required for their production are also different tasks. But these two qualitatively different types of productive activities with two completely different use values, when we ignore their type of use, qualitative properties and formal states, will be just two different forms of human labour power. Coats and linen or tables, carpets, mobile phones, refrigerators, lentils, cars and wheat constitute very different and diverse states or specific forms of labour. Behind all of these lies a common abstract element, which is abstract human labour or labour time. Labor power requires a certain degree of development in order to be able to be used in this or that specific form, but the value of a commodity is only a representative of the socially necessary abstract human labour. The labour power which the average person possesses on average, without any particular development in his physical condition. The socially necessary simple labour naturally varies in different historical conditions in different societies, but in a given society it is a certain amount. Complex and skilled labour is simply simple labour condensed or a multiple of it. A commodity may be the product of the most complex labour, but it is equivalent in value to simple labour and represents a certain quantity of simple labour. Different jobs of different degrees of complexity are assigned different coefficients to simple labour or labour which is the measure of value. It was said above that a coat is worth as much as 20 yards of linen. Why? Simply because the production of both commodities requires equal labour time. They have distinct use values, but the labour time required for their production is the same. The value of the uses produced in a society can undergo an enormous quantitative growth, but this very dramatic growth of use values is usually accompanied by a tremendous decline in the value of the commodities. This is the fundamental issue, which is rooted in the essential contradiction between concrete and abstract labour. The increase in the productivity of labour leads to the production of more commodities and greater use-values, but the greater the quantity of these commodities and the greater the use-values, the less socially necessary labour-time they take up, compared with the former, and the less value-values they carry with them. A given quantity of labour done in a given period of time produces a given quantity of value, independently of all variations due to productivity, although it produces unequal use-values in the same interval of time. This use-value increases if productivity rises and decreases if productivity falls.
3. The Form of Value or Exchange-Value
Commodities have specific objective forms because they are all the embodiment of a single social essence or human labour. Accordingly, the value of commodities has a purely social nature. A commodity is a social relation, and the objectivity of its value can only appear in a social relation with other commodities. Commodities have a common value form called money. It is very important to know where money comes from. To do this, we must explore the historical process of the formation of value.
Elementary or Accidental Form of Value
Let us return to the example of the coat and the linen discussed above. The linen expresses its value in the coat, and the coat is the commodity that expresses this value. The former is active, the latter passive. The former expresses its value in a relative relationship to the latter, and the latter assumes the role of equivalent. The linen has a relative form of value, and the coat determines the equivalent form of this value.
When we say that commodities as value are condensed human labour, we are performing a dissection, revealing their existential essence, but we have not yet imagined for them a value form distinct from the natural form they have. The situation is different in the value relation between two commodities. When a commodity stands in a value relation to another commodity, its value-being appears through its relation to the second commodity.
Human labour creates value, but this labour in its fluid form is not yet the same as value. In order to become value, it must become materialized or take on a congealed state. The value of linen as a mass of concentrated labour can only be expressed as an objectivity, as something materially distinct from the linen itself. When the coat is placed in a value relation with the linen, it acquires a greater importance than it had before, it assumes the status of an equivalent. Linen as a use value is clearly and distinctly different from the coat, but in value it is the same as the coat, and as soon as it comes into contact with the coat, it clearly declares that it represents a certain amount of abstract human labour. The same amount of abstract labour or labour time that is also contained in the coat. The coat thus acquires the status of a certain quantity of an object by which other commodities can be measured. For example, one might ask, how much is 40 meters of linen worth in a coat? The relative value of a commodity screams that a social relation is hidden behind it, but this is not the case with equivalents.
The first property of an equivalent commodity is that it declares that use value has achieved its opposite, exchange value. The equivalent says that the commodity represents value in its existing form and form.
The second property is equivalent to showing that concrete labour has been transformed into its opposite, abstract human labour. Weaving and tailoring are both mere labour power and must be viewed from the same perspective in terms of the production of value, but in practice or in the process of expressing the value of commodities, everything is turned upside down and takes on a mysterious form. To show that weaving, not in its specific form, i.e. the act of weaving, but in its general form, or human labour, becomes the creator of the value of cloth, tailoring, i.e. the specific labour that produced the equivalent of cloth, must be contrasted with it (weaving) as the tangible form of the realization of abstract human labour.
The equivalent commodity has a third characteristic. Individual labour is transformed into its opposite, that is, labour that has a direct social form. The specific labour of tailoring under discussion is a manifestation of homogeneous human labour and on this basis has the capacity to be placed on an equal footing with other forms of labour, such as textile labour. In this regard, although, like all commodity-producing labour, it is individual labour, it also assumes a social form and is crystallized in a product that can be directly exchanged for another commodity.
As soon as the product of labour is exchanged, it truly expresses its value. The simple form of the value of a commodity appears in its value or exchange relationship with a commodity of another type. Here we must correct a point that was made at the beginning of the discussion. It was said that a commodity has both use value and exchange value, this statement was incorrect. The product of labour falls into this duality when it is exchanged for a commodity or other commodities. The product of labour does not have this characteristic in isolation, value emerges in exchange, a fact that also clarifies the task of a mercantilist misconception. We have shown that the form and value of a commodity derive from its value nature and the human labour crystallized in it, the reverse is not true, the value nature of a commodity does not derive from its apparent form and value. In the example of linen and coat, we saw that the natural form of linen is the manifestation of a use value, while the natural form of the coat, with its role of equivalence, is the manifestation of value. This contradiction between use value and value exists in the nature of every commodity, and it is this contradiction that appears in the external process as a relationship between the two commodities. The commodity whose value is to be expressed is immediately considered as use value, and the commodity whose value is to be expressed with reference to it is considered as exchange value. Thus, the simple value form of each commodity is the form of manifestation of the contradiction that exists between use value and value in the essence of each commodity. The product of labour has been a usable object in all forms of society, but it is at a certain historical period that the labour expended in the production of a product appears in one of its objective qualities in the form of value and becomes the product of labour a commodity.
The Expanded form of value
So far, we have only spoken of the value relationship between two commodities, for example, linen and a coat, a relationship that can be generalized between all commodities. 20 meters of linen had the same value as a coat, due to the individual human labour hidden in it. Now let us add a list of commodities that all carry the same amount of labour or the same period of socially necessary labour. They will all have equal value. Their specific form can be beans, lentils, tables, carpets, baklava or lamps, razors and cameras, but these different specific forms do not determine value. It is the socially necessary and equally concentrated labour in them that determines the fate of value. Here, a commodity such as cloth, through its value form, is not only socially related to an individual commodity, but also to the world of commodities. In the simple form of value, the equality between 20 meters of linen and a coat could be accidental, meaning that the two commodities happened to carry the same human labour. In the second or expanded form, this is not the case. With each of the commodities exchanged, such as a coat, a lens, a lamp, a baklava, or a camera, which have various specific forms and many and different owners, the cloth still maintains the same value relationship that it has with the coat, and speaks of its identical value relationship with these commodities, or in fact of the identical value relationship existing between all these commodities. An event that cannot be accidental and cries out that exchange does not regulate the amount of value, on the contrary, it is the value of the commodity or the socially crystallized labour time that regulates the exchange relations. The relative expression of value in the expanded form has in turn an important defect. It resembles a long chain that never ends, each value equality between one commodity and another forms a link in this chain, which can at any moment be lengthened by the arrival of a new commodity and, finally, it leaves human labour without the emergence of a single value form.
General form of value
The existence of the above problem or defect, that is, a long chain of commodities of equal value or of equal social human labour, without any of them playing a distinctive and distinctive role from the others, was pregnant with the emergence of the general form of value. A commodity had to be found and take on this role. The expression of the equality of value of two commodities or the simple form of value was a phenomenon of the time when the production of commodities was going through its embryonic stages and commodities were exchanged randomly. With the gradual development of commodity production and the increasing importance of commodities as products of labour, there was no choice but for the expanded form of value to replace its simple form. This happened when many and diverse commodities began to express their value simply in a single commodity. A long list of commodities, for example, a piece of clothing, 10 pounds of tea, 40 pounds of coffee, 1 quart of wheat, an ounce of gold, half a ton of iron, and many others, expressed their value in a single place, for example, in 20 yards of cloth, on the basis of the social labour crystallized in them, or the socially necessary labour. In the context of this process, the value of each commodity, measured against cloth, was, first, distinguished from its specific use value. For example, 10 pounds of tea took on the most diverse forms in contrast to its natural form. It was still 10 pounds of tea, but its value made it equivalent to many commodities. Secondly, the common and direct expression of the value of commodities was abandoned. Commodities expressed equal amounts of socially necessary labour embodied in them or their equivalent value through a single commodity that contained the same amount of socially necessary labour or value. In other words, a commodity appeared in a certain value form and connected other commodities to each other as value. The general form of value is the result of the common action of the world of commodities. No commodity acquires a general expression of value unless all commodities express their value by means of a single equivalent. The objectivity of value of a commodity lies in its social relation and therefore in a comprehensive social relation that it can be expressed.
Transition from the general form of value to money
A commodity that acquires a universal equivalent form is rejected by all other commodities on account of its being equalized. This commodity is no longer the embodiment of use value even in its natural form, but precisely the embodiment of value, and it is precisely this difference that causes its rejection. This rejection at the same time indicates that the commodity in question has consolidated its position as the common form of relative value in the world of commodities. It has gained social acceptance, its natural form has been fused with equivalence, and it has acquired the medallion of “money-commodity.” In the example we gave earlier for the general form of value, let us replace cloth with “two ounces of gold.” The new form of the equation would be as follows. The value of 20 meters of cloth, a suit of clothes, 10 pounds of tea, 40 pounds of coffee, 1 quart of wheat, 10 kilos of rice, half a ton of iron, or certain quantities of other goods would be expressed in terms of this amount of gold. This is a fact that has occurred in history. With the increasing development of commodity production, the process of expressing the value of commodities has become a reality. If once two commodities, for example, clothing and cloth, in the course of exchange, expressed in a completely simple and accidental way the value nature or the equality of the socially necessary labour concentrated in them, a little later a long chain of commodities in the same process of exchange began to display the same equality of the internally contracted labour or their homogeneous value, not accidentally, not simply, but in a widespread and at the same time constant way. The extensive form of value evolved in the process of the further development of commodity production and was replaced by the general form of value. Commodity production continued to expand slowly or rapidly, gold or “money-commodity” established its position as the common form of the relative value of all commodities. This process continued until it led to the universalization of money. In the transition from the first to the second and from the second to the third form, essential changes took place, the equivalent commodity in its natural form became the embodiment of value, but in the transition to the fourth form we see no essential change. Gold takes the place of cloth.
Value, simple and complex labour, the contradiction of abstract and concrete labour
In Marx’s dissection of the commodity, we saw that the value of every commodity is “socially necessary human labour crystallized in it.” Abstract human labour is calculated by the time it is performed, and workers everywhere in the world, despite the gross differences in labour productivity there, play a role in the production of values and surplus value by the time they work. One point is very fundamental here. According to Marx himself, “what determines value is not the amount of embodied labour time of the products, but the amount of labour necessary at a given moment and under given conditions, or socially necessary labour.” All the hours of labour that the working masses of a country provide to the capitalist class during a year are the labour time required by the social capital or capitalist market of that country. The annual “social product” of this or that given society carries the totality of this work and production or the totality of labour time crystallized in this enormous volume of products and “services,” but the value of this gigantic product is determined not by the work done with the most sophisticated technique and the highest productivity, nor by the simple work without any skill or complexity or with the lowest level of productivity, but by their social average, or the same socially necessary labour, “socially necessary labour time.” Our present discussion focuses on the commodity and, in particular, the formation of the pre-capitalist mode of commodity production, but given the great importance of analysing the inherent contradiction of abstract and concrete labour in the correct and radical anatomy of capitalism, let us, consciously and calculatedly, investigate this analysis not within the confines of the initial stages of commodity exchange or the development of commodity production, but by referring to what is going on in the capitalist mode of production. Bringing up the discussion, at an introductory level, is important here because later, in the process of Marx’s dissection of capitalism and critique of bourgeois political economy, we will encounter its relevance repeatedly and repeatedly.
With this explanation, let us return to the continuation of our discussion and continue the story by focusing on a specific example. Suppose that the industries of a given society can be divided into five distinct levels in terms of the degree of technological development, machinery, labour productivity, and skill of the working masses. A given commodity, for example, a desk, is produced by workers employed at all these levels with distinct productivity. A worker in a small industrial workshop belonging to the lowest level, during each day prepares only 2 tables for shipment to the market, the worker employed at the second level produces 5 tables in the same day, the daily product of the worker at the third level reaches 8, the worker exploited by capital at the fourth and fifth levels makes 10 and 15 tables respectively. 5 workers have worked one day each, and in total 5 days of 8 hours. The result of all their work in these 5 days (40 hours) is 40 tables. If we divide 40 hours by the total number of tables produced, we will get the average concentrated labour time per table or the socially necessary labour time for the production of each unit of product, which is equal to one hour. Thus, each table contains one hour of socially necessary labour time, and it is this socially necessary labour time that determines the value of the tables. Now we need to see what happened in this transition, why these relatively drastic and surprising changes have occurred? Most importantly and fundamentally, where did the emphasized value figure come from? A table is a commodity, and for an object to be a commodity, it must be traded. Basically, it must be produced for exchange. If someone makes a table for personal use, it is not a commodity, and naturally, the table we are examining will not be. In the present example, we have 40 tables entering the market for exchange. Let us assume that the total market need or total demand for tables of this size is 40. In the market, different customers with different tastes and purchasing power are looking to buy tables. Tables differ in terms of carpentry, elegance, beauty, or what is the manifestation of a specific work process (specific work). Our other assumption is that the raw materials and depreciation costs of the machinery involved in their production are the same, but their quality, design, size, and marketability are different, and in this regard, each or each group attracts different tastes. We showed above that the intensive work time in these tables is very different. The production table in the first workshop took 4 hours to build, in the second type, each table is the result of one and a half hours of work.
The working time for producing the third type of table is even less, only one hour. In the fourth workshop, it does not exceed 48 minutes, and finally, the table in the fifth group has broken the record and has not taken more than 33 minutes of work. The table market is hot. Customers are busy digging. The owners of the goods are making a fuss in describing the advantages of their goods, the sellers are using all their might to sell more expensively, and the buyers are using the same struggle to buy as cheaply as possible. The competition is fierce, what is inevitable and what ultimately happens is that none of the manufacturers are able to sell their table or tables based on the amount of labour time concentrated in it, this is the law of capitalism and the commodity economy. Competition establishes an average limit, each table leaves the crystallized labour time in itself, towards an average condensed labour time, socially necessary labour or average socially necessary labour time, it welcomes with open arms the submission to this value which is now dressed in the clothes of price or production price, from here comes Marx’s meticulous and critical explanation of the value of the commodity as socially necessary labour or socially necessary labour time. The commodity is a social relation. It is in the process of exchange that the product of labour becomes a commodity, and value does not arise from within the exchange. Labor is concentrated in the product, but it is in the context of exchange that it appears and declares its existence. Here are a few very important and fundamental points.
First: Specific work or all that belongs to this field, such as shape, size, degree of quality, elegance, beauty, marketability, do not in any way create the value of the commodity. It is only the abstract human work crystallized in the product that creates value.
Second: The value of every commodity is not equal to the human labour embodied in it, but rather to the socially necessary labour concentrated in it.
Third: Value is the essential phenomenon of the commodity, but just as the product manifests its commodity nature in the process of exchange and manifestation as a social relationship, the real value of the commodity is also determined in the process of exchange and the expression of its social identity. For the same reason that value is not merely human labour crystallized in the commodity, but rather socially necessary labour condensed in it.
Fourth: If the value of a commodity is not just a quantity of labour time crystallized in the product, but precisely the socially necessary time for its production – which it certainly is – and if value, despite its essential existence, only manifests its pre-existing reality in the process of exchange or expression of the commodity’s life as a social relation, then we must accept that in the course of exchange, commodities transfer to each other the dispersed, diverse, and different labour time condensed within them, some being sold for less than the original value and some for more than it.
In the example above, we clearly saw this forced transfer. Tables produced in different fields with different levels of labour productivity or worker skill had respectively concentrated labour times of initially 4 hours, 1 hour and a half hour of work, 1 hour, 48 minutes, and finally 33 minutes. This time of different labour in the market and in the process of exchange all fell into the abyss of change and found each other in an average time or socially necessary labour time; to produce a table, they signed an unwritten protocol together. A protocol that declares the socially necessary labour time of each table in question to be one hour. Here, in the process of these transactions, the table in the first area lost more than 3 hours and the table in the second area lost six-tenths of an hour, the third table gains the same one hour hidden in it, the tables built in the fourth and fifth areas gain two-tenths of an hour and 45-hundredths of an hour more than the working time they had, respectively.
Here, in the process of these transactions, the table in the first area lost more than 3 hours and the table in the second area lost half an hour, the third table gained the same one hour hidden in it, the tables built in the fourth and fifth areas gained 12 minutes and 27 minutes more of their existing working time, respectively.
Fifth: Why and in what process do the labour time crystallized in various commodities take the path of replacing itself with an average or social average labour time? We have already mentioned the factor of competition. The thing is that the commodities we are examining are market needs or reflections of existing demand in society. Let us not forget that current market demand is fundamentally different from the necessary social labour concentrated in commodities. We are talking about a situation where capitalists or producers of goods, in search of massive profits, blur the boundaries between different fields, moving in the blink of an eye from pharmaceutical production to rocket production and from clothing to computer production. They produce goods as much as they can, with whatever techniques they have at their disposal and with whatever degree of labour productivity they can. These goods enter the market with different qualities and varying levels of excellence, and the fate of their prices, which are the monetary expression of their value, is determined under the pressure of competition. Although these goods have different quality, appearance and appeal, and although the labour time used in their production is different, they all meet the needs of the market, are in demand and have customers. If this were not the case, perhaps their value expression would have a different fate, an issue that is important and must be explored. In this regard, let us consider three different cases.
- Suppose that the demand in the sales market is so low that more than half of the tables are unoccupied. What happens in this case? The owners of the tables fight over the sale, compete with each other, drive down the prices, which are the monetary expression of value, the monetary expression of the labour time concentrated in the tables, and finally sell at a price equivalent to one hour of crystallized labour.
- The demand and number of customers is slightly higher than the above, but still many tables see no prospect of sales ahead of them, and the owners of the goods have no choice but to settle for a price equivalent to an hour and a half of intensive work at the tables.
- Demand is high and the number of customers far exceeds the total number of tables. In such a situation, prices are rising and may even sell for up to 4 hours of work.
In the first case, the producers of the first realm table lose three hours and the producers of the second realm table lose six-tenths of an hour. The third realm table loses nothing but gains nothing more. The fourth realm table gains 12 minutes, and the producers of the fifth realm gain 27 minutes more than the necessary latent labour time. In the second case, the table manufacturer in the first area has lost two and a half hours, but among the owners of the next workshops, the second has gained 6 minutes, the third half an hour, the fourth 52 minutes, and the fifth 57 minutes. Finally, in the third case, the owner of the table in the first area has neither gained nor lost. The second has gained two hours and 24 minutes, the third 3 hours, the fourth 3 hours and 12 minutes, and finally the fifth has gained 3 hours and 27 minutes in addition to the time of intensive labour in their goods.
- A fundamental question here is where the demand comes from and how is it determined? Is there no calculation or accounting involved?! And can any producer of goods count on an innumerable number of buyers and sell his goods at any price he wants, given the presence of customers?! This is definitely not the case and has never been the case in any period of history. The earthly meaning of demand must be explored. The commodity that is produced must be exchanged and sold. In capitalist society, a very small part of the annual product of labour and production of the working masses becomes their wages, and with this wage, the workers purchase the basic necessities of their survival or the nourishment and training of the future labour force of the system. The largest and most gigantic part of the social product of labour and production is appropriated by the capitalists, and they allocate a portion of this huge part to welfare and consumer waste and convert the entire remainder into additional capital.
The real demand within any capitalist society is, first and foremost, and in its galactic part, the demand for capital for the goods needed for its self-development, or components of fixed capital, and secondly, the basic subsistence needs of the workers and the means of waste, comfort, or pleasure of the owners of capital. The meaning of this statement is that “in principle”!! The volume of demand within the society during, say, a year should be equal to the total value produced in the society during the same period. What the capitalist system does with this equation and balance, through the state, the stock market and the huge financial institutions, with the aim of challenging its own rebellious identity contradictions, intensifying the exploitation of the working class and distributing the burden of crises on the lives of workers, is a matter that has its own fundamental debate. Our present study focuses on the description of the commodity, the law of value and the laws of the commodity economy as the historical background to the emergence of capitalism. In this regard, our assumption is that the volume of demand within a society, independent of its completely different and diverse forms, for example, the consumption of the working mass or the needs of capital accumulation, is in any case in a relative value relationship with the total work and production that has taken place in this society.
- Starting from the above assumption that the total demand of society, despite some exceptions and exceptions that are homogeneous with the rule, is ultimately determined by socially necessary labour crystallized in the social product of labour and production, we return to the example under discussion. In a commodity economy in general and capitalist society in particular, there is no predetermined template for how much of the annual product of labour should be spent on this or that demand. The type of consumption, the nature of demand, and its length and breadth are invented and laid by capital. Here and in the maze of this analysis, our assumption, and only our assumption, is that the aggregate demand for a desk is anchored around the socially necessary work or labour time employed in this sphere. In this case, we must develop and perfect somewhat the distinct situations that we have seen for the fate of the sale of desks in each sphere and the manner in which the labour time concentrated in them is transferred between the different producers. The first, most important and central supplementary point is that if, among the five above-mentioned spheres, only the sphere with the highest phase of labour productivity meets the entire current demand of society, all the products of the other spheres will have no customers. In such a situation, the socially necessary labour time for the production of the table will be reduced to 55 hundredths of an hour. The other tables will be sold, but they will only occupy a part of the labour time inherent in them. Does this mean that the owners of the workshops producing the other tables will suffer losses?!! Absolutely not. We will examine this issue in its place. For the time being, we will suffice with the fact that commodities can be sold at a value well below their real value, and in the first place below their original value, but still make huge profits. As we have said, we will explain this in its place. It should also be remembered that the socially necessary labour time crystallized in the tables is not limited to the specific time of their production, but also the time spent in the process of circulation, organization, and the various stations along the way, such as warehousing, transportation, etc.
- Let us generalize the above component to the entire existing society or the capitalist world. Let us consider for a moment, purely imaginatively and metaphorically, a world saturated with capital, in which the degree of productivity of social labour has reached its peak, the gap between the different levels of productivity has narrowed, the prices or monetary form of the value of products, both capital and consumer, are determined by the capitals with the highest technical achievements, and competition is confined to the role played by these capitals. Let us put all this together and ask ourselves whether such a world with the nature of capitalism can emerge??!! Or can capitalism assume such a state? The answer will definitely be negative. Marx says in the second volume of the Grundrisse on this occasion: “If surplus labour time or necessary labour time were equal to zero, that is, either necessary labour time takes up all the time or production without labour is possible, then we have no value, no capitalism, and no creation of new value.”
The idea of a society, especially a world in which the entire cycle of labour and social production revolves uniformly around the highest possible level of technology, complexity of labour, skill and specialization of the worker, and labour productivity would mean that capital production, surplus value production, and essentially value production have reached the end of the road. Capitalism, or a mode of production based on the law of value and wage labour, cannot be in such a situation. In this society, completely heterogeneous levels of labour productivity with enormous gaps and rebellious contradictions are an identity and inevitable thing. The wage slavery system cannot be otherwise, the unbridled promotion of the growth of technique, labour productivity, worker specialization and skill or complex labour, without organic interrelation with lower levels of machinery and tools of labour, lower specialization and simpler labour is not possible in the wage slavery system. The identity contradiction between abstract and concrete labour in this system arises from here, complex labour with high productivity certainly creates more use values compared to simple labour, but the value of the commodity and in this regard the value of the total annual social product or the value of the total labour and social production of the working class of a society is only a representative of human labour in general and equal to the socially necessary labour time crystallized in it. Increased labour productivity is a function of the level of worker skill, the level of human technique and knowledge, the social organization of the production process, the efficiency of the means of production, the extent of the scope of use of these tools and machines, and finally, natural conditions. All of these affect the amount of labour output, quality, excellence, and marketability of goods, but the growth resulting from increased labour productivity is accompanied by a significant decrease in the value of products because the individual human labour crystallized in the product is declining. Capitalism turns the entire achievements of human knowledge, the great technological and information revolutions into a mechanism for the uncontrolled increase of labour productivity in order to achieve ever greater profits and more galactic investments, but in this process several important events materialize.
- The crystallized labour or socially necessary labour time in the cycle of labour and production of the part of the world capital that has the best production conditions, the most advanced level of technique, machinery, skill, expertise and, accordingly, the highest level of productivity, reaches the lowest level. This means precisely that this part of the international capital, in terms of the value of the annual social product, temporarily and of course with the unrealistic assumption of separation from the overall cycle of capital production!!, suffers the greatest declines in the amount of value and surplus value within this product.
- The socially necessary labour time, or average social labour, decreases for the production of the total annual social product of any given society and, in its historical and international dimension, for the annual product of the entire capitalist world. As the level of productivity of labour rises, the socially necessary time for the production of this product decreases.
- The inevitable emergence and dominance of the average socially necessary labour in the domestic and world spheres enables the capital of the first section of international capital to appropriate for itself the greatest amounts of value of the annual social product of the other section or of the socially necessary labour time expended in them, and thereby to appropriate for itself the vast amounts of value produced beyond its own sphere of advance.
- The opposite situation occurs in sectors with lower social labour productivity and lower technique, skill, and expertise. These sectors lose a very significant share of their socially necessary labour time or value and surplus value.
- In all the above cases, we witness the functioning of the identity contradiction between abstract labour and concrete labour, and the commodity economy and the capitalist mode of production, as its highest level of development, are everywhere and in all their fabric, under the pressure of this inherent contradiction and the dynamic of its challenge.
- The above points also emphasize the great importance and accuracy of Marx’s statement that “compound labour is only as much as simple labour power, or, to be more precise, its multiple. In such a way that a smaller quantity of compound labour is a larger quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this transfer and exchange is constantly taking place, a commodity can be the product of the most complex labour, its value makes it the same as simple labour and consequently represents only a certain amount of simple labour. The different proportions according to which different types of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measure are established by social practice without the knowledge of the producers and therefore appear to the producers as traditional laws”. The essence of Marx’s explanation, if we want to reflect on it with Marx’s intelligence and express it with his radical anti-capitalist understanding, will be that the value of the total annual world social product is determined by the socially necessary international labour crystallized in this product or the socially necessary labour time condensed in it. The unit of measurement here is simple labour, and the various types of labour are delivered in this form of labour, the manner of this delivery, its proportions and criteria, are carried out by means of social practice without the knowledge of the producers or owners of the goods. This social action is in fact the same dynamic of the organization of world capital, the process of circulation, the competition of capitals, the formation of the price of production, the emergence of the average rate of profit, the distribution of values and surplus values in the total annual world product. These are the topics that determine a large part of Marx’s analysis of capital and the content of the second, especially the third volumes of Capital. These sections, if
properly studied, will certainly throw the scandalous theory of the oil economy, rent, discussions related to the gigantic valorisation of specialized labour exploited by huge industrial trusts in one part of the world and the worthlessness of the labour of workers in other places!!, the attribution of the “well-being” of Western European workers to modern industry and the specialization of labour and the poverty and misery of workers in other regions to the worthlessness of their labour, and similar nonsense. 7. All the above points cry out that the producer of the value of a commodity is abstract human labour. Specific labour and all that is related to this area, including higher labour productivity, quality, marketability of the commodity, and the like, play an effective role in determining the price of production, forming the general rate of profit, and ultimately, as a result of all this, how values and surplus values are distributed among the owners of capital.
4. The fetishist nature of the commodity
The product of labour has no mysterious nature as long as it is a consumer object and a means of meeting the necessities of life, but as soon as it assumes the role of a commodity and is produced for the purpose of exchange, a very astonishing halo of mysteries, secrets, and magic surrounds it. It becomes more and more complicated, as if, as the poet says, “you could open the heart of every particle and see a hidden world within it.” A few very basic points can be emphasized here.
- The mystical and mysterious nature of a commodity does not derive from its use value.
- The origin of this nature does not lie in the composition or content of the factors determining the value of a commodity. Human activities in the process of producing different commodities are certainly diverse, a certain type of work is performed to prepare each product. All this work, however, requires the consumption of a certain amount of human labour and labour time. What determines the value of commodities, although it varies in different periods, in proportion to the level of development of the tools and the productivity of labour or other factors, none of these are, on the whole and within this scope, mysterious matters.
- Considering the above points, the question arises as to where, then, is the real source of this fascination, mystery, and enigma of labour. The answer must be dug from the depths of the very event that makes the product of labour a commodity. It has been said that a commodity is a social relation. It is in exchange that it reveals its existence and nature as a commodity. It is here that different commodities are traded on the basis of the socially necessary labour inherent in them. And more fundamentally and importantly, it is here that the equality of human labour establishes the object-like form of the value equality of the products of labour. The mystical and mysterious character of the commodity arises from this, since the commodity embodies the social character of human labour in his eyes, in the form of the material qualities of the product of labour and the intrinsic properties of objects. It presents the social relationship of producing humans with the totality of labour as a relationship outside of their existence, a relationship between objects. In such a way that these wretched producers themselves become non-existent, ineffective, and in contrast, commodities become existent, fully effective, and possess the greatest number of roles. For a vivid example of this, one can turn to the realm of religion. There, what is a creation of the human mind is presented as a living, capable, and active being. The commodity has exactly this state and plays this role. Thus, the commodity has a fetishist or fetishist character. The sum of the work that all individuals do separately constitutes the total work of society. These individuals do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange the products of their labour. It is the commodities that drive them together and make their connection objective. The social nature of the labour of individual or private producers appears only in the course of exchange. In other words, the labour of independent individuals is manifested in the form of social labour circles through the relations arising from the exchange of products and through the connections established between producers by the exchange of commodities. In the eyes of the producers, the social relations of their private labour appear not as immediate social relations between themselves, but as reified relations of people and social relations of things. The relations between people have completely disappeared and disappeared, and the exchange of commodities has become the only driving force and the only chain of movement of the relations of people.
Here everything is different, in the exchange of the products of their labour as commodities, men do not see values as the material form of their equal labour, but on the contrary they consider the equality of products as the basis or proof of the equality of the types of labour. The discovery of this important secret that the value of products is nothing other than the expression of the social human labour consumed in them opens a chapter in the history of human evolution, but this discovery does not contribute in any way to the challenge of the objectification of man and the personification of the object, the mystification of the commodity or the objectification of the social character of human labour. For those who are captives of the mode of commodity production, this discovery is of no consequence before or after. In the eyes of this population, the social action itself is completely absent and the form of functioning of objects is everywhere visible. While men are the creators of commodities and should be in control of the product of their labour, they become their servants and slaves. Commodity production at a certain level of development provides the basis for understanding that individual, independent but interconnected, labour in the social division of labour is constantly reduced to its proper scale, and that the social labour time necessary for production exercises its dominion over the process of exchange like a natural law regulating it. The recognition of this fact is the discovery of a secret, a discovery that eliminates the illusion of the randomness of the value of goods, but in no way undermines the principle of the objectification of persons and the identification of things. To understand these facts more easily, let us take a short excursion into history. First, let us visit Robinson’s Island. Although Robinson is a simple and contented person, he still has diverse needs. He must engage in various types of useful work. He must make tools, domesticate animals, build a place to sleep, catch fish, hunt. The peculiarity of his life is that despite the diversity of productive activities, it is quite clear to him that what he has created is only the different forms of his work or activity. Now let us leave Robinson’s Island and enter medieval Europe.
Here we see everyone dependent on another, the serf, the lord, the tributary, the commoner and the clergy are all interdependent. This personal dependence, while it was characteristic of the social relations of production, also explained the form of society based on these relations. The foundation of society was relations of personal dependence, and precisely for this reason, labour and the product of labour had no need to be enigmatic or to assume magical forms different from their realities. Labor and the product of labour in this society took the form of practical services and sexual payments. The natural form of labour was its particularity and not its generality. Even though labour, like commodity-producing labour, was calculated in terms of time, every serf knew well that what he did for the lord was a certain amount of his specific labour power and not a certain quantity of general or abstract human labour.
A simple example of that society can be imagined in the existence of a peasant family, each member of which does work, but the product of their labour is not a commodity. Bourgeois economics has analysed value and the measure of value, however imperfectly, and has even understood its content beyond the form, but it has never asked itself why that content takes this form? Why, in calculating the value of the product, labour is represented by value and the quantity of labour by time.
This science has treated pre-capitalist forms of production the same way the church fathers treated pre-Christian religions. If commodities could speak, they would say: although our use-value is of interest to man, this is of no importance to us as commodities. What is important to us as commodities is our value; our movement as commodities speaks volumes about this fact. It is only as exchange values that we come into contact with one another. It is in this process that we become mysterious, mystical, and enigmatic; it is here that we acquire a fetishist character and turn our creator into our humble and servile creature. Christianity, with its abstract man, especially in the form of Protestantism, became the most suitable religion for the society of commodity producers, because the basis of commodity production is that individuals produce their products in the form of commodities, as value, and that individual labour is confronted with each other in an objectified form as equal human labour. Ethnic and natural religions could not be like this before the emergence of the commodity economy. Beliefs, illusions, superstitions, rituals, and religions do not descend from the sky; they boil from the very core of the material mode of production of each period, grow in accordance with the needs and requirements of this form of production, and become dominant. Finally, let us remember that the social form of life, meaning the material face of the production process, only completely sheds its mystical and foggy mask when the product of human labour is under the collective, conscious, free, equal, deliberative, planned, intervening, and pervasive domination of all its individuals. Religion is the expression of the various realities of the material world. Its type in each period corresponds to the needs of the social form of production of that period in history and in individual societies. The world and society based on the separation of man from his work cannot be purified or freed from religion in any area, including in the political, legal, civil order and its state power. Talking about this liberation is itself a form of deception and distortion. In order for man to be freed from the evil of religion, the foundation of his separation from his work must be crushed and completely destroyed.
The fetishist nature of the commodity and the product of labour, in capitalism, a society that symbolizes the highest stage of historical development of commodity production and the only manifestation of the complete dominance of this form of production, develops to the maximum possible degree, becomes cancerous, complex, and octopus-like. The idolization of the product of labour and the vulgar and humiliating slavery of its producer, the worker, take on a completely explosive form. Here, the discussion is not only about the products of labour being commodities, the foundation of the existence of society is based on the commodity of labour power and the buying and selling of this commodity. If previously, people exchanged the products of their labour with each other based on the human labour necessary in it, now this entire exchange takes place between the living and dead labour of the worker, between the commodity that is his living labour and the capital that is his dead labour but is in the ownership of someone else, in the ownership of the capitalist. There, the social relationship of the producers with the totality of their labour appeared as a relationship outside of their existence and between things, here the relationship of the worker with his labour, with himself, with his chain, with life and everything is a relationship outside of his existence and between things. It is his own work that has become outside of his being, alien to him, his antithesis, his god, his sworn enemy, the overwhelming force that dominates everything about him. It is his dead work that rules over his entire existence, rules over him in economics, politics, law, civilization, thought, culture, morality, habits, ideology, religion, and taste, and exercises power over him. It chains him, puts him under the yoke of captivity and slavery, conquers him, and blocks his way to make decisions, think about solutions, try, fight, or any reaction to get rid of this humiliating slavery, to free himself. Mind, intellect, consciousness, cognition, thought, the criterion of judgment, the standard of his measurement, alienates him from the natural human function, from the free human approach, distorts and freezes everything, forces him into slavery, makes him inverted, hypocritical and self-contradictory. The fetishization and fetishization of goods in the capitalist system reaches the depths of all aspects of human existence and society. The product of human labour, condensed human labour, socially necessary labour time, value, in a word, dead labour that has now become capital, has acquired the identity and identity of capital, dissolves everything in itself, becomes politics, government, civilization, ethics, law, ideology, education, social behaviour, research, upbringing, science, planning, parliament, the right to vote, “freedom”, “struggle”, “development”, law, custom, criterion and everything else. It locks the basis of the worker’s existence and survival into the exchange of his labour power with his dead labour, which is capital and owned by the capitalist or his class and state. This locking, this terrifying slavish coercion, this humiliating subordination and liquidating subordination, this annihilation in alienated labour, extends his dead labour or capital to all realms of the worker’s social existence.
It mines man’s social activities as alien to him and against himself, it brings his thought, which is the dominant thought and in fact the thought created by capital, against himself and the real needs and interests of his human life, it insinuates the forced, compulsory and inevitable sale of his labour power as a free, voluntary, honourable exchange full of human dignity and respect!! It calls the right to vote, a copy of capital’s version against any amount and any kind of freedom and authority, the supreme symbol of being free! The deprivation of any form of free human choice from the worker is called free elections!! The radical massacre of the worker’s freedom is called his ascension to the supreme throne of freedom!! The decay in the swamp of the wage slavery system is proclaimed by civilization as the guarantor of human dignity!!, absolute injustice is declared to be the perfection of right!!, his terrifying physical and intellectual erosion is depicted as social development!!, the catastrophic intensification of his exploitation is stamped with the seal of improvement of working conditions!!, he inscribes the mark of a great intellectual flourishing and human knowledge on his painful brainwashing!, All these inversions, distortions, fooling’s, enchantments and spells are woven by the consciousness, knowledge and ability to discernment of people. It buries man in the depths of his own power, digging dark tunnels of error along the path of all his efforts for liberation, leading to the high fences of his own power.
In the system of wage slavery, the commodified labour power of the worker, his dead labour, capital, becomes so fetishized, mysterious, mysterious and antithetical to him. The mystery and fetishization of capital cannot be started and ended in a specific chapter under this name. We will certainly deal with it in each section of the dissection of capitalism, for the time being we will be content with this, and we will pursue a more detailed analysis of it in accordance with the different sections and chapters of the re-reading. It is very important to emphasize one point here. The point that determines the real reason for our brief and introductory explanation of the explosive state of capital’s fetishism in comparison to commodities here is that if capital does to the worker what has been mentioned here, if capitalism makes everything from politics, the state, rights, morality, civilization, law, culture, thought and knowledge to the definitions of right, freedom, choice, vote, equality, all of these instruments of the fetishist alienation of the worker’s labour from him and the weapon of the power of his dead labour over himself, then the class struggle of the worker against capitalism must also be a struggle that is identical, homogeneous, consonant and of the same horizon against all these forms of capital’s existence, against capital in all its social manifestations. In this case, and if we accept this reality, then no worker with the slightest class consciousness can separate the struggle for freedom, basic human rights, or anything else, from the radical class campaign against the foundation of capitalist existence.