chapter 2 Commodity Production
Why is the question of commodity production relevant for Marx’s socialism (it is, to recall, socialism in Marx’s sense that is the subject of our study)? To answer this question, one has to understand first of all that socialism arises by directly negating capital, which itself is generated through the development of exchange value. As Marx observes, ‘the value form of the commodity is the economic cell-form of the bourgeois society’.1 Therefore the negation of capital automatically signifies negating exchange value or the product taking the form of the commodity. In his 1847 lecture to the workers, Marx poses the question as follows: ‘how does an amount of exchange value become capital?’ He answers, ‘by maintaining and multiplying itself as an independent social power of a part of society, by means of its exchange for direct, living labour power’.2 However, there is no direct relation between capital and labour. The labourer in capit- alism is not personally dependent on the owner of the means of production to gain her/his livelihood. S/he is a juridically independent individual, freely disposing of her/his labour power as a commodity for sale. Hence the relation between capitalist and labourer has to be mediated by exchange in the circu- lation process. ‘In order to develop the concept of capital’, Marx reminds his readers, ‘it is necessary to start not from labour but from value, and particu- larly from exchange value already developed in circulation. It is impossible to directly pass from labour to capital as it is to pass from different human races to the banker or from nature to the steam engine’.3 In fact, ‘for capital, [the] labourer is not the condition of production, only labour is. If it [capital] could make machines do it, or through water, air, tant mieux [so much the better]. And it does not appropriate the labourer, but only labour – not directly but through the mediation of exchange’.4 One month before the publication of Capital Volume I, Marx, in a letter to Engels, wrote that till now the bourgeois economists had overlooked the simplest thing – that the ‘simplest form of value in which value is not yet
1 Marx 1987a, p. 66; 1976a, p. 11; 1954, p. 19. 2 Marx, in Marx and Engels 1973b, pp. 408–9; Marx and Engels 1970b, p. 81. 3 Marx 1953, p. 170; 1993, p. 259; 1976b, p. 28; 1988b, p. 20. The same passage appears in both the manuscripts. 4 Marx 1953, p. 397; 1993, p. 498.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004377516_004 64 chapter 2 expressed as a relation with other commodities but only as something differ- ent from its own natural form, contains the whole secret of the money form and thereby in germ all the bourgeois forms of the product of labour’ (22 June 1867).5 In a different text Marx expresses the same idea in a more condensed form: ‘for bourgeois society the commodity form of the product of labour – or the value form of the commodity – is the economic cell form’.6 So Marx’s starting point for his investigation into the economic law of motion of cap- italist society is the commodity, the form which wealth assumes in capitalist society. ‘The first category in which bourgeois wealth appears is the category of commodity’, writes Marx in his 1857–8 manuscripts.7 He elaborates this in his Contribution (1859), characterising ‘bourgeois wealth’ as ‘an immense col- lection of commodities [with the] singular commodity as its elementary form (Dasein)’,8 and later in his masterwork (1867), in almost identical terms: ‘the wealth of societies in which reigns the bourgeois mode of production appears as an immense accumulation of commodities, the singular commodity being its elementary form’.9
From Commodity to Capital
In general, useful objects become commodities when produced by private labours operating independently of one another, not for the direct use of the producers themselves but for the use of others. Each commodity presents itself under a double aspect: use value and exchange value. It is use value destined to satisfy human needs, and its material side is common to the most varied kinds of social formation. Indeed, whatever be the social form of wealth, use value always forms its content. And use value is the necessary presupposition of the commodity. A use value is transformed into a commodity by being the bearer of exchange value. Exchange value appears as the quantitative relation in which use values are reciprocally exchangeable, each having the same magnitude of exchange value.
5 Marx 1987c, p. 383. 6 Marx 1987a, p. 66; 1976a, p. 11; 1954, p. 19. 7 Marx 1953, p. 763; 1993, p. 881. 8 Marx 1980a, p. 107; 1970a, p. 27. 9 Marx 1987a, p. 69; 1976a, p. 41; 1954, p. 43. The formulation undergoes slight change in the French version. See also 1988a, p. 24; 1994, p. 355. Later in this chapter we deal briefly with Marx’s idea of the genesis of money as the general equivalent as a development starting with the simplest form of value and the associated contradictions of the equivalent form of value.