When I expend immediate labour to collect food, the moment I consume the food, I extinguish the use value, and along with it the value. or, more correctly, the use value, and value assumes a different form, as it reproduces my labour-power. But, when I use the chair I only extinguish a part of its use value, and a part of its value. All of the value remaining in the chair represents labour that I do not immediately have to expend, providing the use value of the chair. In that sense, it is like a revenue; it is additional labour-time I can expend on immediately providing for my consumption needs. Because I only produce products for my own consumption, the only value that matters is their individual value, i.e. the value created by my own labour in their production, because it is only this labour that is diverted from some other use.
If, on the other hand, I produce the chair as a commodity, it has no use value for me, but it still has value, and as a commodity this value now takes the form of exchange-value, i.e. the quantity of some other commodity or money I can obtain in exchange for it. Now this exchange-value is based not upon the individual value, of the chair, but its social value, the average labour of all producers required for the production of chairs of this type. When I exchange or sell the chair, therefore, its use value passes out of my hands, but its exchange-value remains in my hands, only now transformed into the shape of some other commodity or money. If I consume the use value of a product of any labour, its value is also thereby extinguished. To use a phrase “You cannot have your cake and eat it.” Or, if the cake were produced by me as a commodity, you cannot eat your cake and sell it. If I spend 10 hours making a cake, the cake may have use value for me, and so long as the cake is in my possession it represents a value; it represents 10 hours of labour, I do not need to expend producing a cake to meet my consumption needs.
But, precisely because the cake has value, I can alienate its use value, whilst retaining its value. In this process of alienation, the value of the cake is divorced from its use value. The value, in the form of exchange-value, takes on an independent existence, and remains in my possession, in the form either of some other use value, or money. It's clear, therefore, that if the value of the commodity can be divorced from the use value then this value cannot be something that is intrinsic to or embodied in the commodity. The value is nothing more than the representation of a quantity of labour-time.
I expended 10 hours of labour-time on producing the cake, and by alienating its use value, rather than consuming it, I detached the value from the use value, gave the value an independent existence, which then, in the process, takes on some material form. The buyer of the cake gave me either money or some other commodity with a value of 10 hours of labour. It was then as though they had actually given me, in exchange, not, say, a chair, or a gold coin, but 10 hours of labour. Yet, as described above, this cannot be an exchange of 10 hours of my cake producing labour for 10 hours of their chair producing labour, but only an exchange of equivalent amounts of general abstract labour. In the case of a payment of money, that becomes clear, because the money itself can only be a representative of that general abstract labour, even though the value of the gold itself is the product of a specific concrete form of labour. The gold producing labour thereby automatically becomes a proxy for that general abstract labour.
When the buyer of my cake consumes it, they thereby extinguish its use value, and along with it its value. In order to enjoy the use value, once more, they have to again expend 10 hours of labour, create 10 hours of new value, and thereby exchange it, once more for another of my cakes. In effect, they had not extinguished the 10 hours value that I had created in producing the cake, but the 10 hours value they had themselves created in the chair, a value that they also released by alienating the use value of the chair in selling it to me, in return for the cake. For my part, the 10 hours of value I created still exists, but has now taken the form of the chair. I might consume the use value of the chair, and thereby its value, by using the chair, over a period, until its worn out. Alternatively, I might once more alienate the use value of the chair, and thereby liberate the 10 hours of value from it. I might exchange the chair for a suit, with a value of 10 hours labour. Until such time as I consume the use value, in which the value is represented, the 10 hours of value that I created, or otherwise possessed, remains in my possession, even though it may take on a multitude of different garbs.
In this sense, as also described in Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, every commodity, as a representative of value, is money, because it can be exchanged for other commodities of equal value. The difference with the money commodity, such as gold coins, is that they are not exchanged as commodities intended for consumption. My cake, the chair I obtain in exchange for it, etc. are all commodities intended for consumption, at some point. But, that is not the case with the money commodity itself, in so far as it is used as money. Gold as a commodity can also be consumed, for example, in the production of jewellery, and it is this fact that enables it to act as money in the first place. But, in so far as it takes on the role of money, minted into coins, it gives up that function. It is only intended to act in this specific role as money, as a general commodity that acts as the universal equivalent form of value, continually passed from one hand to another. In this sense, it gives up its own specific use value – for example for use in jewellery – in order to take on the use value only of money.
“A commodity may be sold either below or above its value. This is purely a matter of the magnitude of its value. But whenever a commodity is sold, transformed into money, its exchange-value acquires an independent existence, separate from its use-value. The commodity now exists only as a certain quantity of social labour-time, and it proves that it is such by being directly exchangeable for any commodity whatsoever and convertible (in proportion to its magnitude) into any use-value whatsoever.” (p 136)
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