A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy
Preface
Mill
continued to view commodities as though they were still products
(See: Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17),
and so in which use-value and value were inextricably fused. But,
Marx demonstrates that, as soon as the product is alienated from the
producer, i.e. becomes a commodity, value and use value are no longer
fused but are separated. The most obvious manifestation of that is
that the seller sells a commodity, which, for them, has no use value,
and they sell it to obtain value, in the form of exchange-value, even
if the only purpose of doing so is to again obtain some other use
value. The producer can now produce use values, not because they
have any use for them, but solely because, in producing them, they
can alienate their value, i.e. they can realise the labour contained
in them in some other form.
The
producer of cloth produces it, not because they want to use the
cloth, now, but solely in order to be able to exchange it for wine,
and the wine producer produces wine to exchange it for cloth.
Production and consumption have now been separated, and along with
it, use-value, and value. So long as these commodities are exchanged
in some form of barter, then, demand and supply are balanced, as
described in Mill's Law of Markets (Say's Law), but, once money
intervenes, that is no longer true. Now, sellers can demand money, as
the general commodity, not to consume it, as say wool or wine is
consumed, but also to save it, to hoard it for future use and so on.
Consequently, supply and demand, as well as production and
consumption, use-value and value, are separated, making
overproduction of commodities possible. As Marx sets out in Theories
of Surplus Value, Chapter 17,
in his response to Ricardo's assertion that
“Productions
are always bought by productions, or by services; money
is
only the medium by which the exchange is effected.”” (p 499)
He
says,
“Money
is not only “the medium by which the exchange is effected” (l.c.,
p. 341), but at the same time the medium by which the exchange of
product with product is divided into two acts, which are independent
of each other, and separate in time and space. With Ricardo, however,
this false conception of money is due to the fact that he
concentrates exclusively on the quantitative
determination of
exchange-value, namely, that it is equal to a definite quantity of
labour-time,
forgetting on the other hand the qualitative
characteristic,
that individual labour
must
present itself as abstract,
general social labour
only through its alienation.” (p 504)
And,
“At
a given moment, the supply of all commodities can be greater than the
demand for all commodities, since the demand for the general
commodity, money,
exchange-value, is greater than the demand for all particular
commodities, in other words the motive to turn the commodity into
money, to realise its exchange-value, prevails over the motive to
transform the commodity again into use-value.” (p 505)
If
we take a step back, then, as Marx describes, the primitive
communities that only produced products, first exchanged some of them
in ceremonies and rituals such as weddings, between different
communities, but these accidental and occasional exchanges of
products gradually expand into trade between the communities. The
initial basis of the trade is easy to identify. Community A produces
cloth with greater facility than community B, i.e. its individual value, the concrete labour required for its production, is lower.
Likewise, community B produces wine with a lower individual value than A
can achieve. In other words, there is a comparative advantage for
both communities in specialising and trading to meet their combined
needs.
Its
only necessary to assume that A could also exchange its cloth with
communities B1
– B12,
who also produce wine, to see that competition between the wine
producing communities would reduce the value of wine to the average labour-time required for its production, and the ability of wine
producers to exchange their wine with communities A1
– A12
would do the same to the value of cloth. In the process, the value
of the product, as individual value, based upon individual labour,
has been transformed into social labour, and value is no longer
individual value, but has become social or market value. It is this,
which forms the basis for the comparison of the value of cloth and
wine, and so the establishment of a proportional relation between
them, the exchange value.
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