Sunday 8 May 2022

A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy - Preface - Part 1 of 8

 

A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy

Preface

Marx begins by setting out his initial plan for his analysis of political economy, of which Capital was to form only one part.

I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade, world market.

The economic conditions of existence of the three great classes into which modern bourgeois society is divided are analysed under the first three headings; the interconnection of the other three headings is self-evident.” (p 19)

in Capital, of course, Marx begins by analysing not capital, but the commodity, and not even the commodity under capitalism, but the commodity as it first comes into existence, on the basis of production and exchange by independent producers, and its exchange, thereby, at exchange-values. This forms its capitalist pre-history, and sets the basis for explaining the fundamental basis of exchange-value, as against, prices and the price of production, which determines the basis of exchange under capitalism. It creates the basis for understanding the evolution of individual value of the product, into the market (social) value of the commodity, as the basis of exchange-value, of the product into the commodity, and also, thereby, is a prerequisite for understanding the evolution of money out of exchange-value, which itself is the pre-requisite for the development of capital.

So, Marx begins with the commodity, not only for the reasons set out in Capital, Chapter I, but also because it is fully consistent with his theory of historical materialism. Commodities arise long before capital, and money, and are a precondition for the latter, which is a precondition of the former. Societies produce products, i.e. use values created by labour, required for their own consumption. These products have value, equal to the labour required for their production. The societies that produce the products do not describe this labour as “value”, but that does not change the fact that that is what it is, any more than oxygen did not exist prior to its existence being identified, and it being given a name, as Marx says,

The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered... The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers.”

(Capital I, Chapter 1)

A community producing, say, woollen cloth does not talk about its “value”, being 10 hours of labour. It talks of its value being its use-value, its ability to clothe, and keep warm, the members of the community, its attractive colours and patterns, and so on. In all of the etymology of the world “value” or “worth” this is the meaning originally given to it. And, in terms of products, this use-value, and its value (the labour-time required for production) are fused. If the community wants the use-value of 10 metres of cloth, it knows it must expend 10 hours of labour on its production. This is vital in understanding Marx's criticism of Mill, and Say's Law, when it comes to commodities and money.

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