A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, Chapter 1 - Part 1 of 29

Chapter One – The Commodity

Marx begins, as he does in Capital I, by an examination of the commodity.

“The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Every commodity, however, has a twofold aspect – use-value and exchange-value.” (p 27)

As in Capital I, he examines these two aspects of the commodity, use-value and exchange-value. Written several years before the publication of Capital I, there are slight differences in what Marx says, here, compared to what is said in Capital I, and certainly compared with Marx's more extensive analysis of value, exchange-value and price, contained in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 20. Here, Marx skips a step that is covered extensively in Theories of Surplus Value, where he polemicises against Bailey on the question of subjective value, which Bailey derives from the relative nature of exchange-value. Here, Marx says of exchange-value,

“As exchange-values of different magnitudes they represent larger or smaller portions, larger or smaller amounts of simple, homogeneous, abstract general labour, which is the substance of exchange-value.” (p 29)

But, this requires, first, that the value of commodities is determined. In fact, as Marx sets out, the exchange-value of, say, linen, is not measured in simple labour, but in a quantity of some other use-value, say, iron. In order to determine the exchange-value, of linen, measured in iron, then, as Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, it is first necessary to determine the value of both linen and iron. It is value, that is measured in universal labour, not exchange-value, which is measured in a quantity of some other use-value.

“Relative value means first of all magnitude of value in contradistinction to the quality of having value at all. For this reason, the latter is not something absolute. It means, secondly, the value of one commodity expressed in the use-value of another commodity. This is only a relative expression of its value, namely, in relation to the commodity in which it is expressed. The value of a pound of coffee is only relatively expressed in tea; to express it absolutely—even in a relative way, that is to say, not in regard to labour-time, but to other commodities—it ought to be expressed in an infinite series of equations with all other commodities. This would be an absolute expression of its relative value; its absolute expression would be its expression in terms of labour-time and this absolute expression would express it as something relative, but in the absolute relation, by which it is value.”

(Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 20)

Back To Preface

Forward To Part 2