It is only in more advanced societies, in which there is widespread commodity production and exchange, against money, in large liquid markets, that this fundamental social relation becomes obscured, so that value then appears to be something inherent within the commodity itself, and when commodity production and exchange evolves into capitalist production that becomes even more the case. Under capitalist production, its no longer the case that commodities exchange at their values, so even the link to the labour required for their production disappears. Now they exchange at prices of production, so that even a commodity that contains no current labour may sell at a high price.
“All the illusions of the Monetary System arise from the failure to perceive that money, though a physical object with distinct properties, represents a social relation of production. As soon as the modern economists, who sneer at illusions of the Monetary System, deal with the more complex economic categories, such as capital, they display the same illusions. This emerges clearly in their confession of naive astonishment when the phenomenon that they have just ponderously described as a thing reappears as a social relation and, a moment later, having been defined as a social relation, teases them once more as a thing.” (p 35)
Illustrating the nature of use-value and value, Marx notes that material, in its natural state, contains no labour, whereas exchange-value, in its natural state, contains no material. He quotes Petty's comment that labour is the father, and earth the mother of wealth, and Berkeley's similar comment that it is the four elements and labour that is the source of wealth. Finally, he quotes Thomas Cooper,
“Take away from a piece of bread the labour bestowed by the baker on the flour, by the miller on the grain brought to him, by the farmer in ploughing, sowing, tending, gathering, threshing, cleaning and transporting the seed, and what will remain? A few grains of grass, growing wild in the woods, and unfit for any human purpose.” (p 35)
In terms of use-value, which, as stated earlier, is the basis of real wealth, all of this is true, and Marx emphasised this again in his later writings, for example, in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, but the labour referred to, in all these quotes, is concrete labour, and it is not this that is the essence of value, which, in turn, is the basis of exchange-value. Concrete labour is the source of value, but it is not the essence of value, nor its measure. In other words, its not possible to have the performance of abstract labour, without it taking the form of concrete labour, just as it is not possible to have light, in the abstract, without it taking the form of candle-light, sunlight, and so on. Labour is always performed as spinning labour, weaving labour and so on, and only then can it be reduced to abstract labour. In the same way candle light, sunlight and so on is the form in which light manifests itself, but it is not the essence of light, which consists of photons, and which determines its measurement in luminosity.
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