Marx sets out the different characteristics of social labour, and of value in different social formations, as described earlier. This illustrates the fallacy of those who claim that value and The Law of Value, exists only under capitalism. Marx says,
“Only because the labour-time of the spinner and the labour-time of the weaver represent universal labour-time, and their products are thus universal equivalents, is the social aspect of the labour of the two individuals represented for each of them by the labour of the other, that is to say, the labour of the weaver represents it for the spinner, and the labour of the spinner represents it for the weaver. On the other hand, under the rural patriarchal system of production, when spinner and weaver lived under the same roof – the women of the family spinning and the men weaving, say for the requirements of the family – yarn and linen were social products, and spinning and weaving social labour within the framework of the family. But their social character did not appear in the form of yarn becoming a universal equivalent exchanged for linen as a universal equivalent, i.e., of the two products exchanging for each other as equal and equally valid expressions of the same universal labour-time. On the contrary, the product of labour bore the specific social imprint of the family relationship with its naturally evolved division of labour.” (p 33)
It is this reduction of concrete labour to abstract, universal labour, as a result of bringing one commodity into an exchange relation to others that creates commodity fetishism.
“The labour of different persons is equated and treated as universal labour only by bringing one use-value into relation with another one in the guise of exchange-value. Although it is thus correct to say that exchange-value is a relation between persons, it is however necessary to add that it is a relation hidden by a material veil.” (p 34)
In simple commodity producing societies, this reality that what exists is a social relation between people is still fairly obvious. It remains the case, for example, that payment for some commodities takes the form of labour service. In other words, a blacksmith shoes a peasant's horse, whilst the peasant works an equivalent amount of time on the blacksmith's land. As Lenin notes in “The Heritage We Renounce”, the Narodniks, in seeking to hold back capitalist development, and money economy, sought to preserve such labour service, as means of payment. Engelhardt thought it would be a good idea for every doctor to have land so that peasants could pay for medical services in the form of labour service performed on it.
And, as Marx describes in Capital I, there is no doubt that the labour-service provided by peasants on the land of the lord of the manor is the same payment of an amount of value as if that labour-time is expended in the production of a commodity, handed to the landlord, or an amount of money handed to the landlord, obtained from the sale of a commodity by the peasants.
“Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour power. The tithe to be rendered to the priest is more matter of fact than his blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.”
(Capital I, Chapter 1)
In other words, it is not necessary, here, to measure abstract labour (value), indirectly, in the form of a quantity of some other use-value (exchange-value), or its more developed form, a money price. Instead, value is measured directly in labour hours.
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