So, through all of these different modes of production, The Law of Value operates, forcing Man to continually increase productivity, which, in turn leads to new ways of producing, creating new relations of production, new social relations, and, in each one, a new development of value, whose manifestation evolves from individual value, to market value, and exchange-value, to market price, to price of production. And, it does not end there. Under communism, commodity production again ceases, and society goes back to the production of use value to meet its own needs. However, these use-values are no longer the product of individual producers, but of society as a whole, indeed, of society seen as the whole world, forming one single collective labourer. They are the product of a global division of labour, and global, social, cooperative labour, and it is this that is now the basis and manifestation of their value. As Marx puts it in Capital III, Chapter 49,
“after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, but still retaining social production, the determination of value continues to prevail in the sense that the regulation of labour-time and the distribution of social labour among the various production groups, ultimately the book-keeping encompassing all this, become more essential than ever.”
And, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he writes,
“Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form.”
In other words, it carries over from generalised commodity production social value as the form of value, but now stripped both of its manifestation as price of production and money price/exchange-value.
A product must be a use-value, or otherwise the producer would have no reason to expend labour on its production. Even if the labour is expended simply for the joy of creation, this represents use-value, for the producer, nourishing the spirit as against the flesh. And, for this reason, a product need not be a commodity. But, a commodity must first, also, be a product. That is it must be a use-value that is produced by labour. There is no reason for B to exchange 10 hours of labour, for A's metre of linen, unless B requires a metre of linen. It must have use-value for them. But, similarly, there is no reason for B to give A 10 hours of labour for a use value that is provided freely by Nature, what economists call a “free good”.
I can breathe air freely, provided by Nature. In those cases where people do buy air, what they actually buy is some additional labour in bottling some specific air, whether real or imagined on the part of the buyer. There are some use-values that have no value, i.e. are not the product of labour, and yet which are sold as commodities, and have a market price, as Marx sets out in Capital III. Land is not the product of labour, and so has no value. Yet, it is sold as a commodity, and has a market price. Under capitalism, capital itself, or more correctly the use-value of capital, its capacity to produce the average rate of profit, and has a market price, i.e. the rate of interest.
In both these cases, the use value is required by producers in order to produce profits, but the use values themselves – land and capital – are owned by others – landowners and money-lending capitalists – who will not allow their use unless they are paid for them. As Marx sets out, rent, then, amounts to the surplus profit in excess of the annual average industrial rate of profit, and the rate of interest is determined purely by the balance between the supply of loanable capital, as against the demand for it.
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