Chapter 1A – Historical Notes On The Analysis of Commodities - Part 5 of 8

Marx, then, turns to the ideas of the mercantilist, Sir James Steuart, whose “An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, Being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations” appeared in 1767, ten years before Smith's “Wealth of Nations”. He was “the first Briton to expound a general system of bourgeois economy.” (p 57). Coming earlier than Smith's work, the concepts of use value and exchange-value are more blurred, in Steuart's writing.

“In one passage he determines real value by labour-time ("what a workman can perform in a day"), but beside it he introduces wages and raw material in a rather confusing way. His struggle with the material content is brought out even more strikingly in another passage. He calls the physical element contained in a commodity, e.g., the silver in silver filigree, its “intrinsic worth,” and the labour-time contained in it its “useful value.”” (p 58)

There is a hint, here, of the concepts of constant capital (materials) and variable-capital (wages), later developed by Marx, but jumbled together with the new value created by current labour.

“His clear differentiation between specifically social labour which manifests itself in exchange-value and concrete labour which yields use-values distinguishes Steuart from his predecessors and his successors.

"Labour,” he says, “which through its alienation creates a universal equivalent, I call industry.”” (p 58)

Steuart also distinguished this bourgeois form of labour, creating commodities and exchange-value, as distinct from labour in previous modes of production, e.g. slave and serf labour, Corvée labour, direct labour.

“Steuart knew very well that in pre-bourgeois eras also products assumed the form of commodities and commodities that of money; but he shows in great detail that the commodity as the elementary and primary unit of wealth and alienation as the predominant form of appropriation are characteristic only of the bourgeois period of production, and that accordingly labour which creates exchange-value is a specifically bourgeois feature.” (p 58)

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