Sunday, 7 August 2022

Chapter 1A – Historical Notes On The Analysis of Commodities - Part 6 of 8

Note that Marx distinguishes, here, as he does in Capital I, Chapter 1, between products and commodities. As Marx describes in Capital I, a product itself has valueindividual value – precisely because it is the product of free purposive labour. It is this which enables it to become a commodity, and for its individual value to be subsumed within market value, which is the basis of its exchange-value to other commodities. It is not value that arises only as a result of bourgeois production, i.e. the production of commodities on a generalised basis, but exchange-value, in its developed form.

“Various kinds of concrete labour, such as agriculture, manufacture, shipping and commerce, had each in turn been claimed to constitute the real source of wealth, before Adam Smith declared that the sole source of material wealth or of use-values is labour in general, that is the entire social aspect of labour as it appears in the division of labour.” (p 59)

As Marx points out, in this formulation, Smith entirely misses out the role of Nature as a creator of material wealth. He again makes the error in another form, when he comes to examine social wealth, exchange-value, by excluding the value of constant capital, in what Marx calls Smith's “absurd dogma” that the value of commodities resolves entirely into revenues.

“Adam Smith constantly confuses the determination of the value of commodities by the labour-time contained in them with the determination of their value by the value of labour; he is often inconsistent in the details of his exposition and he mistakes the objective equalisation of unequal quantities of labour forcibly brought about by the social process for the subjective equality of the labours of individuals. He tries to accomplish the transition from concrete labour to labour which produces exchange-value, i.e., the basic form of bourgeois labour, by means of the division of labour. But though it is correct to say that individual exchange presupposes division of labour, it is wrong to maintain that division of labour presupposes individual exchange. For example, division of labour had reached an exceptionally high degree of development among the Peruvians, although no individual exchange, no exchange of products in the form of commodities, took place.” (p 59-60)

In other words, Smith conflates abstract, universal labour, the essence of market value, and, thereby, exchange-value, with the individual labour, and individual value, of the product. The latter as, firstly, concrete labour is necessarily differentiated, and unequal. That is so for various reasons. The labour of a blacksmith is not the same as that of a tailor, and a comparison of the products of the two may show the value created in an hour of the former to be equal to 2 hours of the latter. In the product, where the same labourer is both blacksmith and tailor, this is not apparent, because it is the labour of the same individual, as Marx describes in relation to Robinson Crusoe, in Capital I, but it becomes apparent, as soon as a division of labour arises.

Secondly, the labour of blacksmith A is not the same as the labour of blacksmith B. As Marx describes in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, blacksmith A may be much stronger than B, and produce more use values in an hour, or else they may be more skilled and so produce a greater quantity or variety of use value. These latter differences are dissolved in the competition of all the blacksmiths, which reduces their labour to one average blacksmith's labour, and one social value of their product, which subsumes all of the individual values of their production. The former differences between this average blacksmith's labour and average tailor's labour, is likewise resolved by competition of one with the other, in the market place, as the commodities of each confront one another.


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