For there to be a society based upon such equal exchange requires that the amounts of time to be worked, and the quantities of each type of commodity to be produced, be agreed beforehand, i.e. it requires an overall communal plan of production.
“But such an agreement negates individual exchange.” (p 73)
What is more, it may be the case that the individual artisan and petty commodity producer can decide to work for 6 hours rather than 12, to work even 14 hours one day, and only 2 the next, but that is not the case for the labourer in a large capitalist workshop. Not only does such an enterprise depend on an optimum use of fixed capital, day in day out, but labour is no longer individual artisanal labour, but collective, cooperative labour, based on the division of labour.
“In large-scale industry, Peter is not free to fix for himself the time of his labour, for Peter's labour is nothing without the co-operation of all the Peters and all the Pauls who make up the workshop. This explains very well the dogged resistance which the English factory owners put up to the Ten Hours' Bill. They knew only too well that a two-hours' reduction of labour granted to women and children would carry with it an equal reduction of working hours for adult men. It is in the nature of large-scale industry that working hours should be equal for all. What is today the result of capital and the competition of workers among themselves will be tomorrow, if you sever the relation between labour and capital, an actual agreement based upon the relation between the sum of productive forces and the sum of existing needs.
But such an agreement is a condemnation of individual exchange, and we are back again at our first conclusion!” (p 73)
Commodity production and exchange creates the illusion of commodity fetishism. In other words, what is exchanged is not products/commodities, but equal amounts of labour. What appears as a relation between things – products/commodities – is actually a social relation between people. Again, The Law of Value sits at the heart of these relations, in all modes of production, and, as Marx sets out in his Letter To Kugelmann, it is the mode of production, which, then, determines the mode of distribution, and the manifestation of value as individual value, market value/exchange-value, or price of production.
“The mode of exchange of products depends upon the mode of exchange of the productive forces. In general, the form of exchange of products corresponds to the form of production. Change the latter, and the former will change in consequence. Thus in the history of society we see that the mode of exchanging products is regulated by the mode of producing them. Individual exchange corresponds also to a definite mode of production which itself corresponds to class antagonism. There is thus no individual exchange without the antagonism of classes.” (p 73-4)
The bourgeois liberal, of course, refuses to see this, and also presents the existence of monopolies and oligopolies as abnormal divergences that should be addressed by competition laws and so on, a theme taken up also by the petty-bourgeois, socialist “anti-capitalists”.
“Mr. Bray turns the illusion of the respectable bourgeois into an ideal he would like to attain. In a purified individual exchange, freed from all the elements of antagonism he finds in it, he sees an “equalitarian" relation which he would like society to adopt generally.
Mr. Bray does not see that this equalitarian relation, this corrective ideal that he would like to apply to the world, is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world; and that therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it. In proportion as this shadow takes on substance again, we perceive that this substance, far from being the transfiguration dreamt of, is the actual body of existing society.” (p 74)
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