“Political economy is therefore essentially a historical science. It deals with material which is historical, that is, constantly changing; it first investigates the special laws of each individual stage in the development of production and exchange, and only when it has completed this investigation will it be able to establish the few quite general laws which hold good for production and exchange in all cases.” (p 187)
As Marx describes, in his Letter To Kugelman, explaining The Law of Value, therefore, it is such a general law, a natural law, applying to all modes of production, each of which has its own specific, historically determined, and limited laws of motion. This natural law operates differently, in every mode of production, in its manifestation through these specific, historically determined laws. The Law of Value, that value is labour, and the value of any product is determined by the labour required to produce it, and, consequently, that, with relatively scarce labour, society must allocate this labour accordingly, applies as much to the primitive commune or future communist society, as it does to slave society, feudalism the AMP, or capitalism. However, the specific manifestation of that is quite different, and operates via different laws of motion, in each of those different modes of production.
In the primitive commune, which produces directly to meet its own consumption needs, value is, necessarily, individual value. The labour involved is inextricably linked to the use-values produced. There is no competition, and so the labour is never compared with the labour of other communes producing the same things. As Marx and Engels described, for example, in A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, it is only when this labour, the individual value of the product, comes into competition with, and comparison to the individual labour/value of other products of the same species that value becomes market value, and labour becomes universal labour.
It does not change The Law of Value, only its form of manifestation, now, as the market value of commodities is different. Similarly, in societies based on direct production, not only does market value – the mean average individual value – have no relevance, but the comparison of this market value of A to the market value of B has no relevance either. However, as Marx sets out in Capital I, it has fundamental relevance in a society based on commodity production and exchange. For the product, under direct production, value or worth is understood as use-value, even though value/labour determines its production. But, under commodity production and exchange, use-value, for the producer ceases to exist, and only value expressed on its face, as exchange-value, is significant.
“We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour time of the several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions varying with the seasons. The labour power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour power of the family, and therefore, the measure of the expenditure of individual labour power by its duration, appears here by its very nature as a social character of their labour.”
“Now we know the substance of value. It is labour. We know its unit of measurement. It is labour-time. We have yet to analyse its form, which precisely stamps the value as an exchange-value.”
(Capital I, Chapter 1)
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