What Is Value?

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

WHAT IS VALUE?

Marx thought long and hard about where to begin the first and only volume of Capital to appear before his death in 1883. The next two volumes would be published later, assembled from writings in various stages of completion by Marx's lifelong friend and collaborator Frederick Engels. After years of reading, taking notes and producing draft after draft of his projected multi-volume inquiry, Marx had succeeded in formulating the key concepts guiding his analysis. But only one of them was judged by Marx to be suitable as an opening gambit, a point of departure. Only one would be the subject of Chapter 1 of Volume 1.

Marx might have devoted this chapter to a historical sketch of how the capitalist mode of production emerged in fits and starts from the interstices of feudalism and the organized violence of slavery, conquest and colonialism. Alternatively, he might have begun on a transhistorical note with a discussion of how the labor process mediates the metabolic relation between society and nature, and so forms the material foundation of every historic mode of production. A third possibility would have been to return to the central point which he and Engels had made with such fiery passion in The Communist Manifesto, namely that the driver of the most recent phase of history is the class struggle between capitalists who own the means of production and workers who own nothing more than their capacity to labor.

So, where does he begin his magnum opus on the internal workings of capital?

With the commodity.

A surprising choice, to put it mildly. To appreciate just how surprising let's play make-believe. The above photo is of the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico. I want you to pretend that Marx is a twenty-first-century geologist who is researching and writing a book about the formation of this gorge. He spends years immersed in the scholarly literature. Finally, the time comes to put the books aside and see the gorge for himself. He catches a flight to Albuquerque, rents a car at the airport and heads north to Taos County. Sitting in the passenger seat is his loyal research assistant, Frederick Engels. They cross over the Gorge Bridge on Highway 64, park the car at the nearby rest stop and walk along the west rim trail, stopping at a viewing point to gaze in wonder at the gorge's immensity.

Nothing has prepared Marx for this view. He is stupefied by the sheer power of the forces that have sculpted and continue to sculpt this landscape. Then he looks down and notices a small rock at the toe of his boot, close to a bleached-out wooden cross, perhaps a memorial to one of the dozens of suicides who each you throw themselves off the bridge that he sees in the distance. The rock is nothing special, no different from all the other rocks scattered around the viewing point. He picks it up, examines it from every angle. He then turns to Engels and says, "Frederick, I shall title Chapter 1 of my book, The Rock."

Back to reality. As you may already know and can easily guess, the title Marx chose for the real Chapter 1 was "The Commodity."

Anyone reading this chapter for the first time will probably find the experience disorienting, owing to the way in which Marx toggles back and forth between the rock-like part (the commodity) and the gorge-like whole (capital). On the one hand, Marx wants to identify capital's laws of motion in the most ordinary thing that all of us living under their sway are familiar with and take for granted, "the economic cell-form" of capital, as he calls it, otherwise known as the commodity. Rather than trying to present capital in the round from some godlike vantage point as if he were Zeus sitting on his throne, Marx proposes to view it at ground-level where the mere mortals live.

On the other hand, this chapter is famous for its high level of abstraction, in which Marx seems to be viewing capital's laws of motion from the moon. It introduces difficult concepts with little historical context and few illustrative details, leaving us to wonder how the same Marx who co-authored the Communist Manifesto with its passionate call for proletarian revolution could have written something so seemingly apolitical and untethered to the class struggle. Marx knew that this chapter would send many readers running for the hills, either because it was too damn hard or because they expected a little more heat in their communist gumbo. But in the end, he saw no way around the problem. "There is no royal road to science," Marx explained in one of his prefaces, "and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits." Readers of Chapter 1 have been gasping for air ever since.

So, strap on your oxygen tanks and mountain shoes because we're going for a climb.

The commodity or "commodity form," Marx tells us, is an external thing that internalizes the relations and contradictions of capital by virtue of its three-fold identity. It is a "use value" that satisfies some human want or need; an "exchange value" that can be bartered for other commodities; and a "value," which turns out to be the Gordian knot tying the first two identities together.

What is this last identity, this value stripped of any adjectival noun? Marx reasons that value must be a quality that all commodities share in common and without which they would not be exchangeable. The quality that makes commodities commensurable, he concludes, is the human labor objectified in them. What is more, the magnitude of value is measured in units of human labor time.

In setting out this labor theory of value, Marx remained within the general outlines of classical political economy as represented by David Ricardo. However, he introduced two modifications to Ricardo's value theory that changed everything.

First, Marx specified that value is the "socially necessary" labor objectified in the commodity. Likewise, he identified the magnitude of a commodity's value as the socially necessary labor time required to produce it. By socially necessary Marx meant the average labor time congealed in a commodity, taking into account such factors as the level of skill, intensity of labor, state of technology and availability of natural resources prevailing in a given branch of industry. The addition of the two words socially necessary to Ricardo's labor theory of value signaled Marx's awareness of the crucial role of technology in the accumulation process and put labor productivity at the heart of his value theory.

"A commodity's magnitude of value varies directly with the amount of labor realized in it, and inversely with labor's productive power," Marx writes. The implications of this relationship—that an increase in labor productivity will lower the value of commodities by reducing the quantity of abstract labor objectified in them—will be the steady backbeat of Capital as Marx trains his value theory on the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of this mode of production.

Second, Marx observes that in commodity production under capital labor undergoes a bifurcation from which emerges "concrete" and "abstract" labor. While Marx could be quite generous in acknowledging his debt to classical political economists like Smith and Ricardo (and quite merciless in his dismissal of their "vulgar" wannabes), he was quick to claim credit for being "the first to offer a critical account" of the double-sided nature of labor. It's easy to understand his proprietary feelings on this score, since he considered the concrete/abstract distinction to be "the nub of any real attempt to understand political economy." For Marx concrete labor refers to the particular and multifarious types of labor that go into the production of use values; abstract labor refers to the homogenized and fungible labor that goes into the production of values.

To visualize the contradictory unity of concrete and abstract labor, and of use value and value, imagine that you have just become the proud owner of a state-of-the art blender equipped with a high-speed setting for making the smoothies your personal trainer swears by. In go the separate ingredients—yogurt, fruit juice, raw fruit, kale, crushed ice, protein powder—and out comes a substance of uniform consistency, taste, smell, temperature and color.

In this analogy, the pre-blender ingredients represent different types of concrete labor, each of which is qualitatively distinct from the others, while the post-blender smoothie represents abstract labor whose aliquot parts differ from one another only in quantitative terms. Think of the commodity as an empty glass into which you pour your smoothie.

In the new English edition of Capital, translator Paul Reitter hits the perfect note in rendering the abstract labor contained in a commodity as "a ghostly objecthood—a bare gelatinous blob of undifferentiated human labor, of human labor-power expended without regard for the form of its expenditure." The difference between Reitter's translation and my analogy is that gelatin is not made from fruits and vegetables, as are smoothies, but from animal parts, which evokes the chilling association of abstract labor and value with bodily dismemberment, slaughter houses, steaming vats and hulking processing machinery. Given the gothic and vampiric imagery threading through the first chapters of Capital, there is every reason to think that Marx used such language purposefully and with considerable relish.

We are only a few pages into Chapter 1 and already Marx has planted in our mind the grotesque image of flesh-and-blood workers, the bearers of abstract labor, pureed and consumed by capital.

Of course, we should not take such metaphors literally. The value of a commodity is not a material thing that can be pureed, consumed or, for that matter, perceived directly with the physical senses. It is a social relation specific to commodity production under capital, a relation among private producers whose abstract labor, measured as socially necessary labor time, congeals into Reitter's gelatinous blobs of undifferentiated human labor.

Like all social relations, value is immaterial. But if commodities are to exchange on a large scale, value must have some kind of material representation or form of appearance, otherwise capital would remain permanently stuck in a barter system, a victim of arrested development.

The material representation and measure of value, according to Marx, is exchange value. Marx posits a barter economy in which commodities exchange directly with one another. In this situation, the value of one commodity (the relative form) is measured against the value of another (the equivalent form). But this unmediated system of exchange will shrivel away once capital takes hold. In a capitalist system of generalized commodity production and exchange, where market relations have seeped into every nook and cranny of social life and money has emerged as the universal equivalent and medium of exchange, exchange value is expressed in monetary terms as price. Price is not identical with value, nor value with price, and herein lay a tangled nest of contradictions which Marx will try to tease out in the third volume of Capital.

The main point Marx wants to drive home, in response to all those who see the monetization of gold and silver as the be-all and end-all of political economy, is that the money form is immanent in the commodity form. If not gold and silver, capital would find something else to serve as the universal equivalent.

The contradictory unity of value and its monetary representation sets the stage for "The Fetish Character of Commodities—and the Secret It Entails," the famous final section of Chapter 1, in which Marx allows his imagination and language to run wild. Coming on the heels of the rather dry discussion of relative and equivalent value-forms, Marx now seeks to explain how and why the processes of commodity production and exchange mask the true nature of capital and its social relations. By the time he's finished every commodity has been transformed into "a social hieroglyphic" while ordinary tables stand on their heads and perform acrobatic feats for the entertainment of other commodities.

Block quotes are something I try to avoid, but when it comes to a bona fide puzzler like the fetishism of commodities, I think it best to let Marx speak for himself before trying to get to the bottom of what he's saying:

"The mystery of the commodity-form amounts, then, simply to this: the form reflects back at people the social characteristics of their own labor as objective characteristics of their labor products, as socio-natural properties of those things. And so the commodity form also reflects back at people the producers' relation to the totality of labor as a social relation among objects that exists apart from and outside the producers themselves."

Let's try to break this down. Commodities in their capacity as use values are produced by people to satisfy some human want or need. But they are produced under conditions that are not of the producers' choosing. For example, the social division of labor under capital has developed to the point where all producers are entangled in dense webs of interdependency with other producers. But because these producers are private individuals who go about their productive activities like so many Robinson Crusoes on their desert islands, they have no direct way of knowing each other, of pinpointing their place in the social division of labor or of relating their private labor to the totality of social labor. The social relations of production appear to them only when the material products of their labor are exchanged. At the moment of exchange, however, the relations among the producers and between the producers and their products are turned inside out, taking the form of "material relations between persons and social relations between things."

Long story short, by unmasking the fetish character of commodities Marx is able to bring capital's well-kept secret to light: value is not an intrinsic quality of use values, it is a product of abstract human labor.

Let's go to the movies for what I hope will be a helpful analogy. In Walt Disney's 1940 animated classic, Fantasia, Mickey Mouse makes cinematic history in the role of the sorcerer's apprentice. The story opens with the Sorcerer practicing magic while the Apprentice drudges away mopping the floors. When the Sorcerer decides it's naptime, Mickey takes the opportunity to try on his magical hat and cast a spell, bringing to life an ordinary mop who will take over the chores. The mop is a perfect worker, filling up bucket after bucket with water for the many rooms of the castle that are in need of a good cleaning. Confident that everything is under control, Mickey dozes off and dreams of the unlimited powers he commands. Upon awakening he discovers to his horror that the inanimate object he has conjured into existence is threatening to flood the entire castle. Mickey goes after the mop with an axe and chops it into splinters. But each splinter is immediately reborn as a new mop, unleashing an army of water-carrying mops who overrun the castle, determined to finish their job, even if this means drowning Mickey and every living thing in sight. Fortunately, the Sorcerer arrives in the nick of time to save the day.

If Mickey had read "The Fetish Character of Commodities," he would have known that the products of labor, given the right circumstances, can develop a mind of their own and turn against their producers.

Let me caution, once again, against taking these analogies literally. When Marx describes the commodity as being "full of metaphysical quibbles and theological quirks" or refers to the table that, upon taking the commodity form, "turns upside down and spins bizarre notions out of its blocky head," he is trying to shake readers out of their complacency and puncture the pretensions of bourgeois economists by associating commodities and capital with Medieval scholasticism and pagan wizardry. This is a rhetorical strategy, one that works effectively, I believe.

Marx is not saying that fetishism is an illusion that will go away as soon as we recognize it as such. Fetishism is all too real, lodged as it is in the very heart of capitalist production and exchange. To rid ourselves of commodity fetishism, hints Marx in this opening chapter, we must rid ourselves of value and its mode of production.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

WHAT IS VALUE?

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist