by SANDRA BLOODWORTH
Capitalism comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. So concludes Marx after a lengthy account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism near the end of Capital, Volume I.
Marx explained in the preface to the first edition that its object was “to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society”. Full of literary references, witticisms and a burning hatred of capitalism, it is not the dull treatise that description might imply. His empathy for workers who are exploited by the capitalist class leaps off the pages.
The three volumes are an exposition of Marx’s method of “rising from the abstract to the concrete”. Volume I opens with an analysis of the commodity.
This is not an arbitrary abstraction. It grasps the specific, defining and unique feature of capitalism: the mass production of commodities for exchange on the market.
From this starting point, Marx elaborates the labour theory of value, which solves a question at the heart of capitalism. What quality do commodities as different as clothes, machinery, tables and books have in common that enables their comparison on the market?
This can’t be their use value because they have radically different uses. The only aspect common to everything produced by humans is the labour expended on them.
But how can the very different kinds of concrete labour employed to produce commodities be compared?
Marx argued that what is being compared is abstract labour, measured by “socially necessary labour time”, or the amount of time it takes a worker of average skill and productivity to produce a commodity.
“A use-value, or useful article, therefore has [exchange] value only because abstract human labour is objectified and materialised in it.”
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