By the same token, as with the witch doctor's bone, it isn't clear to the people who believe in commodities why they should believe in them, nor how they came to occupy the position they presently enjoy. Diamonds might be valuable because they are rare, but that does not by itself explain why society should choose to prize them so highly. Not only are there similarly rare items that might have been seized upon, there is no intrinsic reason why rarity itself should matter as much as it does.
Commodity fetishism can also be understood in terms of social relations: neither the producer nor the consumer of a commodity has a necessary or full relation with the other. The fetishization of the commodity shields us from alienation. Sigmund Freud's use of the term fetish, which occurs later than Marx's, also borrows from anthropology.
From: commodity fetishism in A Dictionary of Critical Theory ». Subjects: Social sciences. View all reference entries ». View all related items in Oxford Reference ». Search for: 'commodity fetishism' in Oxford Reference ». All Rights Reserved. It is the expenditure of simple labour power, which every normal human being possesses in his bodily organism, quite apart from any special elaboration. This difference, however, is merely quantitative. If the coat is the product of one working-day of the tailor, it has the same value as the product of two working-days of the farm labourer.
The various proportions wherein differing species of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are established by a social process behind the back of the producers, and appear to them consequently as given by tradition. For purposes of simplification, every species of labour-power counts for us in the following immediately as simple labour-power, whereby we are only sparing ourselves the effort involved in the reduction to it. Therefore, just as one is abstracting, in the case of the values of coat and linen, from the difference between their use-values, just so, in the case of the labour which these values represent, is one abstracting from the difference between the useful forms, wherein labour is on the one band tailoring-labour and on the other hand weaving.
Just as the use-values coat and linen are connections of purposeful productive activities with cloth and yarn, whereas the values, coat and linen, on the other hand, are mere labour-precipitates of a similar species, just so does also the labour contained in these values count not on account of its productive relationship to cloth and yarn but only as expenditure of human labour-power.
Tailoring and weaving are formative elements of the use-values coat and linen precisely by virtue of their different qualities; but they are only the substance of coat-value and linen-value insofar as there is an abstracting from their specific quality and both possess the same quality, the quality of human labour.
Coat and linen, however, are not only values in general, but are values of definite magnitude and in accordance with our assumption the coat is worth twice as much as 10 yards of linen. What is the origin of this difference in their magnitudes of value?
It is the fact that linen contains only half as much labour as the coat, so that labour power has to be expended for a period of twice the time taken for the production of the latter as for the production of the former. If, therefore, with respect to the use-value, the labour contained in the commodity counts only qualitatively, with respect to the magnitude of exchange-value it counts only quantitatively, after being already reduced to human labour without further quality.
In the former case, what is at issue is the how and what of labour; and in the latter case, what matters is its how much, its temporal duration. Since the quantity of exchange-value of a commodity measures only the quantum of the labour contained in it, hence commodities within a certain proportion to one another must always be equally large exchange-values.
If the productive power of say all the useful deployments of labour required for the production of a coat remains unchanged, then the magnitude of value of the coats rises along with their own quantity. If one coat represents x days of labour, then two coats represent 2x days of labour, etc. But now assume that the labour-time necessary for the production of a coat rises to twice as much, or falls to half as much.
In the first instance, a coat has as much value as two coats had previously; and in the latter case, two coats have only just so much value as previously one had, although in both cases a coat performs the same tasks as before and the useful labour contained in it remains of the same beneficence as before.
But the labour-quantum expended in its production has changed. A larger quantum of use-value in and for itself forms larger material wealth, two coats being more than one. With two coats two human beings can be clad, and with one coat only one human being, etc. Nevertheless, a fall in the magnitude of value of material wealth may correspond contemporaneously to a rise in its mass. This contrary motion is produced by the two-sided specification of labour.
Productive power is naturally always productive power of useful, concrete labour. Actually, it only expresses the level of efficacy of purposeful activity in a given extension of time. Useful labour becomes, therefore, a richer or poorer source of products in direct relationship to the rising or falling of its productive power.
A change in the productive power, on the other hand, has in and for itself no effect whatsoever upon the labour represented in the value. Since the productive power belongs to the concrete, useful form of labour, it can naturally no longer influence labour, as soon as there is an abstracting from its concrete useful form.
The very same labour, therefore, when it is represented in the same extensions of time, is also on all occasions represented in the same magnitude of value — however much the productive power may change. But it yields differing quanta of use values, within the same extension of time: more whenever the productive power rises; less, whenever it sinks. In the first case, it can happen that two coats contain less labour than one did previously. The very same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of labour and hence the mass of use-values yielded by it, can therefore diminish the magnitude of value even of the increased total mass — namely whenever it shortens the labour-time necessary for its production.
And vice versa. Just as the commodity must be above all else an object of use in order to be a value, just so does labour have to be before all else useful labour — purposeful, productive activity — in order to count as expenditure of human labour-power and hence as simple human labour.
Since up to now it has only been the substance of value and the magnitude of value which have been specified, let us now direct our attention to the analysis of the form of value. First let us turn back to the first form of appearance of the value of the commodity. We take two quanta of commodities which cost the same amount of labour-time for their production and hence are equal magnitudes of value , and we have: 40 yards of linen are worth two coats.
We observe that the value of the linen is expressed in a specific quantum of coats. The value of a commodity is called its relative value, if it is represented in the use-value of another commodity in this fashion.
The relative value of a commodity can change, although its value remains constant. And, going the other way, its relative value can remain constant, although its value changes. With every change in the productive power of the deployments of labour which produce them there is a change in the labour-time necessary for their production.
Let us consider the influence of such changes upon relative value. Let the value of the linen change, while the coat- value remains constant. If the labour-time expended in the production of linen doubles perhaps as a consequence of increasing sterility of the soil employed in growing flax , then its value doubles. If the labour-time necessary for the production of linen decreases by half, on the other hand perhaps as a consequence of improved looms , in that case the linen- value sinks by half.
The relative value of commodity A i. Let the value of linen remain constant, while the coat- value changes. Given a constant value for commodity A, its relative value expressed in commodity B falls or rises in inverse ratio to the change in value of B. If one compares the different cases sub I and II, what emerges is that one and the same change of relative value can be initiated from completely opposite causes.
Let the labour-quanta necessary for the production of linen and coat vary contemporaneously, in the same direction and same proportion. Their change of value becomes apparent as soon as one compares them with a third commodity, whose value remains constant. If the values of all commodities rose or fell contemporaneously and in the same proportion, then their relative values would remain unchanged.
One would only detect their real change of value in the fact that in the same labour-time it would hold universally that a greater or smaller quantum of commodities was yielded than before.
Let labour-times necessary for the production of linen and coat, respectively and consequently their values be assumed to change contemporaneously in the same direction, but to an unequal degree, or in opposite directions, etc. The influence of all such possible combinations upon the relative value of a commodity may be deduced simply by application of the cases I, II and III.
What we have investigated is how far change in the relative magnitude of value of a commodity linen reflects a change in its own magnitude of value and we have in general investigated relative value only in accordance with its quantitative side. We now turn to its form. If relative value is the form wherein value manifests itself, then the expression for the equivalence of two commodities e.
This form is rather difficult to analyse, because it is simple. The different specifications which are contained in it are veiled, undeveloped, abstract, and consequently only able to be distinguished and focused upon through the rather intense application of our power of abstraction. Linen makes its earthly appearance in the shape of a use-value or useful thing. Its stiff-as-linen corporeality or natural form is consequently not its form of value, but its direct opposite.
It reveals its own reality as value immediately by relating itself to another commodity the coat as equal to itself. If it were not itself value, then it could not relate itself to coat as value as its own sort of thing.
It posits itself as qualitatively equal to the coat, by relating itself to it as objectification of human labour of the same species, i.
By this relationship to the coat, linen swats different flies with one stroke. By equating the other commodity to itself as value, it relates itself to itself as value.
By relating itself to itself as value, it distinguishes itself from itself as use-value, at the same time. By expressing its magnitude of value in the coat and magnitude of value is both things: value in general, and quantitatively measured value , it endows its reality as value with a form of value which differs from its immediate existence. By revealing itself in this manner as a thing which is differentiated within itself, it reveals itself for the first time really as a commodity — a useful thing which is at the same time value.
Insofar as linen is use-value, it is an independent thing. Its value appears, on the other hand only in relationship to another commodity e. Hence, value only acquires an individual form which is different from use-value only through its manifestation as exchange-value. The expression of the value of linen in the coat impresses a new form upon the coat itself. After all, what is the meaning of the value-form of linen? Evidently that the coat is exchangeable for it.
Whatever else may happen to it, in its mundane reality it possesses in its natural form coat now the form of immediate exchangeability with another commodity, the form of an exchangeable use-value, or Equivalent. The specification of the Equivalent contains not only the fact that a commodity is value at all, but the fact that it in its corporeal shape its use-value counts as value for another commodity and consequently is immediately at hand as exchange-value for the other commodity.
As value, linen is composed exclusively of labour, and forms a transparently crystallized precipitate of labour. In reality this crystal is very murky, however. In so far as labour is detectable in it and not every embodiment of commodity reveals the trace of labour , it is not some undifferentiated human labour, but rather: weaving, spinning, etc.
In order to retain linen as a merely corporeal expression of human labour one has to abstract from all that which makes it to be really a thing. Any objectivity of human labour which is itself abstract i. In that fashion, a web of flax turns into a chimera. But commodities are objects. They have to be what they are in an object-like way or else reveal it in their own object-like relationships.
In the production of linen, a particular quantum of human labour exists in having been expended. It reveals itself i. The use-value coat only becomes the form of appearance of linen-value because linen relates itself to the material of the coat as to an immediate materialization of abstract human labour, and thus to labour which is of the same kind as that which is objectified within the linen itself.
The object, coat, counts for it as a sensually palpable objectification of human labour of the same kind, and consequently as value in natural form. Since it is, as value, of the same essence as the coat, the natural form coat thereby becomes the form of appearance of its own value.
But the labour represented in the use-value, coat, is not simply human labour, but is rather a particular useful labour: tailoring. Simple human labour expenditure of human labour-power is capable of receiving each and every determination, it is true, but is undetermined just in and for itself. It can only realize and objectify itself as soon as human labour-power is expended in a determined form, as determined and specified labour; because it is only determined and specified labour which can be confronted by some natural entity — an external material in which labour objectifies itself.
Time cannot be related to the coat as value or incarnated human labour, without being related to tailoring-labour as the immediate manifestation-form of human labour. The aspect of the use value, coat, however, which is of interest to the linen is neither its woollen comfort, nor its buttoned-up essence nor any other useful quality which marks it out as a use-value. It could have attained the same purpose if it had expressed its value in assa foetida or cosmetics, or shoe polish.
The tailoring labour, too, has value for the linen, consequently, not insofar as it is purposeful productive labour, but only insofar as it exists as determinate labour, form of realization, manner of objectification of human labour in general.
If linen expressed its value in shoe polish rather than in the coat, then polish-making would count for it as the immediate form of realization of abstract human labour instead of tailoring. We stand here at the jumping-off point of all difficulties which hinder the understanding of value-form. It is relatively easy to distinguish the value of the commodity from its use-value, or the labour which forms the use-value from that same labour insofar as it is merely reckoned as the expenditure of human labour power in the commodity-value.
If one considers commodity or labour in the one form, then one fails to consider it in the other, and vice versa. These abstract opposites fall apart on their own, and hence are easy to keep separate. It is different with the value-form which exists only in the relationship of commodity to commodity. The use-value or commodity-body is here playing a new role. It is turning into the form of appearance of the commodity-value, thus of its own opposite.
Similarly, the concrete, useful labour contained in the use-value turns into its own opposite, to the mere form of realization of abstract human labour. Instead of falling apart, the opposing determinations of the commodity are reflected against one another. However incomprehensible this seems at first sight, it reveals itself upon further consideration to be necessary.
The commodity is right from the start a dual thing, use-value and value, product of useful labour and abstract coagulate of labour.
In order to manifest itself as what it is, it must therefore double its form. It possesses right from nature the form of a use-value. That is its natural form. It only earns a value form for itself for the first time in circulation with other commodities. But its value-form has then to be itself an objective form. The only objective forms of commodities are their use forms, their natural forms. Now since the natural form of a commodity e. A thing that it cannot do immediately for itself it can do immediately for another commodity, and therefore by a detour for itself.
It cannot express its value in its own body or in its own use-value, but it can relate itself to another use-value or commodity-body as an immediately existent value.
It can relate itself not to the concrete labour contained in itself, but doubtless to that contained in another species of commodity as a mere form of realization of abstract human labour. For that, it only needs to equate the other commodity to itself as an Equivalent. The use-value of a commodity only exists at all for another commodity insofar as it serves in this fashion for the form of appearance of its value. But if one considers the value relation of both commodities in their qualitative aspect, then one discovers in that simple expression of value the mystery of value form, and hence, in nuce [2] of money.
Our analysis has revealed that the relative value-expression of a commodity includes two different value forms. The linen expresses its value and its determinate amount of value in the coat.
It manifests its value in the value-relation to another commodity, and hence as exchange-value. On the other hand, the other commodity, the coat in which it expresses its value in a relative way, obtains precisely in that way the form of a use-value as an equivalent which is immediately exchangeable with it.
Both forms, the relative value-form of the one commodity, equivalent form of the other, are forms of exchange-value. Both are actually only vectors — determinations conditioned reciprocally by each other — of the same relative value-expression, but divided like poles between the two commodity-extremes which have been set equal.
Quantitative determinacy is not included in the equivalent-form of a commodity. The determinate relationship e. The linen is only able to represent its own value in coats, by relating itself to a determinate coat-quantum as a given quantum of crystallized human labour.
If the coat-value changes, then this relationship also changes. But in order that relative value of linen may change, it has to be present, and it can only be formed upon given coat-value.
Now, whether the linen represents its own value in 1, 2 or x coats depends under this presupposition completely upon the amount of value of a yard of linen and the number of yards whose value is supposed to be manifested in the form of coats. The amount of value of a commodity can only express it in the use-value of another commodity as relative value.
This distinction is obscured by a characteristic peculiarity of the relative value-expression in its simple or first form. The relative value-expression of the linen, in which the coat figures as Equivalent, thus contains from the reverse the relative value-expression of the coat, in which the linen figures as Equivalent. Although both determinations of the value form or both modes of manifestation of the commodity-value as exchange-value are only relative, they do not both appear relative to the same degree.
As far as the coat is concerned, it is admittedly an Equivalent insofar as linen is related to the coat as form of appearance of its own value, and hence as something immediately exchangeable with itself the linen.
Only within this relationship is the coat an Equivalent. But it conducts itself passively. It seizes no kind of initiative. It finds itself in relationship because things relate themselves to it.
The character which is constituted for it out of its relationship with the linen thus does not appear as the result of its own relating, but as present without any additional activity of its own.
The linen, after all, relates itself to the coat as the sensually existing materialization of human labour in abstracto and hence as present value-body. It is this only because and insofar as the linen relates itself to the coat in this specific manner. Its status as an Equivalent is so to speak only a reflection-determination [4] of linen.
But the situation seems just the reverse. On the one hand, the coat does not take the trouble to relate itself to anything. On the other hand, the linen relates itself to the coat, not in order to make it into something, but because it is something quite apart from anything the linen might do.
In the first or simple form of relative value 20 yards of linen — one coat , this false seeming is not yet established, because this form expresses in an immediate way also the opposite, that the coat is an Equivalent of the linen, and that each of the two commodities only possesses this determination because and insofar as the other makes it into its own relative value-expression.
In the simple form of relative value or the expression of the equivalence of two commodities, the development of the form of value is correspondent for both commodities, although in each case in the opposite direction. The relative value-expression is in addition identical with reference to each of both commodities, for the linen manifests its value in only one commodity the coat and vice versa, but this value expression is double for both commodities, different for each of the same.
Finally, each of both commodities is only an Equivalent for the single other species of commodity, and thus only a single Equivalent. The linen has just as many different relative value-expressions as there exist commodities different from it, and the number of its relative value-expressions constantly increases with the number of kinds of commodities which newly enter into existence.
This second form yields the most variegated mosaic of relative expressions for the value of the same commodity. Nevertheless, this second form contains within itself an essential development of form. For latent in it is, after all, not only the fact that linen happens to express its value at one time in coats, and at another in coffee, etc.
The continuing determination is revealed as soon as this second or developed form of the relative value-expression is manifested in its connection. We obtain then:. In the second form, however, a background which is essentially different from and determinant of the accidental appearance immediately shines through.
The value of the linen remains equally large, whether expressed in coat, or coffee, or iron, etc. The accidental relationship of two individual possessors of commodities falls away. Necessity expresses itself through accident. In the case of the law of value, this law only arises and asserts itself at the historical point where commodity production and exchange is universal and dominant. In this respect, whilst others in pre-capitalist societies had searched for an explanation to the source of value, none were able to arrive at a complete understanding of labour as the source of value, for none lived in an historical period where the commodity exchange, and thus the law of value, was dominant.
As Marx discusses, Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, arrived at an incomplete labour theory of value, but was limited, not by his lack of genius, but by the historical conditions of slave society in which he lived:. Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion.
This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities. Finally, Marx arrives at the money form of value, in which a single commodity — originally exchanged as a commodity in its own right — becomes a universal equivalent, i. Historically, precious metals such as gold — itself extremely valuable because of the difficulty in producing and obtaining it — have played this role.
This is due to concrete material reasons: metals such as gold were convenient universal forms of exchange as small, easily carried quantities of the metal were able to express a large amount of value. Rather than carrying around baskets of food, rolls of cloth, or herds of cattle, therefore, one could simply carry small bags of gold or silver. It is through these act of exchange, therefore, that private, individual labour acquires a social character.
It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things In other words, the labour of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange established between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers In this respect, Marx ridicules the simplistic notion of the connection between labour and value presented by his predecessors, who saw value not as a relation between things, but as something absolute, determined from the actions of an ideal rational agent, as frequently represented by the example of Robinson Crusoe.
The Crusoe thought experiment proposed that an isolated individual, such as Robinson Crusoe on his island, could determine the value of products by simply noting the various amounts of time he expended in producing these things. As Marx highlights, however, the property of value — and the nature of products as commodities — is expresses a relative quantity that can only acquire an objective character through a process of social interaction — that is, through a general and universal process of exchange within society.
Just as commodity production has arisen to become universal, so one day it will disappear, and with it the law of value also. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc Apart from this, the vulgar economists confine themselves to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is to them the best possible one.
To the degree that common ownership of the means of production increases, so the dominance of commodity production and exchange will decrease.
The products of labour will no longer confront society as commodities, but simply as useful objects; thus the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value will dissolve also. For the first time, the relationship between things will be replaced by genuine relationships between people and men and women will confront one-another as real human beings. The economy — previously a mysterious force, whose laws seemed to be imposed upon society — will no longer dominate over us; instead, we will be masters of our own destiny.
Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation.
The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action.
The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history, pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him.
It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Privacy: Your personal information will be kept private and held securely. By submitting information you are agreeing to the use of data in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
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