A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey

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СКАЧАТЬ to our social world when the house that was once conceptualized mainly in use-value terms as a home becomes reconceptualized as a way to build long-term savings (a capital asset) for a working-class family or even as a vehicle to be “flipped” by anyone who has access to credit for short-term speculative gain? This use-value/exchange-value dichotomy is, well, useful!

      Consider the argument in greater detail. The commodity, a singular concept, has two aspects. But you can’t cut the commodity in half and say, that’s the exchange-value, and that’s the use-value. No, the commodity is a unity. But within that unity, there is a dual aspect, and that dual aspect allows us to define something called value—another unitary concept—as socially necessary labor-time, and this is what the use-value of a commodity is a bearer of. But in order to be of value, the commodity has to be useful. On this link back between value and use-value, we will see all kinds of issues arising around supply and demand. If the supply is too great, the exchange-value will go down; if the supply is too little, the exchange-value will go up—so there is an element here of supply and demand involved in the “accidental and relative” aspects of exchange-value. But behind these fluctuations, the value can remain constant (provided all the other forces that determine value, such as productivity, do too). Marx is not terribly interested in the supply and demand relation. He wants to know how to interpret commodity-exchange ratios between, say, shirts and shoes, when supply and demand are in equilibrium. We then need a different kind of analysis which points to value as congealed elements of this social substance called socially necessary labor-time. We have, without noticing it, tacitly abstracted from supply and demand conditions in the market in order to talk about commodity-values (with supply and demand in equilibrium) as socially necessary labor-time.

      How has Marx’s dialectical method been working here? Would you say that exchange-values cause value? Would you say exchange-values cause use-value, or use-values cause … ? This analysis is not causal. It is about relations, dialectical relations. Can you talk about exchange-value without talking about use-value? No, you can’t. Can you talk about value without talking about use-value? No. In other words, you can’t talk about any of these concepts without talking about the others. The concepts are codependent on one another, relations within a totality of some sort.

      I recognize that to use the word “totality” is to wave a huge red flag in certain intellectual circles. Marx had no idea what structuralism might be about and would have had even less idea about poststructuralism. We should be wary of cramming his thought into these categories (my own view is that he does not fit into them at all). But Marx certainly had the ambition to understand the capitalist mode of production as a totality, so the only question of interest is, exactly what concept of totality does he have in mind? What we know from this first section is that this totality can best be approached through the triumvirate of concepts of use-value, exchange-value and value built around the commodity. But he has acknowledged that use-values are incredibly diverse, that exchange-values are accidental and relative and that value has (or appears to have) a “phantom-like objectivity,” which is in any case subjected to perpetual revolutions through technological changes and upheavals in social and natural relations. This totality is not static and closed but fluid and open and therefore in perpetual transformation. This is definitely not a Hegelian totality, but what else we can say about it will have to wait until we have gotten further along in the text.

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      The story so far is roughly this: Marx declares that his aim is to uncover the rules of operation of a capitalist mode of production. He starts with the concept of the commodity and immediately establishes its dual character: use-value and exchange-value. Since use-values have been around forever, they tell us little about the specificity of capitalism. So Marx puts them aside in order to study exchange-values. The exchange ratios between commodities at first appear accidental, but the very act of exchange presupposes that all commodities have something in common that makes them comparable and commensurable. This commonality, Marx cryptically asserts, is that they are all products of human labor. As such, they incorporate “value,” initially defined as the socially necessary (average) labor time necessary to produce them under given conditions of labor productivity. But in order for the labor to be socially necessary, somebody somewhere must want, need or desire the commodity, which means that use-values have to be reintegrated into the argument.

      In the analysis that follows, these three concepts of use-value, exchange-value and value are kept in a perpetual and sometimes tense relationship with one another. Marx rarely takes any one of these concepts in isolation, it is the relations between them that matter. He does, however, frequently examine the relationship between just two of them while holding the third tacitly to one side. In expanding on the dual character of labor embodied in a commodity in section 2, Marx focuses on the relationship between the use-value of laboring and the value that this useful labor embodies (holding exchange-value constant). In the following section, he brackets out use-value and examines the relationship between exchange-value and value in order to explain the origin and role of money. It’s important to notice these changes of focus as the argument unfolds, because the statements in any one section are always contingent on which of the concepts is being set aside.

      There is yet another mode of argumentation here that requires elucidation if we are to proceed. Having begun with use-value and exchange-value—a dichotomy—he then arrives at a unitary concept of value that has something to do with human labor understood as “socially necessary labour-time” (129). But what kind of human labor is socially necessary? The search for an answer reveals another duality, that between concrete (actual) and abstract (socially relevant) labor. These two forms of labor converge again in the unitary act of commodity exchange. Yet examination of this moment of exchange reveals another duality between relative and equivalent forms of value. These two modes of expression of value are reunited in the emergence of one commodity—the money commodity—which functions as a universal equivalent in relation to all other commodities. What we see here is a pattern in the mode of argumentation, a gradual unfolding of the argument that works through oppositions that are brought back into unities (like the money-form) that internalize a contradiction which in turn generates yet another duality (the relationship between processes and things, material relations between people and social relations between things). This is Marx’s dialectical method of presentation at work, and it continues throughout the whole of Capital, as we will see.

      Here is the pattern of argument unfolding in simple diagrammatic form:

      Mapping the argument in this way makes it much easier to see the woods for the trees. It is easier to situate the content of any one section within the overall line of argument. This is not Hegelian logic in the strict sense, because there is no final moment of synthesis, only a temporary moment of unity within which yet another contradiction—a duality—is internalized and then requires a further expansion of the argument if it is to be understood. This is how Marx’s process of representation unfolds in Capital—and indeed, it is an unfolding and not a logical derivation. It produces a skeletal structure of argumentation around which all manner of conceptual matter can be arranged so that, as we proceed, there emerges a broader and broader understanding of the internal relations that keep capitalism in a perpetual state of contradictory unity and, therefore, in perpetual motion.

      Section 2: The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities

      Marx begins this section with the modest claim that he “was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy,” he says, “it requires further elucidation” (132). He begins, as he did in section 1, with use-values. These are physical products, produced by useful, “concrete” labor. The immense heterogeneity of forms of concrete labor processes—tailoring, shoemaking, spinning, weaving, farming and so on—is important, because without it there would be no basis for any acts of exchange (nobody, obviously, would want to exchange similar products) СКАЧАТЬ