Fundamentals of Marx: The Commodity (REUPLOAD)

[Music] being able to understand marx's critique of classical political economy and capitalism requires a firm grasp of the concept of the commodity as marx outlined it marx intentionally starts out das capital generally known as his most developed work with an analysis of the commodity which rests at the heart of the capitalist mode of production marx dissects the commodity to reveal its complex nature and its connection to the social relations embedded in capitalism as an economic system what is a commodity it is difficult to define what a commodity is according to marx because as we will see there are many critical parts worth noting marx does not provide a comprehensive condensed definition of the commodity part of the reason why he does not do this is because the commodity existed outside of the historical period of capitalist development and as such took on different albeit less important roles in social and economic relations of course marx is primarily concerned with the commodity as it came to be in the capitalist system let's try and deal with some of the mysteries surrounding this concept of the commodity by considering a simple and general maxim regarding the commodity the commodity must fulfill a human want or need the product of any labor that does not meet this basic criterion cannot be traded and thus bears no value we will explore this concept in greater detail a little later on basically a commodity must be valid within society in some way it must have value well what is value can we see value can we measure it what defines value marx points out that there is a common denominator to all commodities they are the products of human labor they all contain a certain amount of congealed labor which he ultimately labels as a determinant of value itself in other words commodities all hold some quantity of labor and that labor gives the commodities value marx isolates the exchange of commodities as the point at which we can see how labor in a very abstract manner takes on its role as a source of value so all commodities values are as marx puts it congealed homogeneous human labor marx talks frequently about this notion of concrete and abstract labor to put it simply concrete labor is the labor that actually happens on the factory floor it's the hammering of the nail the welding of the metal the stitching of the shirt etc but abstract labor is a little more tricky here marx is talking about the fact that when we exchange commodities in acknowledging equivalence between qualitative differences that is the difference between the bottle of wine and the three metal hammers we are actually also acknowledging the equivalence of the quantitative magnitude of flavor embodied in the commodities themselves when a bottle of wine is traded for three hammers on the market the labor used to produce those commodities is treated as a universal flavor though a single hammer might have taken less socially necessary labor time to make and don't worry we will return to this term we know that after enough hammers we can eventually get our bottle of wine and in the market we can supposedly do this with any commodity exactly because they are all made up of that wispy abstract and homogeneous labor you're probably thinking hold on we don't trade commodities for commodities anymore and you're right of course but what marx is doing here is building his argument which requires many steps and thousands of pages before it reaches its peak for the time being rest assured that mark spends a great deal talking about the role of money as a universal commodity that works as an equivalent for all other commodities back to the discussion of value as congealed labor it would be wise to consider the term homogeneous carefully in relation to labor embodied in commodities marx is not in any way implying that all labor is the same labor qualitatively or quantitatively marx talks specifically about the different variables involved in defining labor such as skill intensity time etc undoubtedly three hours of skilled labor at high intensity is bound to produce more value than three hours of unskilled labor at low intensity but much like in the example of the bottle of wine in the hammers given enough products of the unskilled labor of low intensity you can eventually accrue as much value as is in the product of the skilled labor of high intensity this is what makes the labor homogenous human labor is equitable at the point of exchange before we discuss value even further let's consider a final problem with marxist assertion of flavor as a source of value consider the situation in which it takes a potter 10 hours to produce a single bowl by hand it takes another pot or eight hours to produce a single bowl by hand does this mean that the first potter's product has more value than the second one mark says no this would not be the case what determines value is not the individual labor input into a commodity but the socially necessary labor time needed to produce that commodity in other words if given the average amount of skill in the standard production facilities of a particular society it takes nine hours to produce a clay bowl then the value of all bowls will sit roughly at the nine hours of labor mark what this means is that the first potter produces poles slightly slower than the social average whereas the second potter produces bowls slightly faster than the social average this does not affect the value of the bowls they produce but it does affect the amount of bowls the potters can produce in a week considering a 12 hour work day powder 1 can produce 6 clay bowls a week in the same time frame powder 2 can produce 6.7 clay bowls after a month the more efficient powder will have produced over two bowls more than the first potter meaning he will have more balls to sell see how even after a month of work a two-hour difference can put one potter ahead of the other these differences become especially pronounced with the advent of industrial technology which allows some companies to outproduce others by large margins we will see in future videos how a capitalist that stays ahead of the socially necessary labor can make large profits compared to their competitors finally let's touch on the concepts of use value and exchange value to put it briefly use value is the physical attribute of the commodity itself that is the commodities ability to fulfill a human desire want or need exchange value is not physical at all it is valued as expressed by exchange itself and is measured by that abstract labor we talked about earlier a good way to differentiate the two is to remember that use values different quality while exchange values different quantity think about it the quality of a chair its appearance its use the material it's made out of is entirely different from the quality of a lamp or the quality of a cup however when considering their exchange on the market the only difference between these commodities is how much labor is embodied in them hence use values different in their quality while exchange values differ in their quantity notice the interesting relationship between value use value and exchange value they all make up the commodity itself they are at the same time exclusive of each other and intrinsically related they cannot exist without one another but they are totally different this observation is a perfect example of another pillar of marxist thought dialectics dialectics will be on the scope of this video but consider the relationship between the different concepts of value marx introduces value cannot exist without exchange as we've seen at the same time if something is valueless they cannot be exchanged and naturally neither value as a whole nor exchange value can exist without use value a commodity must have practical attributes in order to be exchangeable and in order to hold value of any kind ultimately what we see is that value is not a static or universal concept it is in constant motion defined by labor and exchange this sense of things being in a constant state of motion hence again it marks his dialectics which sees the world as one that is constantly in flux this concludes the first video on the commodity according to marx there's surely more discussion to be had in fact most of marx's analysis of the capitalist motor production can be traced back to the commodity in particular marx focuses on the conditions of production the social relations and the economic forces that revolve around the commodity we have yet to discuss the peculiar role of commodities in the capitalist era of history marx eventually takes this methodical dissection of the commodity and provides us with some interesting food for thought about the implications of commodity production and capitalist society we will consider these issues in future videos until then thanks for watching and remember the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways but the point is to change it

Channel: The Marxist Project

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Keywords: marxism, the commodity, commodities, commodity fetishism, dialectics, materialism, communism, marxist theory, marxist economics, das kapital, volume 1 capital, marx, socialism, marxism commodity, marx commodity

Id: 0UAbbfzO2zc

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020