Everybody knows, by practical experience, what “matter" is, though few might care to offer a precise definition. Everybody knows, too, by experience, what “commodities" are without necessarily troubling to explain the term. Does a theoretical explanation matter, anyway? Does the long research of Marx upon the subject of the commodity help to solve any problem worth solving?
Take “matter" again. Our practical knowledge of matter, the physicist would say, is meagre, superficial, distorted, inaccurate. His truer concept of matter, his profounder knowledge of electrons, protons and neutrons has put a harness on nature and the bit in her mouth. We have machines, devices, productive forces that would have frightened our forbears into fits. And what the atom is to the physicist so the “commodity" is to the Socialist.
Let us take a few commodities. Take apples and amethysts, bread and barometers, cradles and coffins. What have they got in common which makes them all “commodities" ? They are all physical things and have a use, but so also with daisies and dewdrops. What distinguishes the things in the first group is not that they are useful, since this is common to both groups, but that they are the proceeds of human labour and are the subject of commercial transactions. At a stroke the commodity is transformed from a physical into a social phenomenon! For things produced for market bear a banner with this strange device: “ I am worth — ." They have value. The things in the second group do not go to market: they have usefulness, but not value. Things produced for exchange have usefulness and value. They represent values, not usefulness, to the intending seller; they represent usefulness only to the prospective buyer, or to the last of a chain of buyers, the one who buys to enjoy the use of them.
The commodity is thus a social phenomenon, because the evolution of exchange, from barter to “bulls" and “bears" on the Stock Exchange, progressively modifies the methods of production and the social institutions arising therefrom; because exchange and mart is bound up with important institutions—private ownership, class, government, law, even religion; because in the market material relations between tinker and tailor express themselves as social (exchange) relations between kettles and clothes; because, lastly and firstly, value, the soul of the commodity, is a social quality, socially determined.
Supply and demand theories explain why prices may rise above or fall below value. They explain fluctuations away from value, not the thing, value, round which the fluctuations occur. What determines value when supply and demand are equal?
Utility theories attempt to explain value in terms of usefulness, which we have seen is not the distinguishing feature of things produced for exchange. Some of the most useful things, air, water, sunlight, do not, in their natural state, enter into exchange and have no value. Moreover, the usefulness of a commodity differs with individuals and differs with the same person in varying circumstances, whilst the value may remain unchanged and the same for all. Clearly, our explanation of value must have the same general, social validity as value itself.
One variant of orthodox economic theory, which regards “scarcity as the basic factor in economics,” approaches the truth. For scarcity is one way of avoiding saying “human effort," which is necessary to the production of commodities. Those which are more “scarce” are those which cost more effort to produce, which have to be dug for, dived for, forced from nature by ingenuity, wrung from her by sweat and blood, slowly coaxed by patience. Labour is the substance of value.
It is no objection to the labour theory of value that men work with tools as well as with hand and thought. The instruments of production were likewise produced by labour, are past labour presently used in further production, and transfer this stored labour bit by bit, as they wear out, to the products. A complex machine is a number of tools combined and set in motion together and, accordingly, a multiple sewing machine will transfer to its products proportionately greater values in a given time than a simple needle.
It is no objection, either, that the work of the tinker is different from the work of the tailor. This objection confuses precisely the two things which the labour theory keeps distinct: usefulness and value. The work of the tinker differs from that of the tailor in its particular usefulness, just as do their respective products. But although kettles and clothes are unlike in physical properties, have different uses, a number of kettles will exchange for a suit of clothes. They are equal values. Copper-bottoming and tailoring are different kinds of work, but they are both labour. Highly-skilled labour is but a multiple of less skilled, takes proportionately longer to learn, and will produce proportionately more value in a given time, just as with the needle and the sewing machine.
Frank Evans
(To be continued)
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