Marxist Economics Question

[Saint Street Revolution]

I'm reading "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" by Marx, with an introduction by Maurice Dobb, an economist. The opening statement of the book (after the introduction) is


Originally posted by Karl Marx
The wealth of bourgeois society has presented itself as an immense accumalation of commidites, it's unit being a single commodity.

I don't understand the bolded statement. Any help?

[blackstone]

Hopefully, this diagram will make it simpler to understand.

each | equals a commidity

| | | | | | | | | | equals wealth



so therefore, wealth is the accumulation of commodities.



Did i answer your question?

[Saint Street Revolution]

Originally posted by [email protected] 21, 2007 05:07 pm
Hopefully, this diagram will make it simpler to understand.

each | equals a commidity

| | | | | | | | | | equals wealth



so therefore, wealth is the accumulation of commodities.



Did i answer your question?
That you did. Thanks alot.

[mikelepore]

The unit is the commodity because Marx was working on an analysis that would make clear the source of such results as wages and profits. One of the basic problems is like this: If the capitalist hires $100 of labor power to act upon $100 of tools and materials, and this results in a product that sells for $1000, is it better to say that the capitalist made $800 profit by overcharging the buyer $1000 for a $200 item, or is it better to say that the capitalist made $800 profit by paying the worker only $100 for $900 worth of work? Both choices for a model would would seem at first to be plausible. Marx shows that the whole economic process becomes more clear when we interpret the employer's profit as a deduction from the worker's wage, not an increment added to the price paid by the buyer of the product. It happens because the labor power that the worker sells on the labor market is the only commodity that is variable capital, meaning that the amount of exchange value that it causes to be added to other things is not the same as its own exchange value. Anyway, realizing what Marx was basically trying to accomplish before you read it should make it easier for the reader to make sense out of it.

[Janus]

Commodities are merely the units of measure of wealth (through its exchange value) in a capitalist society.

[gilhyle]

I dont really follow these 'explanations'. The full quote is "The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Every commodity, however, has a twofold aspect – use-value and exchange-value. "

The meaning of the opening sentence is, thus, that the 'commodity' is not the indivisible atomic concept from which capitalism is to be understood. Rather, the concept of the commodity is further divisible into use value and exchange value.

[mikelepore]

I don't think that's right to say that a commodity is "divisible" into two things. Use value and exchange value are both necessary at the same time, but have to do with different statements that can be made about the commodity. The use value is a non-quantifiable statement about why the buyer wanted to use it for when deciding to buy it from the seller. The use value of copper wire is that it conducts electricity. The exchange value of the commodity is the ratio its exchange has compared to some other commodity. The exchange value of a spool of copper wire may be three chairs or twenty bags of potatoes.

Marx didn't mention those two aspects to qualify his previous statement that the commodity is a basic unit. He mentioned them to more completely define what characteristics a commodity has. The statement that the commodity is basic unit is not diminished by that.

What is a basic unit? Marx considered human "society" to be, not the sum of all "individuals" but the sum of all "relationships" that individuals have with one another (he wrote in the 'Grundrisse'). He also saw his own job as identifying the laws of mechanics that society operates according to. So commodity for Marx is something like mass or force or acceleration for Newton. It's a concept that is one of the building blocks for further discussion. That's why in 'Capital' he explains what a commodity is in the opening sentences of chapter one.

So he says he's going to talk about the *accumulation* of commodities, and its unit is the single commodity. The relationships that operate among people will explain how the accumulation was achieved. The use value of the commodity called "labor power", the reason the capitalist decided to buy it from the worker, is the fact that, when labor power (the ability to perform labor) is transformed into actual labor, it adds more exchange value to the product than the exchange value of that labor power. This is the source of the "accumulation."

[workingcommunist]

This is a great topic. Since there is a Marxist Communist Party in my country i'll join pretty soon.

[gilhyle]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27, 2007 06:26 am
I don't think that's right to say that a commodity is "divisible" into two things. Use value and exchange value are both necessary at the same time, but have to do with different statements that can be made about the commodity. .....Marx didn't mention those two aspects to qualify his previous statement that the commodity is a basic unit. He mentioned them to more completely define what characteristics a commodity has. The statement that the commodity is basic unit is not diminished by that.

What is a basic unit? .... he says he's going to talk about the *accumulation* of commodities, and its unit is the single commodity. The relationships that operate among people will explain how the accumulation was achieved. The use value of the commodity called "labor power", the reason the capitalist decided to buy it from the worker, is the fact that, when labor power (the ability to perform labor) is transformed into actual labor, it adds more exchange value to the product than the exchange value of that labor power. This is the source of the "accumulation."
While I agree with the fundamental emphasis on relations in your post, when it comes to the analysis of the role the concept of the commodity plays in the work of Marx, I think your description is not accurate.

I think my own post was about the concept of a commodity, and I dont think that was clear in my post.

But what Marx is saying in these opening lines is differentiating between appearance and reality, as he so often did. Behind the appearance of the commodity is a more complex set of relationships that have to be analysed under two rubrics. It is not correct, he is saying, just to take commodities as a fundametal homogenous unit.

Thus when you say


I don't think that's right to say that a commodity is "divisible" into two things.

You are, in one sense correct, but in another not. You are correct in that - within commodity production use value and exchange value exist together. You are incorrect in the sense that we must separate one from the other to understand each appropriately. In effect you recognise this when you say:


Use value and exchange value are both necessary at the same time, but have to do with different statements that can be made about the commodity

But the methodological significance of what it means to make such very different statements about the commodity does not come out in your text. THus you say:


Marx didn't mention those two aspects to qualify his previous statement that the commodity is a basic unit. He mentioned them to more completely define what characteristics a commodity has.

But it is precisely the sense in which the more complete definition of what a commodity is (which he gives by contrast with previous political economists) does constitute a qualification of the understanding of what a commodity is that he wants the reader to see. I mean to emphasise 'qualification' as constituting the achievement of what Marxists mean by a critique. That is how he undermines the reification of the commodity by his critique of the prior political economic concept of the commodity.

Which brings us to key methodologicl choice that Marx makes to begin what is to become an explanation of capital, by explaining an abstract model of simple commodity exchange in which there is no capital. He does that precisely so that when it comes to explaining capital, the commodity, as a concept beig used to describe capital, will have been critiqued.

[mikelepore]

You highlighted the words "it's unit being a single commodity", and then you said "I don't understand the bolded statement". Is there some more that needs to be discussed about that part?

[mikelepore]

I also think that many economists reify the concept of a commodity. They do that by seeing only the surface of an object. They think a basket of corn with a price tag is nothing but a basket of corn with a price tag. It's really an entire story from history, about a class of the population that lack ownership of the means of life, and, in order to survive, the people must sell their bodies at auction, which gives the property owning class the private use of them, and the people get used as appendages to machines, to generate more wealth for the propertied class. Perhaps every commodity is like a slice of a holographic image, in the sense that all of the human relationships can be found in it. That would be a metaphor that wasn't available to Marx, but probably more true than if one were to think of a commodity as a "unit" in any component or atomic sense.