This, I submit, continues to be the big issue for us. Is there, as Margaret Thatcher famously remarked, “no alternative,” which in a way is like saying that the social necessities that surround us are so implacably set that we have no choice but to conform to them? At its foundation, this goes back to a question of by whom and how “values” are established. We all like to think, of course, that we have our own “values,” and every election season in the United States there is an interminable discussion about candidates’ “values.” But Marx is arguing that there is a certain kind and measure of value which is being determined by a process that we do not understand and which is not necessarily our conscious choice, and that the manner in which these values are being imposed on us has to be unpacked. If you want to understand who you are and where you stand in this maelstrom of churning values, you have first to understand how commodity values get created and produced and with what consequences—social, environmental, political and the like. If you think you can solve a serious environmental question like global warming without actually confronting the question of by whom and how the foundational value structure of our society is being determined, then you are kidding yourself. So Marx insists that we must understand what commodity values and the social necessities that determine them are all about.
Commodity values are not fixed magnitudes. They are sensitive, for instance, to changes in productivity:
The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by one half the labour required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. In order to do this, the English hand-loom weaver in fact needed the same amount of labour-time as before; but the product of his individual hour of labour now only represented half an hour of social labour, and consequently fell to one half its former value. (129)
This alerts us to the fact that value is sensitive to revolutions in technology and in productivity. Much of Volume I is going to be taken up with the discussion of the origins and impacts of revolutions in productivity and the consequent revolutions in value relations. But it is not only revolutions in technology that are important, because value is “determined by a wide range of circumstances; it is determined amongst other things by the workers’ average degree of skill, the level of development of science and its technological application”—Marx is very taken with the significance of technology and science to capitalism—“the social organization of the process of production, the extent and effectiveness of the means of production, and the conditions found in the natural environment” (130). A vast array of forces can impinge on values. Transformations in the natural environment or migration to places with more favorable natural conditions (cheaper resources) revolutionize values. Commodity values, in short, are subject to a powerful array of forces. He does not here attempt a definitive categorization of all of them; he simply wants to alert us that what we are calling “value” is not a constant, but is subject to perpetual revolutionary transformations.
But then comes a peculiar twist in his argument. Right in the last paragraph of this section, he suddenly reintroduces the question of use-values. “A thing can be a use-value without being a value.” We breathe air, and so far we haven’t managed to bottle it and sell it as a commodity, although I am sure someone is already trying to figure out how to do that. Also, “a thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity.” I grow tomatoes in my backyard, and I eat them. Lots of people within capitalism actually do a lot of things for themselves (particularly with a bit of help from do-it-yourself stores). A lot of laboring (particularly in the domestic economy) goes on outside commodity production. The production of commodities requires not only the production of use-values “but use-values for others.” Not simply use-values for the lord of the manor, as the serf would do, but use-values that go to others through the market. But the implication of this is that “nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value” (131). Marx earlier seemed to dismiss and abstract from use-values in order to get to exchange-value, and it was this that got him to value. But now he says that if the commodity doesn’t meet a human want, need or desire, then it has no value! You have, in short, to be able to sell it to someone somewhere.
Let us reflect a moment on the structure of this argument. We begin with the singular concept of the commodity and establish its dual character: it has a use-value and an exchange-value. Exchange-values are a representation of something. What is it a representation of? A representation of value, says Marx. And value is socially necessary labor-time. But value doesn’t mean anything unless it connects back to use-value. Use-value is socially necessary to value. There is a pattern to this argument, and it looks like this:
Consider, then, the implications of this argument. You own a commodity called a house. Are you more interested in its use-value or its exchange-value? You will likely be interested in both. But there is a potential opposition here. If you want to fully realize the exchange-value, you have to surrender its use-value to someone else. If you have the use-value of it, then it is difficult to get access to the exchange-value, unless you do a reverse mortgage or take out a home-equity loan. Does adding to the use-value of the house for oneself add to the potential exchange-value? (A new modern kitchen, probably yes; some special construction to facilitate a hobby, probably no.) And what happens 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,