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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) or a social division of labor.
Use-values cannot confront each other as commodities unless the useful labour contained in them is qualitatively different in each case. In a society whose products generally assume the form of commodities … this qualitative difference between the useful forms of labour which are carried on independently and privately by individual producers develops into a complex system, a social division of labour. (133)
Here Marx broaches a methodological theme that echoes throughout these chapters: the movement from simplicity to greater complexity, from the simple molecular aspects of an exchange economy toward a more systemic understanding. He then deviates from the rule of looking at relations in order to examine some of the universal properties of useful labor. He does so because “labour … as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society.” Useful labor is “an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself” (133).
This idea of “metabolism,” with labor as the mediator between human existence and nature, is central to Marx’s historical-materialist argument. He will come back to it at various points in Capital even as he leaves the idea rather undeveloped. This, too, is often typical of his approach. He says, in effect, “Look, there is something important here you should think about [in this case, the relation to nature]. I am not going to work with it in any detail, but I want to put it on the table as significant before going on to matters of more immediate concern.” “Use-values,” he writes, “are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour.” Hence, “when man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself” (133). This again is an important foundational point: whatever we do has to be consistent with natural law.
[We] can only change the form of the materials. Furthermore, even in this work of modification [we are] constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. (133–4)
With the help of this gendered metaphor (which dates back at least to Francis Bacon), Marx introduces a crucial distinction between wealth—the total use-values at one’s command—and value—the socially necessary labor time these use-values represent.
Marx then returns to the question of values in order to contrast their homogeneity (all products of human labor) with the vast heterogeneity of use-values and of concrete forms of laboring. He writes,
Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc., and in this sense both human labour. They are merely two different forms of the expenditure of human labour-power. Of course, human labour-power must itself have attained a certain level of development before it can