Marx
Marx himself is often thought of as advocating precisely such a substantialist or ‘embodied’ position, in his labour theory of value, as that found in the political economy that preceded him. In this account, a commodity’s value always stems from the ‘labour time necessary in production’, and ‘labour performed under the command of capital’ likewise always ‘produces value, regardless of what later happens to the product’, the commodity’s value differing from its underpinning value substance only due to the artificial fluctuations of supply and demand.39 From this perspective, Marx holds to a similar set of ‘conservation principles’, insofar as labour-time extracted in production reappears in the commodity, where it subsists independent of other activities such as trade and circulation, which can only transfer commodities and their values.40 The presentation of such a reading of value in Marx’s work was partly as a result of political expediencies, sitting within a political and theoretical tradition that has staked its analyses and objectives on the power bestowed upon workers to create the value contained in the world of commodities and lay claim to the wealth produced. Regardless, the substantialist approach to value that we find in Marx represents ‘the culmination of the substance-theory tradition’ – and, we might add, its most sophisticated and forceful rendition.41
In his masterwork, Capital, Marx ‘start[s] from the simplest form of the product of labour’ in the society under study, which is that of capitalism.42 In capitalist society, this product is the commodity. Whilst some, as we will go on to see, have read this as an indication of the primacy of monetary exchange to Marx’s understanding of value, a substantialist reading of Marx’s value theory would instead suggest that Marx selects the commodity for the same reason as it was the starting point of Smith’s analysis: because it is a product of labour, which is the true underpinning principle of value.43 Marx suggests that the commodity is ‘the simplest social form in which the labour product is represented in contemporary society’.44 The commodity matters because labour matters. On this account, instead of looking at prices and seeking an explanation of why they are as they are, the aim for Marx was instead to understand the forms that labour takes and what the consequences of these forms might be.45 Marx stated the importance of a perspective rooted in labour in his engagement with Smith, suggesting that ‘As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce.’46
Commodities, for Marx, possess a use value and an exchange value. On the market, commodities are equalized where their exchange values are concerned, and differentiated with regard to their use values. The former is what allows the commodity to be exchanged with others; the latter is what makes the commodity attractive as an object of utility or desire.47 Commodities must be sufficiently different from one another in order to have specific, particular characteristics that render a good or service a worthwhile purchase amongst all the other similar goods and services for sale on the market. For traditional readings of Marx’s value theory, this specificity consists in the ability of the labour engaged in production to offer a particular skill or capacity that endows the product of that labour with an individual use value carrying with it a practical, aesthetic or sensual application that makes the product of labour desirable as a commodity in itself. The commodity’s use value – its usefulness to the purchaser – therefore pertains to its endowment with a specific characteristic or feature rendering it superior or unique in some way with reference to other products. Exchange value, meanwhile – its power to command money in the market – is the criterion of the exchangeability of one commodity with one another, and dictates the proportion in which this can be done. In order to be considered exchangeable, two or more commodities must possess some common characteristic which brings them into relation with one another. The most immediate way in which two equivalent commodities might be said to be exchangeable is that they are products of human labour. From this flows the notion, common to the substantialist Marx and classical political economy, that value must have something to do with the labour expended in a product’s creation.48
Commodities are traded not directly with one another, but by means of money. This is most auspiciously because capitalist societies are not societies of independent commodity producers who take the good or service they produce to market. The capitalist system of organizing economic relations is based upon the separation of workers from the means of production through which they would be able to provide themselves with their own commodities. The ownership of the means of production by a class of capitalists concentrates into the hands of this latter class control over the fruits of the process of production. It is therefore the capitalist who oversees and organizes the aggregate efforts of their workforce, who, structured in accordance with a division of labour, are unable to achieve the production of any good or service individually.
It is partly in explaining how this state of affairs came to be that Marx’s developed value theory represents a distinctive step both within and beyond substantialism.49 Specifically, Marx’s theory of labour power follows through on the unfulfilled potential of cost-of-production approaches to value by uncovering the historically determinate character of labour power and its value as a stake in the conflict between workers and capitalists. For Marx, at the inception of value is a prior act of valuation conditioned normatively and politically, even if value thereafter is taken to flow as if by osmosis from its substantial foundation. Certain historical preconditions must be in place to render labour as an act not for itself but for exchange, and these must be institutionally reproduced. It is only by virtue of these conditions being in place that labour can be posited a value to begin with, and, from this, a value notionally posited to that in which labour is embodied thereafter.50
In embedding the study of value within an account of its prehistory, Marx’s labour theory of value surpassed the naturalization of labour and exchange in the work of Smith and Ricardo. This is not to say that Marx’s work was free of transhistorical concepts. Marx saw work – in the sense of the human metabolism with nature through which the world around us is transformed into useful things for us to use, wear, eat and so on – as a necessity specific to humans alone, in that we exist, unlike the animal kingdom, at one remove from nature.51 Unlike the bee which acts upon nature as a matter of instinct, building its hive, humans conceive of designs upon the world before executing them.52 Nature does not give over easily to human purposes but – with sometimes disastrous consequences – must be made to bend to our will. This is not a ‘natural’ state of affairs but expresses the development of humankind as a specific sort of social animal that defines itself through its domination and objectification of nature as a means to establish its own subjective presence in the world.53 Thus, the need to produce the world around us is a constant part of human life. Humans require means of production – tools, machines – to use to do this, and the application of human effort, in the form of work, to accomplish the transformation of nature.
What differentiated Marx’s account of the transhistorical character of the human intercourse with nature from Smith and Ricardo’s naturalization of human economic life was its critical confrontation with the contemporary mediation of this essence in the historically specific form of wage labour. The selling of one’s capacity to labour for a wage, Marx suggested, was the result of a social and political process characterized by violence, struggle and the unintended consequences of movements for reform and liberty. Feudalism – in most cases, the mode of production that preceded capitalism – was characterized by a direct relationship of power and dependence between feudal landlords and their tenant serfs. The serf relied on the landlord for the land that they in turn farmed to subsist, with a payment to the landlord as rent. Whilst their freedom was limited, their subsistence was guaranteed, directly or in collaboration and exchange with others. With the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth century in countries like England, France and the Netherlands, these relationships were restructured.54 From a relationship of mutual interdependence and personalized power with the feudal landlord, tenant serfs were cast free, with nothing to call their own but their capacity to work for pay. Deprived of