A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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expenditure of human labour in general. (134–5)
As such, it is what Marx calls “abstract” labor (135–7). This kind of generality of labor contrasts with the myriad concrete labors producing actual use-values. In creating this concept of abstract labor, Marx holds that he is merely mirroring an abstraction produced by extensive commodity exchanges.
So Marx conceptualizes value in terms of units of simple abstract labor; this standard of measurement “varies in character in different countries and at different cultural epochs, but in a particular society it is given.” Here again we encounter a strategy frequently deployed in Capital. The standard of measurement is contingent on space and time, but for the purposes of analysis we assume it is known. Furthermore, in this instance, he then goes on to say, “complex labour,” i.e., skilled labor, “counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour”:
Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the outcome of the most complicated labor, but through its value it is posited as equal to the product of simple labor … In the interests of simplification, we shall henceforth view every form of labour-power directly as simple labour-power; by this we shall simply be saving ourselves the trouble of making the reduction. (135)
Notably, Marx never specifies what “experience” he has in mind, making this passage highly controversial. In the literature it is known as the “reduction problem,” because it is not clear how skilled labor can be and is reduced to simple labor independently of the value of the commodity produced. Rather like the proposition about value as socially necessary labor time, Marx’s formulation appears cryptic, if not cavalier; he doesn’t explain how the reduction is made. He simply presumes for purposes of analysis that this is so and then proceeds on that basis. This means that the qualitative differences we experience in concrete labor, useful labor and the heterogeneity of it, is here reduced to something purely quantitative and homogeneous.
Marx’s point, of course, is that abstract (homogeneous) and concrete (heterogeneous) aspects of labor are unified in the unitary act of laboring. It is not as if abstract labor occurs in one part of the factory and concrete labor occurs somewhere else. The duality resides within a singular labor process: making the shirt that embodies the value. This means there could be no embodiment of value without the concrete labor of making shirts and, furthermore, that we cannot know what value is unless shirts are being exchanged with shoes, apples, oranges and so on. There is, therefore, a relationship between concrete and abstract labor. It is through the multiplicities of concrete labors that the measuring rod of abstract labor emerges.
On the one hand all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values. (137)
Note that this argument mirrors that of the first section. The singular commodity internalizes use-values, exchange-values and values. A particular labor process embodies useful concrete labor and abstract labor or value (socially necessary labor-time) in a commodity that will be the bearer of exchange value in the market place. The answer to the problem of how skilled or “complex” labor can be reduced to simple labor partially lies, it turns out, in the next section, where Marx follows the commodity into the marketplace and takes up the relation between value and exchange-value. So let us move on to section 3.
Section 3: The Value Form, or Exchange-Value
This section incorporates, in my view, a lot of boring material that can all too easily mask the significance of the argument being made. Marx sometimes puts on, as I pointed out earlier, an accountant’s hat, and the result is a form of exposition that can be tedious in the extreme: when this equals that and that equals this and this costs three pence and this fifteen, then the result is that something else is equivalent to … and so it goes, with the help of all manner of numerical illustrations to follow. The woods-for-the-trees problem, which often arises in Marx’s writing, is at its worst here, so this is a good point to figure out how to approach it. I shall deal with this at two levels: I will skim over what is often a simple, technical argument, and then comment on its deeper significance.
Marx’s objective is to explain the origin of the money-form. “We have to perform a task,” he (again, so modestly!) claims, “never even attempted by bourgeois economics.”
That is, we have to show the origin of this money-form, we have to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value-relation of commodities from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-form. When this has been done, the mystery of money will immediately disappear. (139)
He accomplishes this task in a series of heavy-handed steps, beginning with a simple barter situation. I have a commodity, you have a commodity. The relative value of my commodity is going to be expressed in terms of the value (the labor input) of the commodity you hold. So your commodity is going to be a measure of the value of mine. Turn the relationship around, and my commodity can be viewed as the equivalent value of yours. In simple barter situations of this sort, everybody who has a commodity has something with a relative value and looks for its equivalent in another commodity. Since there are as many commodities as there are people and exchanges, there are as many equivalents as there are commodities and exchanges. All Marx really wants to show here is that the act of exchange always has a dual character—the poles of relative and equivalent forms—in which the equivalent commodity figures “as the embodiment of abstract human labour” (150). The opposition between use-value and value, hitherto internalized within the commodity, “gets represented on the surface by an external opposition” between one commodity that is a use-value and another that represents its value in exchange (153).
In a complex field of exchanges like the marketplace, my commodity will have multiple potential equivalents, and conversely, everybody out there has relative values in a potential relation with my singular equivalent. An increasing complexity of exchange relations produces an “expanded form” of value that morphs into a “general form” of value (§b, 154–7, and §c, 157–62). This ultimately crystallizes in a “universal equivalent”: one commodity that plays the exclusive role of a “money commodity” (§d, 162–3). The money commodity arises out of a trading system and does not precede it, so it is the proliferation and generalization of exchange relations that is the crucial, necessary condition for the crystallization of the money-form.
In Marx’s time, commodities like gold and silver had emerged to play this crucial role, but it could in principle be cowry shells, cans of tuna or—as has sometimes happened in disruptive conditions of war—cigarettes, chocolate or whatever. A market system requires a money commodity of some sort to function effectively, but a money commodity can only come into being through the rise of market exchange. Money was not imposed from outside, nor invented by somebody who thought it would be a good idea to have a money-form. Even symbolic forms, Marx argues, have to be understood in this context.
This gives rise to an interesting interpretive question, one that crops up a number of times in Capital: is Marx making a historical argument or a logical argument? The historical evidence supporting his explanation of how the money commodity arose would now, I think, be regarded as rather thin. Quasi-monetary systems and commodities, religious icons and symbolic tokens and the like, have long been in existence, and while expressive of some sort of social relation, these have had no necessary primitive relation to commodity exchanges even as they gradually became mixed up in such exchanges. If we were to consult the archaeological and historical records, many would now probably hold that the money-form didn’t arise the way that Marx proposes at all. I am inclined to accept that argument, but then on top of it say the following—and this comes back to Marx’s interest in understanding a capitalist mode of production. Under capitalism, the money-form has to be disciplined to and brought into line with the logical position that Marx describes, such that the money-form reflects the needs of a system of proliferating exchange relations. But by the same token (forgive the pun), it is