in your texts "Critical to Political Economy" and "The capital", Marx starts his analysis by merchandise, given that “the wealth of the society where the capitalist mode of production reigns appears as a 'monstrous accumulation of commodities' and the individual commodity as its elementary form”. The first property of this form is linked to its character as a thing: it is an external object, conducive to satisfying human needs and needs. Utility constitutes the use value, linking itself as such to the physical properties of the object. In this way, the use value has nothing to do immediately with the human labor that may have cost, nor with the social relation of production, remaining, therefore, outside the concerns of the economy politics. However, whatever the social form of wealth, it will always constitute its material content. In the particular case of capitalism, it forms the basis of exchange value, according to the elementary property of the commodity.
Commodities, says Marx, as use-values, are naturally diverse, possess diverse qualities, are, in short, incalculable. While values, on the contrary, are qualitatively the same and only quantitatively different and, in fact, they are all calculated reciprocally and replace each other, that is, they exchange, are reciprocally convertible in certain proportions and according to certain relations. The main moments inherent in such contradictory duplicity are manifested in the fact that, as a value, each commodity is symmetrically divisible – in its natural existence, it is no longer so; as a value, each commodity is absolutely equal to all other commodities of equal value – in reality, on the contrary, the goods were changed only because they are diverse and satisfy needs diverse; as a value, every commodity is universal – as a real commodity, on the contrary, it is a particularity; as a value, every commodity is continuously exchangeable – in real exchange, on the contrary, it is only so under certain conditions; as a value, the measure of the commodity's characteristic of exchange is determined by itself (that is, by the
quantum of labor contained therein) – in real exchange, on the contrary, it is exchangeable only in quantity related to its natural quality and corresponding to the needs of those who carry out the exchanges. In short, the merchandise is the real contradiction, sensitive and materially existing. It, says Marx, “does not live in its natural identity with itself, but given as not equal to itself, as something unlike itself”.Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
In the last instance, the exchange value it first appears as a quantitative relation; is the proportion in which goods are exchanged: x of bananas = y of paper, the last term being the exchange value of the banana expressed in paper. It takes place, therefore, as a purely accidental determination to vary in time and space, to establish itself in relation to the other commodity with which it was indifferently brought into contact. There is, therefore, no exchange value immanent to a commodity. The last dimension of the commodity, value, arises from the relationship of exchange values and therefore has nothing to do with its natural properties. Furthermore, the exchange ratio abstracts the use value. The agent of exchange, in effect, does not take into account the particular use of the object he sells, but sees it as an instrument for appropriating someone else's product.
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
