William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx

7
The Forms of Value

How Value Takes Shape as Exchange Value

Until this time we have analyzed the internal composition of value, using the exchange value merely as a means of leading our way back to the essential nature of value. We now retrace our steps and ask how immanent value acts as exchange value. The exact reason we had to begin with its only manifestation was in order to get back to its nature, just as we deduce the mental substratum of man from his behavior and speech. For we see commodities only with the eye or apprehend them with our other senses. As far as we are concerned in daily life, they are toys, cake, gasoline, freshman caps, not values. As values, they are like Falstaff’s honor, “ ’tis here, there”—no one can grasp them. But since we know value to be only a social reality, our detective instinct tells us to look for them in the social relation of commodity to commodity, for it cannot be from man to man, as we have seen, for these articles would then be use-values, not commodities. Now the value-form common to all commodities is their value expressed in money.

The task Marx sets himself is to trace the origin of this money form, by beginning with the simplest forms of exchange and developing their ramifications until we are conducted into the gilded chamber of money. It is said that love and currency theories are the two sources of madmen. This money riddle that has led so many to lunacy (and in private life to despair) is the question of the economic sphinx that Marx seeks to answer.

Simple Form of Value

The simplest relation of exchange value (which from now on, unless distinguished, will no longer be differentiated from value; this is an oversimplification, but useful), is the equation:

One shirt = one box of chocolates.

In this apparently redundant story is the mystery of the value-form. The shirt’s value is expressed by the chocolates. Here the shirt is passive, for it is valued by way of the chocolates, which play the active part; they do the valuing of the shirt. In this formulation the value of the shirt appears as relative to the chocolates. In Marxian terms the shirt takes on the relative form of value, for we know that value only by its relation to the chocolates. The chocolates, on the other hand, express the equivalent of the shirts, and Marx calls this aspect of the chocolates, the equivalent form.

Now this is not redundant. It would add nothing to our knowledge of value to say that the shirt equals a shirt. We have to compare differing utilities.

The equation can be reversed to say that one box of chocolates equals one shirt. But that would not affect the value form. For in that case the chocolates would have the relative form and the shirt the equivalent form. In any one equation, one commodity must be at one or the other of the poles of that equation, the pole of relative value or that of equivalent value. True, the position of either commodity in the equation is accidental. Either may be the commodity whose value is expressed in terms of the other.

This type of exchange can be called the simple form, or the isolated form, since it stands alone as one transaction, or as the elementary form, since it is primary, or the accidental form because it must have been the first type men stumbled upon. Later on, as exchange became common and goods were exchanged purposefully, each commodity did not have an equivalent found at random, but many equivalents. This more complex relationship of one commodity to many is termed the total form of value, or the expanded form of value. But before going on from the simple form to the expanded, let us examine the two poles¹ of the equation of simple exchange, the relative form and the equivalent form.

In this enquiry the quantity exchanged can be ignored; since every quantity implies units of which it is composed, it follows that any quantity may be assumed in discussing the mere act of exchange, for the same value-form would be valid for any given quantity. One shirt = one box of chocolates is the equation.

We are in a different world from that of value itself. When we say an object has value, we cannot separate that value from the shape it assumes, as a box, a piano, etc. But when we see the value-form in exchange, then only can we separate the value of the shirt from the shirt itself, by finding its value in its relationship to the box of chocolates. Now since the shirt is a wholly different product of concrete labor than are the chocolates, it is by way of the value of the shirt being expressed in the chocolates that we discover the abstract labor common to both. Instead of seeing value with the mind’s eye, we see it in reality.

Value Is Dead Labor-Power

But there is a still more fundamental aspect of exchange. Human labor-power, while it is on the job, is producing values. But human labor-power itself is not value, it is the creator of value. In what do we find value then? It becomes value only when labor-power has taken shape in some object, that is, after it has made something. In other words, living value is dead labor-power. It is so in the sense that the living canvas of Rembrandt is the memorial to the once-great genius that worked on it.

How the Equivalent Form Acts

It is clear that the poor shirt we are flaunting again must have:

(a) Its value (i.e., mass of abstract labor) taking on objective existence, and although that value is different from the shirt itself, it must no longer be concealed, it can only be revealed as something in common with the chocolates or any other commodities.

(b) Yet these chocolates which, in the equivalent form of value express the value of the shirt are, for that relationship, but the embodiment of the value of the shirt. For the value in that shirt remains hidden until it makes its bow in the box of chocolates.

This is intellectual tightrope-walking, but hang on, it cures economic vertigo. We are at:

(c) But the blessed chocolates after all have a use, they are sweet and with them you can make a girl happy. As chocolates, they no more tell us they are value, or contain value, than the shirt does by itself. In other words, when placed in relation to the shirt, the chocolates take on an economic character they do not otherwise have. As Marx says, they are like a tramp who looks seedy in his everyday clothes, but superb in a Marine Corps uniform.

We are still at it. Here is the corollary:

(d) Not only are the chocolates the mode by which we realize the value of the shirt, but because of that relation they show they are equivalent to it, and in that relation they exist only as value. But the chocolates cannot represent the shirt’s value unless the shirt’s value is taken over by the chocolates. Hence the shirt’s value takes on the strange form of the use-value of chocolates.

Or, in simple English, we know that a shirt and chocolates have something in common when we exchange the shirt for the chocolates, because we can eat the chocolates. It is their use-value that brings out the hidden inner relationship of value between the two. To recapitulate:

The absolute value of any commodity, is expressed in the use-value of another, with which it exchanges, and in this form it appears as relative value.

It is unfortunate that this exposition has to be given in a scholastic form that resembles the discussions of the immanence of God in man or the essence of the Trinity in Unity. But as the economic deductions come along, it will be seen to have been worth while. Certainly some means had to be found to relate use-values to values, in the form of exchange, since use-values are not economic; we see now that they are the carriers of economic value. And the dead products of labor-power can only take on life in exchange. In a socialist society that would not be true, for the objects made by labor would embody no value. But for capitalist society we must determine how the values of past labor are exchanged in the present.

Changes in the Magnitude of Value

The foregoing description ignored changes in the quantity or magnitude of value. These are, on the whole, obvious, but the conclusion is not. We shall take as examples linen and a woolen coat. If the labor required to produce linen doubled, the value of ten yards of linen, which had been the same as that of two coats, would be doubled; it would then take four coats to buy the ten yards. But if the time required to produce linen is cut in half, then one coat would buy ten yards. If the coat goes through the same variations of labor required to produce it, its value in terms of linen will alter similarly. But if both the value of linen and coat say, sink by one half, due to improved manufacture, then the relative value of the ten yards of linen to the two coats would be unaffected. Despite the fact that their absolute values would be halved, this would not affect the expression of the value of linen in terms of the coat. Some unchanged third article could alone give us a clue to what had happened. But if all commodities rose or fell in value simultaneously, their relative values would be undisturbed, and their changed values seen only through the alteration of physical output in the same labor-time.

From this it is clear that:

Real changes in the quantity of value are neither unequivocally nor exhaustively reflected in their relative value expression.

“If we lived on the inside of a nut,” queried Anatole France, “and the proportions of our minute stars were the same to our little space as those of the true cosmos, would we know the difference?” And then he asked with alarm, “How do we know we do not?”

This is not quite the problem here. For Marx, value is a quantity. It is expressed in relative form, as its manifestation. But the relative form is a carrier, a manifestation. It can never change the nature of the hidden value, the quantity of social labor-time. What Marx means is that the manifestation of value in the value-form is not a true picture of the actual magnitude of value itself. All other things being equal, it reveals the proportion of values of any two commodities in exchange. It can do no more.

NOTE: It may appear that Marx has oversimplified the question of relative value. If the supply of flax were to be brought down to next to nothing by a series of crop failures, would the labor required for the small quantity of linen to be produced from the debris of the crop really be expressed at the ratio indicated? Say that the linen used ten times the labor than formerly to produce the same yardage. Would the proportion of value in the linen really rise so high that instead of two coats being exchanged for ten yards, twenty coats would be so exchanged? Long before that point was reached, other textiles would be used to substitute for the linen. The labor used in its fabrication would be wasted labor, unremunerative, and so far from commanding ten times the value, it might command no value at all. The issue, although presented here, will logically take place in the study of market values, or the full Marxian theory of deviations from value.

It is frequently argued that all values are relative, that is, that since we know of value only through the comparison of commodities in the market, it follows that we can conceive of no change in value. One thing goes up, another must go down relatively to it. There can never be a general rise and fall of value. This idea, championed by John Stuart Mill, has disciples even today, like Prof. E. R. A. Seligman (cf. B. M. Anderson, Social Value, Houghton Mifflin, 1916, ch. 1). They are opposed by most economists who view value as a quantity, but not in the Marxist sense. Some view it as costs, others, like Tarde, as psychic magnitudes.

From the Marxist viewpoint, of course, this is mistaken. The relative expression of value is a mere manifestation of the underlying magnitude, of social labor-time. Hence it is the form in which the proportions of magnitudes of labor of any two given commodities (or even a larger number) is discovered. But discovery is different from the thing discovered. The key of Marxism is that the value of commodities is the quantity of abstract labor incorporated in them. It can rise and fall in the most astounding manner, and it is the movement of total values that is the record of productive achievement.

It is argued that if A falls because B with which it is exchanged rises, while, at the same time, the labor put into A remains untouched, the labor theory of value falls to the ground. (Not the Marxist theory of abstract-labor time-value but the classical theory of Ricardo.) It argues that there has been a change in one constituent without a change in labor, relative to the other. Marx’s answer is complete. It is the same as arguing, he says, that the figure 10 exists in the fractions ¹⁰⁄₂₀ , ¹⁰⁄₃₀ , and is constantly becoming less in proportion to the series of numbers it divides. Therefore the magnitude of 10 cannot be a constant, for it falls in relation to the other figure of the fractions!

Value Not Expressed by Another Value

Since Marx does not hold, with the other economists, that the exchange relation of a commodity determines or affects its magnitude of value, he takes the simpler step that a commodity’s value is expressed not in the value of another commodity (for that would be Ring-around-the-Rosy), but by that other commodity itself, physically. We see, to go back to our old stagers, that a shirt is worth a box of chocolates only because the shirt-seller will accept the chocolates as an equivalent of the shirt’s value. Not the value of the chocolates, but the chocolates themselves, express the value of the shirt. The chocolates, though, as the equivalent form of value for the shirt, cannot make manifest their own value-form. It is only the shirt which, because it has the relative form of value, reveals its own quantity of value in that exchange. The chocolates present the shirt with their own use-value in which the shirt can express its value.

The number of shirts exchangeable for chocolates will depend on the value of the chocolates. But as we have seen, the value of the chocolates, so long as they are the equivalent form, cannot be manifested. So it is not the value-form of the chocolates that measures the quantity of exchange value in the shirts, it is the social labor-time in the chocolates that acts as the measure for the number of shirts for which they can be exchanged. The value of the shirts (again!) is expressed not as so much value of the chocolates, but as so many chocolates. You cannot express value by value, but value by things. So that when any commodity acts as the equivalent of another, we never know how much value it has; we only know how much of it is required to express the quantity of value of the commodity of which it is the equivalent.

This may look oversubtle, but note one thing. The value-relation is not reversible. If the chocolates take the place of the shirts and occupy the relative pole, every one of the above deductions still holds. The equivalent commodity in any value equation always embodies in its physical nature the quantity of value of the relative commodity, and itself does not reveal its own value, or quantity of value.

Illusions Due to Exchange

Two implications follow. Since the chocolates reveal the shirt’s quantity of value merely by being chocolates, it appears as though the value-form embodiment is a natural attribute of the chocolates just as sweetness is. But we have seen that this is a mere relationship as against the shirt. But since the physical nature of chocolates does not depend upon their being related to shirts, and still it is only their physical nature that reveals the quantity of value of the shirt, the property of exchangeability seems to be as much of an attribute of the chocolates as is their sweetness. For this error, which confuses the permanent body of the chocolates with their temporary social relationship to the shirts, Marx uses the expression (later to prove the navel of his system) the fetichism of commodities. The exchangeability of the chocolates is transfigured from a relationship in an equation to its becoming an immanent quality of the chocolates themselves.

The concrete labor (candy-making) in the chocolates expresses only the shirt’s value, when acting as its equivalent. In this part, it does not act as chocolates, but as the appearance of the shirt’s value. It is equated to shirtmaking as abstract labor. The labor in the chocolates, then (their specific labor of candy-making), by being equated with the wholly different quality of shirtmaking, becomes the materialization of social abstract labor, the bodily form in which their common attributes are expressed.

Thus the second peculiarity of the equivalent form is that concrete labor becomes the manifestation of its opposite, abstract labor.

Which leads to the third peculiarity. As abstract labor is socially necessary labor-time, common to all employments as a homogeneous mass, and concrete labor is private labor, then it follows that:

In the equivalent form, private labor assumes the form of social labor.

General Theory of the Elementary Form of Value

Marx holds that the expression of value in the relationship of exchange, originates in the nature of value.

But for the majority of economists (nearly for all), the value of objects, and the amount of that value both, originate in the exchange relation itself, or, to be more exact, are originated by that exchange relationship. The old hoarders of the seventeenth century thought that value originated in money, the free-traders of the nineteenth century (who had to sell their factory goods), thought it originated in trade. For Marx it begins in the production process, in labor, and the exchange relation merely brings it out. The non-Marxian economists appear to have a case because the value in one object is expressed by the use-value of another. The other way round, Marx summarizes; it is the contrast between use-value and value that is made apparent by the relation of exchange.

Since use-value is an attribute of all objects, and exchange is the attribute of all commodities, the elementary form of value is the primitive form in which commodity society is foreshadowed. It is by the development of the value-forms that the ripening of commodity society becomes noticeable. It is clear that the elementary form of value (one shirt equal to one box of chocolates) is far away from the developed economy of a complex market and price-forms. The simple equation of value does not give the qualitative equality or the quantitative proportionality of the shirt to every other commodity existing. But since any commodity can be at either pole of the elementary form of value, it follows that we get the beginning of a long series.

The Total or Extended Form of Value ²

The extended form of value can be expressed as follows:

It is clear that all these commodities are at the equivalent pole of value compared to the gloves and that all together act as with respect to the gloves as the chocolates did to the shirt in the simple form. The abstract labor, that is value, is made more graphic when we realize what a variety of employments equal glovemaking as social labor. And the same applies to quantity of value. The gloves are now, by virtue of form of their value, related to the universe of commodities. It is seen, as it was not in the simple form, that irrespective of the use-value in which it is expressed, abstract labor can be expressed. The value of the gloves remains unaltered in quantity no matter what commodity expresses its value-form. For they all serve in the equation to express its value-form, and they themselves, as with the chocolates in the simple equation, cannot express their own value-form. In the elementary equation, the relationship might appear as accidental; here that cannot be thought. It is not the exchange of commodities, therefore, that regulates the quantity of value, as the economists think, but, as the extended form of value shows, it is the magnitude of the gloves’ value that controls its exchange proportion to everything else.

From the Extended to the General Form of Value

In the extended form there are serious working defects. On the relative and equivalent sides, items can be added to infinity, so that the equation need never be closed. On the equivalent side, the varieties of concrete labor are so great, and, as each one of them is a specific embodiment of the value of some commodity on the relative side, we do not get a unified picture of abstract labor, but only one of fragmentary equivalents. In order to make the extended form, not merely an illustration of complex exchange relations, as compared with the simple form, but also a general representation of exchange itself, it is necessary to complete it.

Since the extended form is really nothing but a series of simpler equations, as

each of these can be inverted, as

Hence we can invert the whole equation of the extended form as follows:

which Marx terms the general form of value.

At first nothing would seem to be gained. We have shifted all the commodities on the equivalent side to the relative side and the single commodity, ten pairs of gloves, to the equivalent side. What is the object?

This: the equivalent side is one commodity. It means that all the multitude of commodities realize their value in a single article. For one and all commodities, there is only one equivalent, which expresses all their values. This is not quibbling. We saw that the simple form of value equation is irreversible. Hence when we transfer all the commodities from the equivalent side to the relative side, they not merely change their places in the equation but they now become commodities whose value has to be expressed in the physical form or use-value of another commodity. The elementary form of value, that in which value is realized in a single commodity, is restored.

But the earlier forms, both the simple and extended, could only present the value of the commodity as something distinct from its use-value or its material form.

In the simple form, only two commodities are distinguished and we have no certainty (except that of logic) that their action is typical. In the extended form, value is expressed in a multitude of differing use-values, but there is no general expression of value common to all of them, and not merely to each one taken separately.

The general form of value, by expressing the whole world of commodities in terms of any single commodity, especially selected to stand apart for this purpose, now means that a million commodities can be measured against one, gloves.

The use-value of gloves, then, expresses their value in the other commodities, and separates their values from their use-values. For the first time, all commodities are realized as values, for the first time they can be effectively expressed as exchange values; they are so many gloves, no matter what their nature.

Unique Aspects of the General Form

In the less advanced forms each commodity had to find another in which its value was expressed and the equivalents played a passive part. They merely mirrored the value of the others. But the general form of the value means that it is the joint action of the world of commodities, and only that total action that results in the expression of their value in the general equivalent, gloves. More than that, every new commodity must follow suit, for it too must express itself in that general equivalent. No commodity can acquire an expression of its value except as part of a simultaneous expression of all commodities in one commodity.

Now it is evident that since the existence of commodities, as values, is purely social, this social existence can be manifested only in a social relation, which relation is given in the General Form of Value. Not only are all commodities now qualitatively equal, in that they all have expressed values, but now their respective quantities of values can at last be ascertained. By expressing these quantities in only one object, gloves, they are compared with each other. Thus we know that one overcoat equals fifty pounds of coffee, and that three footballs are equal to an ounce of gold because of the proportions in which each of them is exchangeable for gloves. Then it is clear that as much labor-time is required to produce three footballs as one ounce of gold, and that these two embody just as much labor-time as thirty bushels of wheat. The abstract substance of labor in them is manifested in the general expression of values, gloves.

Labor Implications of the General Form

The gloves are the temporary home of all values. The private labor of producing gloves now becomes the social equivalent of every other kind of labor. Glovemaking is converted from a private activity into a social character, equality with all kinds of labor, that is, into social labor-time without reference to concrete achievements. But not only is it manifested negatively (since abstract labor-power is negative with reference to concrete labor), but it manifests itself positively as the reduction of all kinds of labor to one character, that they are all expenditures of undifferentiated human laborpower.

The general labor form shows that since the gloves, on the equivalent side, represent all other commodities as being, like themselves, embodiments of the value resulting from social-labor-time, and that since all commodities are made so comparable because they are congealed masses of abstract, undifferentiated human labor, in the world of commodities, it is human labor that is its specific social character. The social character, then, of commodities, does not rest in inanimate objects but in the human labor of which they are embodiments. Not goods are exchanged, but human labor in substantial form.

NOTE: The opposition between the relative and equivalent poles of value-form becomes more sharply defined in the General Form of Value. In the elementary form either the shirt or the chocolates could take either pole, though the value-form would be unaltered. In the General Form, however, since all commodities except one are on the relative side, a reversal of the equation is impossible. It would change the nature of the value-form, of the special function of the general equivalent.

The general equivalent (which we have made gloves, for purposes of illustration) can of course be any commodity whatever. Actually one commodity has become the universal equivalent of all others. That commodity is gold. The name given to the universal equivalent function of gold is money. The manner in which the value equivalence of all other commodities is expressed by gold, is called price.

Gold—the Universal Equivalent

We have been led to this gilded chamber by the corridor of the elementary form of value, then through the antechamber of the General Form of Value. There, all other commodities are now on the relative side of the equation of the value-form and gold alone is on the throne, on the equivalent side. Since about the sixth century B.C., it has enjoyed that position and the revolutions of mankind have singularly failed to shake it. It is a testimonial to the need, in commodity production, of a universal expression of the immanent value in every commodity.

It is the last term in a series that began with the elementary form of value. We are now on the threshold of exchange and price.

Footnotes

1. By poles of an equation, Marx means opposites, like the poles at the two ends of the axis of a sphere or cathode and anode in Roentgen rays.

2. W. H. Emmett’s term; usually translated as “expanded.” Emmett’s use is more idiomatic.

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