Marx assumes at this stage that commodities exchange for their value determined by this abstract labour. Marx argued that what is being compared is abstract labour, measured by “socially necessary labour time”, or the amount of time it takes a worker of average skill and productivity to produce a commodity.Ī use-value, or useful article, therefore has value only because abstract human labour is objectified and materialised in it. The only aspect common to everything produced by humans is the labour expended on them.īut how can the very different kinds of concrete labour employed to produce commodities be compared? This can’t be their use value because they have radically different uses. What quality do commodities as different as clothes, machinery, tables and books have in common that enables their comparison on the market? It grasps the specific, defining and unique feature of capitalism: the mass production of commodities for exchange on the market.įrom this starting point, Marx elaborates the labour theory of value, which solves a question at the heart of capitalism. Volume I opens with an analysis of the commodity. The three volumes are an exposition of Marx’s method of “rising from the abstract to the concrete”. His empathy for workers who are exploited by the capitalist class leaps off the pages. Full of literary references, witticisms and a burning hatred of capitalism, it is not the dull treatise that description might imply. Marx explained in the preface to the first edition that its object was “to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society”.
So concludes Marx after a lengthy account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism near the end of Capital, Volume I.
Capitalism comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.
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