Deciphering the Commodity: The Social Code of Value

Abstract

Commodities are economic and symbolic objects, two aspects that merge in Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, where two ontological and phenomenological planes operate. Their subject is the twofold social objectivity of the commodity as the product of labor and the object of exchange deriving from the dual nature of capitalist social relations as the real subsumption of labor under the command of capital in production and as market reciprocity in circulation. The reconstruction of the logical structure of Marx’s analysis of the commodity allows for grasping the form of value and the fetishistic character of capitalist society. Value emerges as the objective abstract form of capitalist class relations acting as an automatic social code of equivalence between abstract labor in production and solvent social needs in market exchange. The disjunctive synthesis between labor exploitation and the formal equality of exchange constitutes value as a real abstraction in capitalism.

Key Words:

• Abstract Labor
• Fetishism
• Real Abstraction
• Structuralism
• Value

Notes

1 Other semiotic approaches, although present in the debate, remain confined to specialized literature. E.g., see Kim (2000) and Kockelman (2006) for Peirce’s triadic semiosis approach.

2 The initiators of the Neue Marx-Lektüre in Germany were Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmuth Reichelt, and Alfred Smith.

3 This is supported by two passages in the first chapter of volume 1 of Capital, where Marx (1975–2001, 35:62) lets commodities speak with their own language: “We see, then, all that our analysis of the value of commodities has already told us, is told us by the linen itself, so soon as it comes into communication with another commodity, the coat. Only it betrays its thoughts in that language with which alone it is familiar, the language of commodities.” And further on: “Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values” (35:93–4).

4 “Mr. Wagner also forgets that for me neither ‘value’ nor ‘exchange-value’ are subjects, but the commodity” (Marx 1975–2001, 24:534).

5 “They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form” (Marx 1975–2001, 35:57). Likewise: “I do not divide value into use-value and exchange-value as opposites into which the abstraction ‘value’ splits up, but the concrete social form of the product of labor, the ‘commodity,’ is on the one hand, use-value and on the other, ‘value,’ not exchange-value, since the mere form of expression is not its own content” (24:545).

6 In addition to Deleuze and Guattari, Hjelmslev’s schema is used by several other authors in contemporary social theory. For example, Jameson (2013) applies it in the context of a Marxist analysis of literary genres.

7 Barthes (1986, 40) explains this subdivision as follows: “The form is what can be described … by linguistics without resorting to any extralinguistic premise; the substance is the whole set of aspects of linguistic phenomena which cannot be described without resorting to extralinguistic premises.”

8 “From the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labor assumes a social form” (Marx 1975–2001, 35:82). Consequently, “Individuals producing in society … is, of course, the point of departure” (28:27).

9 In this vein, from a Lacanian perspective, Madra and Özselçuk (2010) locate the logic of capitalist exploitation by the combination of the logic of the exception of surplus appropriation and the norm of the value of labor power.

10 This tripartition is formulated by Marx (1975–2001, 28:173–4) in this passage from the Grundrisse: “The content falling outside … the specific economic form, can only consist of: (1) the natural particularity of the commodities exchanged; (2) the particular natural need of the exchangers. Or, combining both aspects, the different use-value of the commodities to be exchanged.”

11 “Price is only value translated in another language” (Marx 1975–2001, 29:194). Or again: “Price is merely a determinate expression of exchange-value, a generally understandable expression [given] to exchange-value in the language of circulation itself” (29:487). Even more straightforward is this reference in the Grundrisse: “To compare money with language is no less incorrect … Ideas do not exist apart from language. Ideas which must first be translated from their mother tongue into a foreign language in order to circulate and to become exchangeable would provide a better analogy” (28:99).

12 “A single commodity (e.g., a quarter of wheat) is exchanged with other articles in the most varied proportions. Nevertheless its exchange-value remains unchanged regardless of whether it is expressed in x bootblacking, y soap, z gold, etc. It must therefore be distinguishable from these, its various manners of expression” (Marx 1976, 8).

13 In his “Notes on Wagner,” Marx (1975–2001, vol. 24) was explicit on this point: “The ‘value’ of the commodity merely expresses in a historically developed form something which also exists in all other historical forms of society, albeit in a different form, namely the social character of labor, insofar as it exists as expenditure of ‘social’ labor-power.” In this sense, we can agree with Henderson (2013) that the associated form of production better fulfills the functions of value than capitalism by providing a more rational and equitable division of social labor. It seems improper, however, to refer to the general social character of labor with the term “value,” which denotes the historically determined social form of labor in capitalism. In associated production the division of social labor and the distribution of its products are realized in social forms other than value.

14 Roberts (2005) refers to the presence of an “aliquot part” reasoning in Marx’s value theory.