Marx continues to explore the fetishisation, the magical lustre of, commodities…
“As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other.”
In the capitalist mode of production, the division of labour into various private enterprises itself provides the social condition for the produce/commodities to be taken from workers and sold generally.
“The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange.”
In this way the labour in commodities becomes obscured, even from the producer-turned-consumer. But does that moment of exchange make what’s going on any clearer…?
“In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.”
And so the real social process of how value is created by labour and exchanged is obscured as the value of labour becomes embodied and traded in seemingly remote objects/commodities, whereas the value is created socially by people, but the division of labour into separate individuals and/or groups obscures the fact:
‘Material relations between people and social relations between things’… It comes down to a simple cash exchange among people on the one hand, and the way value is actually created in the first place being obscured by the magical value existence, now independent from its producers, of the commodity.
This is no accident but is a necessity for the continuance of the capitalist mode of production…
“It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production.”
A commodity is not only a useful thing, a use value, but also an exchange value. Under capitalist production things are made solely as exchange values, they are primarily produced not to meet a need but to generate more capital. This means that in production they will be looked at not as useful things but as objects that it will be necessary, say, to produce more inexpensively and shoddily so as to increase the profit yield: Great wealth to a few never came at a cost to a great many more.
This capitalist mindset can be seen incarnate in everything from dodgy cheap commodities created in sweatshops for the western market in the so-called ‘developing countries’, right up to how the UK Tories can justify killing people by cutting National Health Service provisions. 👍
Straight up, Karl! 