A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
to the money-form required to facilitate commodity-market exchange. The precursors of the money-form, which can indeed be found in the archaeological and historical record of coinage, have to conform to this logic to the degree that they get absorbed within capitalism and perform the function of money. At the same time, it should be clear that the market could not have evolved without that disciplining taking place. Though the historical argument is weak, the logical argument is powerful.
This section as a whole establishes, then, the necessary relation between commodity exchange and the money commodity and the mutually determinative role that each plays in the development of the other. But there is much more going on in this section to which we need to pay close attention. At the very beginning of the section, Marx describes the way in which
the objectivity of commodities as values differs from Dame Quickly in the sense that ‘a man knows not where to have it’. Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value. However, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social. From this it follows self-evidently that it can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity. (138)
This is an absolutely vital point that cannot be overemphasized: value is immaterial but objective. Given Marx’s supposed adherence to a rigorous materialism, this is, on the face of it, a surprising argument, and we have to wrestle a bit with what it means. Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence. We therefore have to carefully examine this social relation and its expression.
Marx proposes the following idea: values, being immaterial, cannot exist without a means of representation. It is, therefore, the rise of the monetary system, the rise of the money-form itself as a means of tangible expression, that makes value (as socially necessary labor-time) the regulator of exchange relations. But the money-form comes closer—step by step, given the logical argument—to expressing value only as commodity-exchange relations proliferate. There is, therefore, nothing universal out there called “value” that after many, many years of struggling finally gets to be expressed through monetary exchange. Rather, there is an internal and coevolving relation between the rise of the money-and the value-forms. The rise of monetary exchange leads to socially necessary labor-time becoming the guiding force within a capitalistic mode of production. Therefore, value as socially necessary labor-time is historically specific to the capitalist mode of production. It arises only in a situation where market exchange is doing the requisite job.
There are two conclusions and one major question that derive from Marx’s analysis. The first conclusion is that exchange relations, far from being epiphenomena expressive of the deep value structure, exist in a dialectical relation with values such that the latter depend on the former as much as the former depend on the latter. The second conclusion confirms the immaterial (phantom-like), but objective, status of the value concept. All attempts to measure value directly will fail. The big question mark concerns how reliable and accurate the money representation is of value or, in other words, how the relation between immateriality (value) and objectivity (as captured by the monetary representation of value) actually unfolds.
Marx works through the problem in a number of steps. He comments,
It is only the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings to view the specific character of value-creating labour, by actually reducing the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general. (142)
Here we encounter a partial answer to the question of how the reduction from skilled and complex human labor to simple human labor occurs. But then he goes on to say: “human labour-power in its fluid state”—and it is striking how often Marx invokes the concept of fluidity in Capital—“or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form” (142). A distinction therefore needs to be made between the labor process and the thing that gets produced. This idea of a relationship between processes and things, along with the idea of fluidity, is important in Marx’s analysis. The more he invokes it, the more he moves away from dialectics as a formal logic to dialectics as a philosophy of historical process. Human labor is a tangible process, but at the end of the process, you get this thing—a commodity—which “coagulates” or “congeals” value. While the actual process is what is significant, it is the thing that has value and the thing that has the objective qualities. Thus:
The value of the linen as a congealed mass of human labour can be expressed only as an ‘objectivity’, a thing which is materially different from the linen itself and yet common to the linen and all other commodities. (142)
The problem is: how does value, this “thing which is materially different from the linen,” get represented? The answer lies in the money-commodity form. But there are, he notes, some peculiarities in this relationship between value and its expression in the money-form. “The first peculiarity which strikes us,” he writes, is that a particular use-value “becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value,” and this “conceals a social relation” (148–9).
Hence the mysteriousness of the equivalent form, which only impinges on the crude bourgeois vision of the political economist when it confronts him in its fully developed shape, that of money. He then seeks to explain away the mystical character of gold and silver by substituting for them less dazzling commodities, and, with ever-renewed satisfaction, reeling off a catalogue of all the inferior commodities which have played the role of the equivalent at one time or another. (149–50)
“The body of the commodity,” he goes on to say, “which serves as the equivalent, always figures as the embodiment of abstract human labour, and is always the product of some specific useful and concrete labour” (150). What does this say? Gold, for example, is a specific use-value, a specific commodity, produced under specific conditions of production, and yet we are using it as a means of expression of all human labor everywhere—we are taking a particular use-value and using it as a stand-in for all social labor. This raises complicated questions, as we will see when we get deeper into the theory of money in chapter 2.
The second peculiarity is that “concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour,” and the third peculiarity is that “private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form” (150). This means not only that the universal equivalent, the money commodity, is subject to the qualitative and quantitative problems that beset the production of any use-value, but that the production and marketing of the money commodity as well as its accumulation (eventually as capital) lie in private hands even as it performs its universalizing social function. When gold was still a dominant commodity underpinning global money at the end of the 1960s, for example, the two primary gold producers were South Africa and Russia, neither of which was particularly friendly to international capitalism. The dematerialization of the whole financial system in the early 1970s and the system of floating exchange rates, free from any gold standard, that then came into being had the effect of disempowering the gold producers (even if this was not the primary reason it occurred).
These are the sorts of contradictions that Marx’s analysis leads us to contemplate, and we later see—particularly in Volume III but also in chapter 3 of this volume—how these peculiarities and contradictions start to play out in the creation of possibilities for financial crises. In any case, the fundamental conclusion has to be that the relation between values and their representation in money-form is fraught with contradictions, and so we can never assume a perfect form of representation. This mismatch, as it were, between values and their representation turns out to have advantages even as it is deeply problematic, as we will see.
This brings us to an important passage on Aristotle. “There can be no exchange,” says Aristotle, “without equality, and no equality without commensurability.”1 The