KARL MARX

THE
'ECONOMICS'
3'174
of economic analysis, and used them to draw very different conclusions.
Ricardo had made a distinction between use-value and exchange-value.
The exchange-value of an object was something separate from its price
and consisted of the amount of labour embodied in the objects of production,
though Ricardo thought that the price in fact tended to approximate
to the exchange-value. Thus - in contradistinction to later analyses
- the value of an object was determined by the circumstances of production
rather than those of demand. Marx took over these concepts, but,
in his attempt to show that capitalism was not static but a historically
relative system of class exploitation, supplemented Ricardo's views by
introducing the idea of surplus-value. Surplus-value was defined as the
difference between the value of the products of labour and the cost of
producing that labour-power, i.e. the labourer's subsistence; for the
exchange-value of labour-power was equal to the amount of labour necessary
to reproduce that labour-power and this was normally much lower
than the exchange-value of the products of that labour-power.
The theoretical part of Volume One divides very easily into three
sections. The first section is a rewriting of the Critique of Political Economy
of 1859 and analyses commodities, in the sense of external objects that
satisfy human needs, and their value. Marx established two sorts of value
- use value, or the utility of something, and exchange value which was
determined by the amount of labour incorporated in the object. Labour
was also of a twofold nature according to whether it created use values
or exchange values. Since 'the exchange values of commodities must be
capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all,' 192
and the only thing they shared was labour, then labour must be the source
of value. But since evidently some people worked faster or more skilfully
than others, this labour must be a sort of average 'socially necessary'
labour time. There followed a difficult section on the form of value and
the first chapter ended with an account of commodities as exchange values
which he described as the 'fetishism of commodities' in a passage that
recalls the account of alienation in the 'Paris Manuscripts' and (even
more) the Note on James Mill. 'In order', said Marx here, 'to find an
analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the
religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear
as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both
with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities
with the products of men's hands." 95
The section ended with a chapter on exchange and an account of
money as the means for the circulation of commodities, the material
expression for their values and the universal measure of value.
The second section is a small one on the transformation of money