Marx lays great stress on the abstract nature of the commodity and uses such expressions as “value-abstraction” and “commodity-abstraction”. What is meant by these terms is abstraction from use-value. “The material properties of the commodities only concern us here, in so far as they confer utility, so as to render the commodities use-values. On the other hand, the obvious characteristic of the exchange ratio between commodities is precisely this., that it is an abstraction from their use-values.” Thus by use-value of a commodity is understood the sum total of its physical properties, its entire sense reality. The abstraction from use-value is seen as a purely objective, blind and factual function of commodity exchange. It is not intended by anybody, not consciously instituted by man, not sprung from his thoughts. On the contrary, the abstraction is not even noticeable to the exchanging agents who cause it by what they do. “They do not know it, but they do it.” The commodity owners are the deluded victims of whatever effects the abstraction that they themselves enact has upon their condition. The awareness of the abstraction comes to them post festum and leaves them guessing as to the origin. “The intermediate steps of the process vanish in the result and leave no trace behind.”

What makes exchange possess this abstractive function? This, obviously, is the crucial question. To any bourgeois economist or sociologist, the Marxian teaching on the fetishism of commodity is pure speculation devoid of reality. But what is the argument upon which Marx’s assertion rests? If we trace back the twenty-odd steps by which he reaches his conclusion, we meet as sheet-anchor of the derivation the reference to the function inherent in exchange of establishing an equation between the commodities exchanged.

“In order to discover how the elementary expression of the value of a commodity lies hidden in the value relation of two commodities, we must, in the first place, consider the latter entirely apart from its quantitative aspect…Linen = coat is the basis of the equation.”

This equation Marx accepted as a basic postulate needing no proof beyond its mere statement. And it formed indeed the common ground of all economic value theory up to his day. The “equivalent” of a commodity is that which is “exchangeable” with it; these are synonymous terms to him. It is well known, however, that only four or five years after the appearance of the first volume of Capital bourgeois economics evolved the subjectivistic value theory (of marginal utility) which is based on the denial of the postulate of equivalence. This theory reduces exchange to the logic of choice, and choice pre-supposes difference, not equality of values. This makes idealism the methodological principle of economics, but however this may be, the exchange equation of values can no longer be treated as an axiomatic truth. It must be proved and traced to its foundation. This will not merely reconfirm the Marxian analysis of commodity but will inevitably enlarge it, and this enlargement entails, if I am not mistaken, its extension into the epistemological field.

There is more than one way of approach to this task. The most obvious would be by means of a fully-fledged critique of subjectivistic economics, or at least of its theory of value, an undertaking impossible in a short article. There is, however, a short cut which has moreover the advantage that it eliminates the economic aspect focused upon the quantitative determination of value and confines our analysis to the purely formal characteristics of exchange.

For this short cut we require a definition of use-value and of exchange-value and of their relationship, which satisfies the Marxian theory and which, at the same time, subjectivistic economists are powerless to reject. Accordingly we say: use-value is the aspect of a commodity as object of use, exchange value its aspect of exchange. (The word “use” here must be understood in a precise meaning: [1] the word signifies act of use, not a property of being usable - e.g., the use of a chair to sit on it;[2] the word must retain its distinctive difference from exchange - e.g., it is admissable to speak of the “use” of a coin as material for jewellery, but not to speak of its “use” as money.) Use and exchange are different actions in such a way that they are mutually exclusive in time. The root-cause of the abstractness of exchange is contained in this exclusion. The exclusion or separation in time between exchange and use as actions therefore carries paramount importance and must be understood in its essentials.

The point is that exchange and use are not only different and contrasting by description, but that they must perforce take place separately, at different times. While commodities are subject to a deal of exchange, they must remain exempt from use. The reason is that exchange serves one change only, a change of ownership, a change, that is, of a purely social status. And in order to make this change of ownership possible as a regular activity, the physical state of the commodity must be assumed to remain unchanged while their transfer is taking place. Therefore, wherever commodity exchange takes place, it does so in effective “abstraction” from use. This is an abstraction not in mind, but in fact; it is a state of affairs prevailing at a definite place and throughout a definite time. It is the state of affairs which reigns in the market.

The abstraction from use by no means implies, however, that the use-value of the commodities is of no importance in the market. On the contrary, it engages the interest of people in the most lively way. But it occupies them only in their minds, only subjectively and by thought; they may not put their interest into action. Hence, in the market and in the shop window things stand still.  They are under the spell of one activity only, that of changing their owners. While they are waiting to be sold their use-value is on show and for scrutiny. the scrutiny may take any form and go to any length short of causing damage to the commodities, that is, of affecting their material state, or of putting the commodities to their actual use.

[Part three ends]

               

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