| This question <46|50> overall <47|49> Hans: <43|51>. |
| Question 124: If the physical thing is not the commodity but only the “body” or the “bodily form” of the commodity, how should then the commodity itself be defined? |
| [48] Hans: What's in a commodity? Zookeeper [46] proposes that a commodity should not only be defined to be a material object, but that the following things should enter its definition: the time, effort, labor, money, supplies, and work needed to produce this object. |
| Which of these ingredients are still present and which belong to the past of the commodity? |
| The supplies, to the extent that they are materials needed to produce the commodity, are now part of the product. Those supplies needed to keep the machinery running etc. were necessary for the production and you see their result now in the shape of the commodity. The same with the work, the useful labor that entered the commodity. It is a thing of the past, but you see its results in the commodity. Including all those in the definition of the commodity would be double counting. |
| Money? Money does not enter the product directly, but perhaps through the materials it bought. If you count the money, the material, and the finished product, then it is even triple counting. |
| The remaining items in Zookeeper's list are effort, time and labor of the person producing the commodity. Here I will argue that they are not a thing of the past but are still present in the commodity. Why? Because the producer's effort, time and labor went into producing something the producer does not need. This was not done out of charity, but because the producer needs certain other things to live. A commodity is not only a use-value but at the same time a claim check through which its producer has a claim on other commodities. The commodity was only produced for this purpose, and if it cannot meet this purpose, more commodities will not be forthcoming. Therefore it is justified to include this in the definition of the commodity. |
| This is why Marx wrote in the first edition of Capital |
| a commodity is the product of useful labor and the congelation of abstract labor, |
| or in the fourth edition of Capital, 138:1 |
| Commodities are something twofold, useful objects and carriers of value. |
| or later, in 152:1: |
| When at the beginning of this chapter we said in common parlance, that a commodity is both a use-value and an exchange-value, we were, strictly speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use-value or object of utility, and a value. It manifests itself as this twofold thing, that it is, as soon as its value assumes its own, from the bodily form of the commodity different form. |
| This last sentence, with the form, can be paraphrased as follows: People will, on a regular basis, put their labor into things which they do not need, only if there is an orderly way for them to retrieve this labor for their own use. Society provides such an orderly way by the institution of money. Producers sell their commodity, and the money they get in return is their labor-time in a form in which it can be converted into any use-value they please. |
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