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commodities 1 of 2

1. Commodities are made by workers for capitalists. Capitalists own productive capital. That is, they own capital that can be used to make commodities: factories, raw materials, machines, etc. But they need people to work in their factories, at their machines, with their raw materials. They hire workers to do the actual labor required to turn all this productive capital into commodities. Once a worker has made a commodity it does not belong to him or her. It is the exclusive property of the capitalist. 2. Capitalists sell commodities to consumers. The capitalist doesn't want the commodity for his or her own use. (Does the owner of Genera Mills just want to eat a lot of cereal? Does Philip Knight, the ceo of Nike, just want to wear a lot of shoes?) Capitalists are not really interested in the particular commodities they are producing. They could be making pharmaceuticals, tennis shoes or widgets. Their primary concern is that they sell these commodities to consumers for money. The money they get from this sale goes to pay for the productive capital they just used and the workers they just hired. The rest is profit. Where does profit come from? That is a question for later. (see exploitation) 3. Consumers buy commodities from capitalists and use them. We are all consumers. We must buy in order to live. We must work in order to buy. Thus we live to work. Some commodities go straight to the consuming public. Other commodities like steel and corn are purchased by other capitalists to make more commodities. In the latter case, some commodities go through many transformations until they reach their final state. Once they reach this final state they are consumed- as food which is eaten, fuel which is used up, cars which are driven till they die, etc. Anything left over is thrown away. Thus do we get garbage, pollution, and second hand shops. So commodities have three dimensions: The making, the selling/buying and the consuming. Each dimension is unique, telling us different things about both commodities and about the world around us. Yet they are all interrelated, meaningless without the other dimensions. Each dimension corresponds to a different way of measuring the value of a commodity. Now we will look closer at each of these three dimensions, or values, to see what sort of secrets they conceal. Let's start with the last one: consuming. Licking an ice cream cone, riding a bike, shooting a gun, watching TV- these are the ways we normally interact with commodities. They have value to us because we can use them. This is called "use value". If we didn't have a use for something, we wouldn't buy it. And if no one had a use for something, capitalist wouldn't hire workers to make it. Thus use-value is a very important dimension to the nature of the commodity. Yet use-values are subjective. I like hot sauce, you don't. I like red cars, you like blue cars. I like scotch, you like gin. There are billions of different subjective preferences out there. That's why we say that use-value is a heterogeneous concept. This will be an important point later. Now we'll jump to the first dimension I listed: making. All of these commodities have to be made by someone. If something doesn't require work to exist then it isn't a commodity. Sunlight- not a commodity. Weeds- not a commodity. Hugs- not a commodity. Water, watches, coal- all commodities. Commodities require labor. Thus do we get a second type of value: labor value. A pancake requires very little labor to make, thus it has a very low labor value. I'm eating a stack of pancakes right now and it cost me about 3 dollars. A car takes a lot of labor to make- many different persons labor together, performing very difficult tasks. The raw materials, machines, and power used to make cars are all products of labor too. These impart a fraction of their value to each commodity. Cars have a very high labor value. That's why they are so expensive. Let's compare this to use-value. This morning I chose to get up and go to a cafe to eat some pancakes instead of going to buy a car. Pancakes have more use to me at the moment. Thus they have a greater use-vale to me. This has nothing to do with their labor-value. The fact that I wanted pancakes more than a car doesn't make pancakes more expensive! So though use-value and labor vale are important aspects of commodities, they help us explain different things. This is why we will generally turn to labor value to help us explain our third dimension: selling/buying. We call the dimension of selling and buying "exchange". Like many other things we've discussed thus far, exchange at first seems like a pretty self-explanatory dimension. Yet it is here in the realm of the buyer and seller that the most mystification happens. It is here where the true nature of things are obscured from view. We must approach with caution.

Channel: Education
Uploaded: November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am
Author: brendanmcooney

Length: 09:23
Rating: 4.79
Views: 1120

Tags: bourgeois  buy  capitalism  class  commodities  communism  economics  engels  exchange  labor  labour  marx  sell  socialism  us  value  

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