Introduction to two fragments on value

Below are two texts by Marx not before translated into Swedish. The first one, with the title »Value» is from the Grundrisse (1857–8), interestingly taken from the very end of these Manuscripts. It consists of a first and, as will be seen, unfinished sketch of how the editions to follow of Marx's great critique of political economy, with some minor revisions in the different editions (of 1859, 1867, and 1872) came to be introduced. Thereof the note at the beginning that this paragraph is to be moved forward. It finally ended up constituting the very first sentence of his presentation. It is to be noted, here, that the Grundrisse first and foremost is to be considered as a laboratory for Marx to develop his critique and not as a systematically dialectical presentation such as Capital. Immediately we recognise the famous first sentence both from Critique and from Capital that bourgeois wealth, at first sight, presents itself in commodity form. In the later presentation it is specified, as is well known, as 'an immense accumulation of commodities', with the singular commodity as its elementary form, as an average exemplar. Marx, thus, introduces his critique with a concrete and simple phenomenon, something apparently trivial. We follow then how Marx reveals its two properties: being a use value and exchange value, where the former, in political economy, primarily acts as the carrier of the latter–exchange value. Use value thereby fulfil its role as the material basis or fundament on which 'a definite economic relation presents itself'. This circumstance, that manifests 'the modern system of private exchange' itself has emerged historically. What we find here is an early indication that what Marx takes as his practical, actual ground and point of departure is the modern capitalist mode of production, the modern exchange economy with its bourgeois society. In the later versions of the presentation this is even more obvious, where Marx speaks about those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails.

The second text in an excerpt from the Manuscript with which Marx was working around the end of the year 1871 and early 1872 to prepare for the publishing of the second edition of Das Kapital. In the MEGA edition on which this Swedish translation is based is known as the Manuscript 'Ergänzungen und Veränderungen', i.e. 'additions and changes'. This title, which we borrowed from Michael Heinrich, reveals that for Marx primarily is about specify the determination of the commodity as an object of value, and that its property of being such an object is to be expressed as its value objectivity. This common and equal property between different commodities has nothing to do with their physical properties, but consists solely of their mutual relations. It is, therefore, as pinpointed by Marx, an exclusively social property. Their common third, as it is written, is what determines them as equal objects of value. Without being related to each other, thus, neither the one or the other commodity possess this social value objectivity. One problem, addressed by Marx here, if implicitly, is the question about the objectivity of value, which had been challenged already in David Ricardo and his theory of value by those economists who by value understood something relative, something that did not at all exist outside of the proportional relation between two or more commodities. This subjective theory of value, however, focuses exclusively on the quantitative determination of value: how various individual relative prices are to be determined. But as objects of value, Marx notes, what matters is the qualitative equality between different commodities–an equality that is the very precondition for the quantitative comparison between different commodities. This 'third' is their common unit. Different commodities are reduced to abstract human labour, to being products of labour as such. But, Marx notes, 'abstract human labor as their unity, abstract human labor as a specific social form of labor; not only as their substance, but rather as their substance held in common by one
commodity with another commodity'. That is, it is not enough to reduce the labour being expended on a commodity as a use value, e.g. tailoring, to abstract human labour, but such abstract human labour is a determined social form of labour. Labour, in this sense, is not the substance of individual commodities, but emphatically their common, purely social substance. Abstract human labour is the expenditure of human labour power, but not as such, in itself, but 'counts' here as the expenditure of the expenditure of the common labour power of all distributed over and evened out over all 'workers'. A product of labour, 'considered in isolation, is
not value, any more than it is a commodity'. What Marx here wants to reach through his writing in preparation for the second edition of Capital, Volume One, is a clarification and specification of the value of a commodity as its value objectivity, that this form, as objectivity, is included already in the concept of value, and that the value form springs from the concept of value.