Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews June 11, 2023 June 4, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
In this section—which is subtitled "The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use- Value and Value (Substance of Value, Magnitude of Value)"—Marx introduces us to his analysis of commodities. A commodity is an external object that satisfies a human need either directly or indirectly. He says that useful things can be looked at from the point of view of quality and quantity. They have many attributes and can therefore be used in many ways. He uses the term use-value in relation to commodities' quality. "The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value." A commodity's use-value is a trait of the thing itself, and is independent of the amount of labor needed to make the commodity useful.
Exchange-value is the proportion by which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of other kinds. It is a constantly changing relation, and is not inherent to the object. For example, corn and iron have an exchange relation, which means that a certain amount of corn equals a certain amount of iron. Each must therefore equal a third common element, and can be reduced to this thing. The common element cannot be a natural property of the commodity, but rather must be abstracted away from its use-value. Discarding use-values, only one property remains—the commodities are the products of abstract human labor. They are "congealed quantities of homogenous human labor." This common factor in the exchange-value of the commodity is its value.
Thus, a use-value only has exchange-value when it consists of abstract human labor. This is measured by the amount of labor-time socially necessary to produce it. A commodity's value would stay constant if the labor-time also stayed constant. With greater productivity, it takes less labor to produce a commodity, and thus, less labor is "crystallized" in the product, leading to a decrease in value. "The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productivity, of the labor which finds its realization within the commodity." Something can be a use-value without being a value. This occurs when something's usefulness is not produced through labor. However, nothing can be a value without also being a use-value; if something is useless, so is the labor contained in it.
Marx presents several definitions that will be important throughout his work, so it is very important to be clear on their meanings. A use-value corresponds to the usefulness of an object, and is internal to that object. For example, a hammer is a use-value because of its contributions to building. Its use-value comes from its usefulness. In contrast, a hammer's exchange-value comes from its value relative to other objects. For example, a hammer might be worth two screwdrivers. An object doesn't have an exchange value in itself, but only in its relationship with other objects.
However, the fact that the hammer and screwdriver can be exchanged at all suggests that there must be something common between them, some means of comparison. Marx says that this is the object's value. Value means the amount of labor it takes to make the commodities. This labor theory of value is very important to Marx's theory. It implies that the price of commodities comes from how much labor was put into them. One implication of this is that objects with natural use-value, such as forests and other natural resources, do not have value because no labor went into them. One problematic question, then, is how such natural resources can have exchange-value (people do spend money on them) without benefiting from labor. It is also important to consider how Marx's conception of the roots of exchange value differs from modern economic theory. In modern theory, something's exchange value is rooted in people's subjective preferences. While the amount of labor required would be linked to the supply curve of a commodity, its exchange value is also determined by the demand curve. Marx focuses exclusively on labor.
This section also gives a general sense of Marx's approach in Capital. Here he dissects one aspect of the modern capitalist system and presents a schema for understanding why it functions as it does. Later Marx will analyze things like the role of money and the capitalist. While this book makes many historical and sociological arguments, it is largely a book of economic theory and its implications.
Please wait while we process your payment