Readings: Marx, Capital Volume 1, pages 125-244 (Part I: Commodities and Money)
Parry and Bloch, Money and the Morality of Exchange: "Introduction" (optional) and Carsten, "Cooking Money"

Note on readings: The Marx reading is the same as on the syllabus, but I've made the Introduction to the Parry and Bloch book optional. It provides an overview of theories about money and exchange and is very helpful if you're interested in the ways social scientists have approached these issues. The Carsten reading is still required, but the focus of our discussion will be Marx, so spend most of your time coming to terms with the logic of his argument about value, commodities, and money.

1. What does Marx mean by use value and exchange value?

2. What, according to Marx, is the relationship between labor and value? How does capitalism lead to the alienation of labor?

3. Marx writes that money is the "radical leveler" (229). What does he mean by this? What impact does money have on social relations and cultural values? Do you agree with his argument?

4. In the article by Carsten, what is the relationship between gender, money, and commodity exchange? How are discourses about money and morality used to convey attitudes toward economic change? How does Carsten's account compare to Ong's?

Discussion quotes from Karl Marx, Capital

Use-Value, Exchange-Value, and the "Labor Theory of Value"

Exchange value: "The proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind" (126).

"As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time" (130).

"Finally, nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labor contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value" (131).

"This is a roundabout way of saying that weaving too, in so far as it weaves value, has nothing to distinguish it from tailoring, and, consequently, is abstract human labor. It is only the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings to view the specific character of value-creating labour, by actually reducing the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general" (142).

"But because this labor, tailoring, counts exclusively as the expression of undifferentiated human labour, it possesses the characteristic of being identical with other kinds of labour, such as the labour embodied in the linen. Consequently, although, like all other commodity-producing labour, it is the labour of private individuals, it is nevertheless labour in its directly social form" (151).

"The physical form of the linen counts as the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state, of all human labour" (159).

Commodities, Fetishization of commodities

"The coat, therefore, seems to be endowed with its equivalent form, its property of direct exchangeability, by nature, just as much as its property of being heavy or its ability to keep us warm. Hence the mysteriousness of the equivalent form, which only impinges on the crude bourgeois vision of the political economist when it confronts him in its fully developed shape, that of money" (149).

"The product of labour is an object of utility in all states of society; but it is only a historically specific epoch of development which presents the labour expended in the production of a useful article as an 'objective' property of that article, i.e. as its value. It is only then that the product of labour becomes transformed into a commodity" (154).

"The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things" (164-5).

"As soon as these proportions have attained a certain customary stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear to be equal in value, in the same way as a pound of gold and a pound of iron are equal in weight, despite their different physical and chemical properties" (167).

Emergence of Money and its own Fetishization

"Finally, a particular kind of commodity acquires the form of universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it the material embodiment of their uniform and universal form of value" (160).

"What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. The movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind" (187).

"Money is the absolutely alienable commodity, because it is all other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their universal alienation" (205).

"When they thus assume the shape of values, commodities strip off every trace of their natural and original use-value, and of the particular kind of useful labor to which they owe their creation, in order to pupate into the homogenous social materialization of undifferentiated human labour. From the mere look of a piece of money, we cannot tell what breed of commodity has been transformed into it. In their money-form, all commodities look alike" (204).

"Just as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too for its part, as a radical leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions" (229).

 

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