Part One — Commodities and Money Chapters 1–3. The commodity and its two factors, the value-form, the fetish, and the genesis of money.

Part One is the analytic opening of Capital, and it is the part Marx himself flags as the hardest and the most consequential. Three chapters take the commodity apart down to its cell and rebuild the whole apparatus of value, exchange, and money out of what is found inside it. Nothing in the rest of the volume — labour-power, surplus-value, the working day, accumulation — can be stated until the categories built here are standing. Chapter 1 dissects the commodity into use-value and value, tracks value back to the double character of the labour that produces it, derives the value-form through four stages up to the money-form, and then, in the fetishism section, explains why this whole structure presents itself to the people living inside it as a property of things rather than a relation between them. Chapter 2 stages the derivation a second time from the side of the commodity-owners, as an act they perform without grasping. Chapter 3 unfolds money into its functions: measure of value, means of circulation, and money as money — hoard, means of payment, world money.

The situation the Part enters is the critique of political economy. Classical political economy had already found that the magnitude of a commodity's value is governed by labour-time. What it had never asked is why the product of labour takes the value-form at all — why human labour should express itself as the objective value of a thing, and why that value should have to appear as exchange-value and finally as money. Marx's target across Part One is the form, not merely the magnitude, and the analysis is immanent: no external standard is imported, the commodity is made to yield its own contradictions, and each category is forced out of the insufficiency of the one before it. That is the through-line the reconstruction below follows — from the two factors of the commodity, through the dual character of labour, through the four forms of value to the money-form, and out into the fetish.

Marx sets the stakes in the Preface, and the brief takes his warning as its orientation. The difficulty is concentrated exactly where the payoff is.

Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences. The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulty.

Marx, Preface to the First Edition, page 89.

The reason the difficulty pays is that what is under the microscope in Chapter 1 is not a minor category but the germ-cell of the entire mode of production. The famous image is Marx's own, and it is the best statement of why Part One is load-bearing out of all proportion to its length.

Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells. Moreover, in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both. But for bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form.

Marx, Preface to the First Edition, page 90.

The reconstruction runs Chapter 1 section by section, at full quotation density, because Chapter 1 is the anchor of the volume; Chapters 2 and 3 follow. What the brief does not do — weigh the derivation against later theories of value, or measure the value-form analysis for what it may occlude — is left to the researcher who has the reconstruction in hand.

1 · The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value

The volume opens not with capital, labour, or class but with the commodity, and the first sentence states why. Capitalist wealth does not present itself as a stock of use-values or as a sum of activity; it presents itself as a heap of saleable things, and the single commodity is the unit that heap is built from. The analysis therefore begins where the wealth first appears.

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.

Marx, Capital I, page 125.

The commodity is taken apart into two factors. The first is use-value. A commodity is before anything else a thing outside us that satisfies a need, and the character of the need is irrelevant to the analysis.

The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man’s need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production.

Marx, Capital I, page 125.

Use-value is bound to the physical body of the thing and to its consumption; it is not a relation but a property. Marx pins it down so it can be set aside, and in doing so drops the phrase — material bearers of exchange-value — that names the whole problem the chapter will work on: the useful thing is also the carrier of something else.

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When examining use-values, we always assume we are dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use-values of commodities provide the material for a special branch of knowledge, namely the commercial knowledge of commodities. Use-values are only realized [verwirklicht] in use or in consumption. They constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be. In the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers [Träger] of … exchange-value.

Marx, Capital I, page 126.

Exchange-value enters as the second factor, and it enters as a puzzle. It shows up first as a mere proportion, a ratio at which one use-value trades for another, and that ratio shifts with time and place — which makes the idea of a value intrinsic to the thing look self-contradictory.

Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind. This relation changes constantly with time and place. Hence exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e. an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with the commodity, inherent in it, seems a contradiction in terms.

Marx, Capital I, page 126.

The way out is the reduction argument, the analytic engine of the whole section. A single commodity has many exchange-values (so much boot-polish, so much silk, so much gold), and if all of these express the exchange-value of one quarter of wheat, then all of them must express something equal. Exchange-value is therefore not the thing itself but the appearance of a content behind it.

It follows from this that, firstly, the valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance’, of a content distinguishable from it.

Marx, Capital I, page 127.

Two commodities set equal — a quarter of corn to a hundredweight of iron — assert a common element of identical magnitude in both, a third thing that is neither. Marx illustrates the move with the triangle reduced to base-times-height, then forecloses the obvious wrong answer: the common element is not any natural property of the things, because exchange abstracts from exactly those.

This common element cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities. Such properties come into consideration only to the extent that they make the commodities useful, i.e. turn them into use-values. But clearly, the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values. Within the exchange relation, one use-value is worth just as much as another, provided only that it is present in the appropriate quantity.

Marx, Capital I, page 127.

Strip the use-value away and one property survives: the things are all products of labour. But the abstraction cannot stop at the useful thing; it takes the useful character of the labour with it. Once concrete labours — joiner, mason, spinner — are no longer distinguishable, what is left is labour with no qualitative determination, labour as such.

Nor is it any longer the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason or the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labour. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.

Marx, Capital I, page 128.

What remains once both the useful thing and the useful labour are gone is value, and Marx names its strange mode of being in the register that will carry through to the fetish section: a spectral objectivity, congealed labour, a social substance crystallized in the thing.

Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values – commodity values [Warenwerte].

Marx, Capital I, page 128.

The section now fixes the relation between the two terms it began with. Exchange-value was the starting appearance; value is the content behind it. The order will later be reversed — the investigation returns to exchange-value as the form value is forced to take — but for now value is to be examined on its own, apart from its form. This sentence is the hinge that Section 3 is built to swing back on.

The common factor in the exchange relation, or in the exchange-value of the commodity, is therefore its value. The progress of the investigation will lead us back to exchange-value as the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearance, of value. For the present, however, we must consider the nature of value independently of its form of appearance [Erscheinungsform].

Marx, Capital I, page 128.

With value defined, the question turns to its magnitude. Value is abstract human labour objectified in the article; its magnitude is the quantity of that labour, measured by its duration in time.

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified [vergegenständlicht] or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ‘value-forming substance’, the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.

Marx, Capital I, page 129.

Marx raises the objection his own definition invites — that a lazy or unskilful worker, needing more time, would make more valuable goods — and answers it with the concept that keeps the labour theory from collapsing into an absurdity. The labour that counts is not any individual's labour but a social average; the measure is socially necessary labour-time. This is the load-bearing definition of the section, and the power-loom case shows it is not a stipulation but a mechanism: raise productivity and the same hour of individual labour comes to count as less social labour, so value falls.

However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power. The total labour-power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour-power. Each of these units is the same as any other, to the extent that it has the character of a socially average unit of labour-power and acts as such, i.e. only needs, in order to produce a commodity, the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary. Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society. The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by one half the labour required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. In order to do this, the English hand-loom weaver in fact needed the same amount of labour-time as before; but the product of his individual hour of labour now only represented half an hour of social labour, and consequently fell to one half its former value.

Marx, Capital I, page 129.

The consequence is the inverse law of value and productivity, stated first as a determination of magnitude and then compressed into a single proposition. Value tracks the labour socially necessary, not the labour actually spent; and because productivity governs how much labour is necessary, value moves against it.

In general, the greater the productivity of labour, the less the labour-time required to produce an article, the less the mass of labour crystallized in that article, and the less its value. Inversely, the less the productivity of labour, the greater the labour-time necessary to produce an article, and the greater its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productivity, of the labour which finds its realization within the commodity.

Marx, Capital I, page 131.

The section closes by separating the terms it has bound together, so that neither use-value nor value nor commodity collapses into the others. A thing can be useful without being a value; a thing can be a product of labour without being a commodity, since it must be produced as a use-value for others and transferred through exchange; and nothing can be a value if it is not useful at all, because then the labour in it does not count.

A thing can be a use-value without being a value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not mediated through labour. Air, virgin soil, natural meadows, unplanted forests, etc. fall into this category. A thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity. He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labour admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values. … Finally, nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.

Marx, Capital I, page 131. The ellipsis marks Marx’s own parenthetical on the medieval corn-rent and corn-tithe, which he added to block the misreading that any product made for another is thereby a commodity.