Commodity Value

The undifferentiated human labor in general congealed in commodities, i.e., the expenditure of human mental and physical powers. Marx pointed out: “If we then disregard the use-value of commodities, they have only one property left, that of being products of labor.” The labor mentioned here does not refer to the concrete labor with various useful characteristics embodied in the products of labor but to the human labor common to them, i.e., abstract human labor.

All commodities, no matter how innumerable different their use-values may be, and no matter how different the concrete form of the labor used to produce a commodity may be, are in the last instance the result of human labor in general. In the production process, the means of production, such as the instruments of production and raw materials, are the results of past human labor, while the newly input labor can be regarded as living human labor. When the production process is completed, both the past human labor and the present living labor are materialized in commodities. This undifferentiated human labor, materialized in the in the product of labor, is value.

Value is a historical category that exists simultaneously with the commodity economy and is an essential property and social property unique to commodities. Values are equal in quality and comparable in quantity, so that different commodities can be exchanged in a certain proportion. The reason why two commodities with different use values can be exchanged in certain quantitative proportions lies in the fact that the amount of labor expended in the products of the two exchanging parties is equal, or that the values of the two parties are equal. Value thus embodies the socio-economic relations between commodity producers comparing the amount of labor expended and exchanging labor with each other. Lenin pointed out: “Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.” It was through the analysis of commodities and value that Marx revealed the essence of the capitalist relations of production.