Marx Read Along Capital v.1 - The Commodity

What is a commodity?

1. ‘The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing, which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind’ (126). Whether these ‘needs’ arise from the stomach or mind makes no difference.

2. It also makes no difference wether the thing is used as means of production or means of subsistence, i.e. as tools or resources to make something else, or to consume and destroy (over a longer or shorter period) in consumption.

3. ‘The wealth of capitalist societies exists as an ‘immense collection of commodities’. The individual commodity is the ‘elementary form’ of this wealth.

This multiple definition will be refined and complicated further as the text proceeds

What is a use-value?

We take a commodity and we say that it is useful because it possesses so many ‘useful’ qualities. This is not to be conflated with ‘useful’ in the utilitarian sense. A piece of paper is useful not only for keeping notes or records (a ‘utilitarian use’ I suppose) or to make a paper airplane from the thing (not very utilitarian at all, but totally fun!). At this level of abstraction, both are useful qualities of the paper commodity. They are both use-values.

Though there is clearly a qualitative difference as to whether the paper is used as an airplane or for record keeping, we are concerned here with the use-values of commodities as quantities of use values (we always assume that use-values exist in varying quantities). That is, with x of paper commodities we can make y paper airplanes or print z characters.

This is merely a method of abstractions and not intended to brush aside the individual qualitative, relational, or symbolic properties of commodities as ‘mere use-values’.

‘…use-value 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…which is the use-value of a useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labor required to appropriate its useful qualities.’

For example, the fact that one can make a paper airplane with the paper is incidental to the fact it takes v hours of labor time to make the sheet of paper in question - of course one is probably less inclined to go the airplane route if v is higher than lower, and one must be able to ‘discover’ the properties and means of making paper ‘fly’, but these latter two points are outside the present scope.

In addition to existing in definite quantities, ‘Use-values are only realized in use or consumption. They constitute the material content of wealth [the 'body' of wealth], whatever its social form may be.’ That objects have qualities which make them useful is not particular to any one type of society -though of course the types of things that have uses or the types of uses which are realized may change over time. 

What is distinctive about use-values in a capitalist mode of production is that they are ‘material bearers of…exchange value’ (126).

Exchange value, of which much more will be spoken next time and many times after that.