Episode 16

The difference between concrete useful labour and labour which creates exchange-value aroused considerable interest in Europe during the eighteenth century in the following form:what particular kind of concrete labour is the source of bourgeois wealth?It was thus assumed that not every kind of labour which is materialised in use-values or yields products must thereby directly create wealth.But for both the Physiocrats and their opponents the crucial issue was not what kind of labour creates value but what kind of labour creates surplus value .They were thus discussing a complex form of the problem before having solved its elementary form;just as the historical progress of all sciences leads only through a multitude of contradictory moves to the real point of departure.Science,unlike other architects,builds not only castles in the air,but may construct separate habitable storeys of the building before laying the foundation stone.We shall now leave the Physiocrats and disregard a whole series of Italian economists,whose more or less pertinent ideas come close to a correct analysis of the commodity,[10]in order to turn at once to Sir James Steuart ,[11]the first Briton to expound a general system of bourgeois economy.The concept of exchange-value like the other abstract categories of political economy are in his work still in process of differentiation from their material content and therefore appear to be blurred and ambiguous.

In one passage he determines real value by labour-time ("what a workman can perform in a day"),but beside it he introduces wages and raw material in a rather confusing way.[12]His struggle with the material content is brought out even more strikingly in another passage.He calls the physical element contained in a commodity,e.g.,the silver in silver filigree,its "intrinsic worth ",and the labour-time contained in it its "useful value ".

The first is according to him something "real in itself",whereas "the value of the second must be estimated according to the labour it has cost to produce it....The labour employed in the modification represents a portion of a man's time."[13]

His clear differentiation between specifically social labour which manifests itself in exchange-value and concrete labour which yields use-values distinguishes Steuart from his predecessors and his successors.

"Labour,"he says,"which through its alienation creates a universal equivalent,I call industry ."He distinguishes labour as industry not only from concrete labour but also from other social forms of labour.He sees in it the bourgeois form of labour as distinct from its antique and mediaeval forms.He is particularly interested in the difference between bourgeois and feudal labour,having observed the latter in the stage of its decline both in Scotland and during his extensive journeys on the continent.Steuart knew very well that in pre-bourgeois eras also products assumed the form of commodities and commodities that of money;but he shows in great detail that the commodity as the elementary and primary unit of wealth and alienation as the predominant form of appropriation are characteristic only of the bourgeois period of production,and that accordingly labour which creates exchange-value is a specifically bourgeois feature.[14]

Various kinds of concrete labour,such as agriculture,manufacture,shipping and commerce,had each in turn been claimed to constitute the real source of wealth,before Adam Smith declared that the sole source of material wealth or of use-values is labour in general,that is the entire social aspect of labour as it appears in the division of labour .Whereas in this context he completely overlooks the natural factor,he is pursued by it when he examines the sphere of purely social wealth,exchange-value.Although Adam Smith determines the value of commodities by the labour-time contained in them,he then nevertheless transfers this determination of value in actual fact to pre-Smithian times.In other words,what he regards as true when considering simple commodities becomes confused as soon as he examines the higher and more complex forms of capital,wage-labour,rent,etc.He expresses this in the following way:the value of commodities was measured by labour-time in the paradise lost of the bourgeoisie,where people did not confront one another as capitalists,wage-labourers,landowners,tenant farmers,usurers,and so on,but simply as persons who produced commodities and exchanged them.Adam Smith constantly confuses the determination of the value of commodities by the labour-time contained in them with the determination of their value by the value of labour;he is often inconsistent in the details of his exposition and he mistakes the objective equalisation of unequal quantities of labour forcibly brought about by the social process for the subjective equality of the labours of individuals.[15]He tries to accomplish the transition from concrete labour to labour which produces exchange-value,i.e.,the basic form of bourgeois labour,by means of the division of labour .But though it is correct to say that individual exchange presupposes division of labour,it is wrong to maintain that division of labour presupposes individual exchange.For example,division of labour had reached an exceptionally high degree of development among the Peruvians,although no individual exchange,no exchange of products in the form of commodities,took place.