Capital for Tech Workers

Commodity

Let’s begin where Marx does in chapter 1, with the concept of the commodity.1 For Marx, a commodity is a good that is exchangeable for another good.

There is nothing distinctly physical about a commodity, even as we might commonly associate the term with a product that we can touch, weigh, or feel. According to Marx, what defines a commodity is that it is “an external object– a thing whose properties satisfy human wants or needs of whatever kind” [1, p.13].2 The commodity is not a hallucination or psychosis that is private and particular, or internal, to just one person, but a shared entity. The commodity does not just exist as a subjective idea, but also as an external object, i.e. one that somehow also exists independently from its internal instantiation in the minds of the people that think about it.

This is why we can refer to the commodity as a real abstraction.3 Think seriously about that formulation for a moment. What does it mean for an abstraction—an ‘immaterial’ notion in the mind—to also be real? The commodity is abstract, as it does not refer to any object in particular but rather a general class of objects. Commodity is the name for the class of all objects that can be exchanged for other objects (that are also in that same class). But it is not just an abstraction in the way in which we usually think about abstractions as immaterial thoughts, as the concept of the commodity actually exists in the world. Every time an object is exchanged for another object under the rubric of having equivalent value, the concept of commodity is working in the world, whether or not the traders are thinking explicitly with this idea, or not.

The commodity’s curious conceptual status as an external object or real abstraction is the foundational element that holds up the rest of Marx’s analysis in Capital. As Marx famously announces in the very first sentence of Capital, the commodity is “the elementary form of wealth” in the capitalist mode of production, and capitalism is the mode of production in which wealth “appears in the form of ‘an enormous accumulation of commodites’” [1, p.13].

Note that Marx didn’t really use the term ‘capitalism’ himself. It was arguably his editor, comrade, and patron Friedrich Engels who popularized (and perhaps even coined) the term ‘capitalism’; but 150 years of discussion about it in relation to Marx since has consolidated it as a key term indissociable from the latter’s analysis. For his part, however, Marx talked about capital, the mode of production in which the commodity is the elementary form of wealth, much more than he did about capitalism. This distinction is subtle but important. Capital is not, according to Marx, an omnipresent state of affairs that emerges at some distinct moment in history and which unrelentingly colonizes all modes of life and thought in every moment since its onset. Capital is a particular way of thinking about what societal ‘wealth’ means, how it is measured, and how certain things, processes, and infrastructures come to seem more valuable than others as a result, when capital has been naturalized as an unchanging physics of how the world and society work, rather than a structure that involves a set of choices about what we collectively value.

Marx’s analysis in Capital is better understood as an analytic inquiry into how logically self-consistent it is to talk about the commodity as a measure of collective wealth in society, rather than as a philosophical assertion that we are now ‘in’ capitalism as it is sometimes caricatured. Wealth’s appearance as an enormity of commodities is a specific rendering of wealth, of what wealth could mean in society. When capital is the dominant (Marx sometimes uses the word ‘preponderant’) mode of production in society, the enumeration of commodities becomes a proxy for wealth more generally. Wealth in capitalism is measured by counting out quantities of its elementary unit, the commodity. (The commodity can also be counted using money, another real abstraction that has a special logical relationship to the commodity, as we will discuss in the next section.) The important point here is that we need to keep in mind, right from the beginning of our reading and thinking, that Marx’s analysis in Capital is a logical evaluation of how well the commodity works as a proxy for wealth in society. Societal wealth does not need to be measured solely as GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a capitalist measure of wealth insofar as it collapses our idea of what it means to live a good life to a raw headcount of commodities exchanged. It is the subconscious slippage that allows GDP to stand in for quality of life that is the problem Marx is trying to address by logically working through capital from its first principles.

It is also important to keep in mind that the commodity is not limited to tangible objects in the colloquial sense. It is an idea that applies to anything: or, as we can confirm by returning to the commodity’s first definition by Marx, to any object, thing, or process that “satisf[ies] human wants or needs of any kind.” [1, p.13]. A service, therefore, can be a commodity just as much as a bar of steel, as can something visually invisible but sensible in some other way, such as a smell or a sound, as can apparently ‘immaterial’ things such as software. What commodifies an object in the terms of Marx’s argument is its conception as exchangeable (in a later chapter we will think about this as the commodity’s acquisition of exchange-value), its expression or naming as a representative quantity in the circuit of social value. A software company that sells a subscription service is producing commodities, in this sense, just as much as a steel factory that is processing iron and carbon in a furnace. Commodity production does not refer exclusively to the material processes that we associate with the industrial revolution, but to the giving of quantities to objects that are then taken to express their social value. We want to emphasize this point as a lemma, so that you can return to it frequently when thinking about Marx’s analysis in later chapters:

The commodity is the name of the moment in which an object, process, or grouping is made conceptually exchangeable by means of a quantity that is taken to express its social value.

The misunderstanding of a commodity as exclusively a physical product that can change hands gives rise to other misunderstandings, such as the idea that capital no longer structures daily life in our present conditions of exchange. A scholar called Jodi Dean has recently put forward, for example, building on prior arguments from Mackenzie Wark and Yanis Varoufakis, that capital is dying and threatens to be replaced by a new and even more life-threatening paradigm of sociality that these scholars call ‘neofeudalism’ [3], [4], [5].4 The evidence that capital is on its deathbed, according to Dean, is the preponderance of services such as those provided by Uber drivers, which are taken to represent a form of exchange that is no longer the commodity.5 As explained above, however, services such as Uber rides can be conceptualized (consciously or subconsciously) as commodities just as much as tangibly graspable products such as steel bars and paper clips. Thus to say that the salience of Uber as a major player in the economy is evidence of the decline of commodification is to misunderstand the generality of the commodity concept as Marx presents it. The commodity is as any ‘thing’—any item, process, or event—that becomes thinkable as exchangeable for equal value with any other such thing. If the commodity and the capital-logic that follows from it are on their deathbeds, as Marx theorized them, it cannot be on sole account of a booming service economy. Because services can be commodities, too! If a service’s value is expressed in a given quantity such as a dollar amount, it is hard to say that it is no longer a commodity in the sense in which Marx uses that term.

There is nothing inherently un-commodity-like, then, about either services or software in their own right. The commodity is any object that is rendered in thought as a quantity (as possessing an exchange-value), and so can apply to objects in the world that we can hold in our hand just as much as it can to broader arrangements or logical processes, encoded in software or otherwise. Importantly, however, this does not mean that everything is a commodity at all times. Things can transition in and out of being commodities, as a commodity is minted when it becomes thinkable as exchangeable with some other commodity. There are things and processes that we use and interact with every day, that are not commodities, then, as we are not always thinking about everything as universally exchangeable. When I eat an apple, I am not eating its exchange-value, and so in that moment it is not a commodity. (When I buy an apple, of course, I value it at a price, and so in that moment of purchase, by contract, it is a commodity.) As we will see soon, the act of thinking-everywhere-all-the-time about exchange-value is what characterizes the capitalist position. But there are other ways of thinking about value, too, and we must hold onto these ways in many aspects of our lives to keep capital from encroaching everywhere.

Bibliography

Footnotes

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  1. 1Marx wrote Capital in German; his term here is die Ware. We thank Carson Welch for the interesting insight that this German term is a homonym with the German word for ‘the truth’, die Wahr. The commodity is the basic axiom of the system of political economy that Marx aims to critique in Capital. We will put some of the original German terms in footnotes throughout the book.
  2. 2The German term for object here {Gegenstand} refers in the vocabulary of German idealism to something that ‘stands against’ {Gegen-stand} the perceiving subject. The object is also ‘external’ {äusserer}, referring to a space outside of the perceiving subject rather than a private internal abstraction.
  3. 3′Real abstraction’ is a formulation coined by the Marxist philosopher and sociologist Alfred-Sohn Rethel in his book Intellectual and Manual Labour [2].
  4. 4We will try contain references to contemporary scholarship and discussion in footnotes wherever possible, as we do not want to overfill the main text with the density and vastness of Marxist scholarship. We restrict the inclusion of references in the body text to where we feel they help our pedagogy of the concepts at hand along, such as in this case.
  5. 5 “The Uber app connects them to buyers, ride-seekers, for a fee. Drivers sell transport services to potential passengers. Marx says that “the relation between buyer and seller of this service has nothing to do with the relation of the productive laborer to capital. The buyer of the ride service is not employing the driver in order to accumulate capital by putting them to work. The seller of the service, the driver, is not being put to work on means of production owned by the buyer” [3]