49
Chapter 1
useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for
others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other
particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the
products of labour, have one common quality, viz., that of having value.
Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not
because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the
contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act,
we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not
aware of this, nevertheless we do it.
28
Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label
describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.
Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products;
for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The
recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material
expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history
of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the
social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.
The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production
of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists
in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character,
therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers,
notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after
the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.
What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question,
how much of some other product they get for their own? in what proportions the products are
exchangeable? When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear
to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of
gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron in spite of
their different physical and chemical qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of
having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting
and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually,
independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action
takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It
requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience
alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are
carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social
division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society
requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating
exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production
forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when
a house falls about our ears.
29
The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is
therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.
Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the
magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination
takes place.
Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of
those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He
begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The
50
Chapter 1
characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary
preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-
understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in
his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of
commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the
common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their
characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities
that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social
relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to
linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the
statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those
articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they
express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the
same absurd form.
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought
expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined
mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all
the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of
commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.
Since Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists,
30
let us
take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and
must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming
goats, fishing and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source
of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. In spite of the variety of his
work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same
Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour.
Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work.
Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the
difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed
at. This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and
pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His
stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary
for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on
an average, cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of
his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion, even to Mr.
Sedley Taylor. And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.
Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island bathed in light to the European middle
ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent,
serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises
the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the
basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work
of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different
from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and
payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on
production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour.
Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but
every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own