A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
By contrast, under conditions of simple reproduction, there would be no surplus-value and no profit whatsoever, since all surplus-value would be unproductively consumed without entering into the reproduction process.
For the capitalist who has others to work for him, buying and selling is a major function. Since he appropriates the product of many people, on a larger social scale, so he has also to sell on such a scale, and later to transform money back again into the elements of production. Now, as before, the time taken up with buying and selling creates no value.
The interpenetration of pre-capitalist, semi-capitalist and capitalist relations of production, imposed upon colonies and semi-colonies by the power of capital on the world market and the violence of foreign political and military domination, has been an extremely important factor in the historical development of these twin sources of money capital accumulation.
The formula itself expresses that the money is not spent here as money, but is only advanced, and is thus simply the money form of capital, money capital. It further expresses the fact that it is the exchange-value, not the use-value, that is the decisive inherent purpose of the movement.
By destroying the non-capitalist milieu on which its expansion is based, capitalism undermines the conditions of its own growth.
M–L is the characteristic moment of the transformation of money capital into productive capital, for it is the essential condition without which the value advanced in the money form cannot really be transformed into capital, into value-producing surplus-value. M–mp is necessary only in order to realize the mass of labour bought by way of M–L.
The irrationality consists in the fact that labour as the value-forming element cannot itself possess any value, and so a certain quantity of labour cannot have a value that is expressed in its price, in its equivalence with a certain definite quantity of money.
Money is the universal equivalent form of all commodities, which already show in their prices that they ideally represent a specific sum of money, expect to be transformed into money, and only receive the form in which they can be converted into use-values for their possessor by changing places with money.
What is characteristic is not that the commodity labour-power can be bought, but the fact that labour-power appears as a commodity.
The very nature of expanded reproduction – capitalist reproduction – under capitalism implies that production takes place not only on a broader scale, but also under changed technological conditions.
It is easy to imagine a society which, having reached a certain level of consumption, consciously decides to give absolute priority to a single goal: reduction of the work load.
Volume 2 of Capital has indeed been not only a ‘sealed book’, but also a forgotten one. To a large extent, it remains so to this very day.
The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.
They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling-classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.
It firstly makes commodity production universal, and then gradually transforms all commodity production into capitalist production.
The purchase and sale of slaves is also in its form a purchase and sale of commodities. Without the existence of slaves, however, money cannot fulfil this function. If there is slavery, then money can be spent on the acquisition of slaves. But money in the hand of the buyer is in no way a sufficient condition for the existence of slavery.
Fixed and circulating capital are now no longer distinct and independent capital investments, but rather different portions of the same productive capital, which form different shares of the total value in different spheres of investment.
Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it.
Society behaves just as exclusively as the state, only in a more polite form: it does not throw you out, but it makes it so uncomfortable for you that you go out of your own will.