NOTE: many of these paragraphs are adaptations from articles and websites written by others!

What is Communism?

• Communism is a system where all property is public. A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless and stateless, implying the end of the exploitation of labor.

What is Marxism?

• Marxism posits that the struggle between social classes, specifically between the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and the proletariat, or workers, defines economic relations in a capitalist economy and will inevitably lead to revolutionary communism.

What is Anarchism?

• Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of authority and rejects all involuntary, coercive forms of hierarchy. Anarchism calls for the abolition of the state which it holds to be undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and the installation of a communist society.

What is Socialism?

• The transitionary phase between capitalism and communism.

Who was Karl Marx?

• Karl Marx was a german philosopher who created the concepts of marxism and communism. He believed that no economic class—wage workers, land owners, etc. should have power over another. Marx believed that everyone should contribute what they can, and everyone should get what they need.

What are the main “classes” that Marx identified?

• BOURGEOISIE: the capitalist class who own most of society's wealth and means of production

• PROLETARIAT: workers or working-class people

What is a Mode Of Production?

• Everything that goes into the production of the necessities of life, including the "productive forces" (labor, instruments, and raw material) and the "relations of production" (the social structures that regulate the relation between humans in the production of goods). Essentially, the economic system. HOW things are produced.

What are the different Modes Of Production?

• The main modes of production that Marx identified generally include primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, mercantilism, and capitalism. In each of these social stages, people interacted with nature and production in different ways.

What is Capital?

• Anything that can be used as a tool or resource to produce a commodity. Fixed capital, or constant capital, consists of raw materials, energy, and machinery used in the production process. Variable capital consists exclusively of the human labor necessary to carry out the production process.

What are the Means Of Production?

• The physical and non-financial inputs used in the production of goods and services with economic value. These include raw materials, facilities, machinery and tools used in the production of goods and services. Essentially, the facilities and resources for producing goods. WHAT is used to produce things.

What are the main components of Marxism?

• DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM: Political and historical events result from the conflict of social forces and are interpretable as a series of contradictions and their solutions. The conflict is believed to be caused by material needs.

• HISTORICAL MATERIALISM: Historical materialism extends the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of society and its history. Historical materialism recognizes that history and society develop based on material, economic conditions.

• MARXIAN ECONOMICS: Marxian economics, or Marxist economics, focuses on the role of labor in the development of an economy and is critical of the classical approach to wages and productivity developed by Adam Smith. Marx argued that the specialization of the labor force, coupled with a growing population, pushes wages down, adding that the value placed on goods and services does not accurately account for the true cost of labor.

What is Class Conflict?

• Class Conflict defines a social class by its relationship to the means of production, such as factories, agricultural land, and industrial machinery. The social control of labor and of the production of goods and services is a political contest between the social classes. Marx proposes that class conflict is decisive in the history of economic systems organized by hierarchies of social class, such as capitalism and feudalism. Marxists refer to its overt manifestations as class war, a struggle whose resolution in favor of the working class is viewed by them as inevitable under plutocratic capitalism.

What is Commodity Fetishism?

• Commodity fetishism is the collective belief that it is natural and inevitable to measure the value of useful things with money.

What is Use-Value?

• The tangible features of a commodity which can satisfy some human requirement, want or need, or which serves a useful purpose. In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, any product has a labor-value and a use-value, and if it is traded as a commodity in markets, it additionally has an exchange value, most often expressed as a money-price. The usefulness of a commodity vs. the exchange equivalent by which the commodity is compared to other objects on the market

What is Labor-Value?

• The economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of "socially necessary labor" required to produce it.

Private VS Personal Property

• Property that generates profit is private property. Profit is excess money above and beyond the operating costs. Those that use private property but do not own it gain ZERO profit, so therefore private property is property that generates profit for the owner, regardless of who operates it or puts in the work.

• EX: The car magnate's personal belongings, things he uses directly, like his clothes, his house, his own car etc. are PERSONAL property. He uses these directly, as in his skin actually touches his clothes, he is actually using that bathroom, he actually sits in the car, his hand actually touches the fridge door to have some late night champagne. The magnate's FIRM however is PRIVATE property. He isn't personally building the cars, the labourers are doing that. He probably doesn't even manage the workers, he delegated that to his management staff. He is not designing the cars, the engineers do that. He is only indirectly connected to making cars, and that connection is the private property structure of capitalism. He doesn't need to move a finger, he just needs to wait for the money to pile up.

The core ideas of Marxism are that the world is divided into classes, the workers and the richer capitalists who exploit the workers, there is a class conflict that should ultimately result in socialism (workers own means of production), and then communism (stateless, classless society). Karl Marx explained that capitalism is a chaotic system of production beyond the control of humanity. While it raised human productive capacity higher than anytime before, it is doomed to plunge society into ever-greater crises. But Marx also explained that the system creates the modern proletariat. This class is set to overthrow the capitalist class and, on the basis of modern production, build a planned economy to use the resources of society for the benefit of all. Marx developed a method, a comprehensive philosophy, and a world outlook purely derived from the material world that we live in.

3 Pillars Of Marxism

• Dialectical Materialism: Dialectical materialism is the philosophy or methodology of Marxism. Every political movement, party, or even statement of any kind bases itself, consciously or unconsciously, on some sort of philosophy or world outlook. Marxism is concerned with effecting a radical change in society, and therefore requires an exceptionally clear, thoroughgoing, and systemic set of philosophical principles. The basic tenets of dialectical materialism are that everything that exists is material and is derived from matter; that matter is in a process and constant change; and that all matter is interconnected and interdependent.

• Historical Materialism: Marxism analyses the hidden mainsprings that lie behind the development of human society, from the earliest tribal societies up to the modern day. The way in which Marxism traces this winding road is called the materialist conception of history. This scientific method enables us to understand history, not as a series of unconnected and unforeseen incidents, but rather as part of a clearly understood and interrelated process. It is a series of actions and reactions which cover politics, economics and the whole spectrum of social development. To lay bare the complex dialectical relationship between all these phenomena is the task of historical materialism.

• Marxian Economics: The economic system we live under today is capitalism: based on competition, private ownership and the production for profit. Karl Marx revolutionized our understanding of the capitalist system. With his vast collection of economic writings – including the three volumes of Capital – Marx stripped away the mysticism surrounding capitalism, uncovering and explaining its inner processes, emergent laws, and intrinsic contradictions. By developing the ‘labor theory of value’ (labor is the source of all new value within society), Marx was able to explain an enigma that had eluded the classical economists: that of profit. This, Marx demonstrated, arises from exploitation – that is, from the surplus value produced by the working class. Simply put, the capitalists’ profits are obtained from the unpaid labor of the workers. The capitalist system is inherently prone to periodic crises of overproduction – crises that break out and paralyze the entirety of society, as the forces of production crash up against the narrow limits of the market.

Tenets Of Marx

• Social Classes under Capitalism – Marx’s ideas inspired Marxism or the Marxist perspective. He was critical of capitalism, an economic system in which private owners invest money in the business and employ workers to produce goods and service in order to make profits. In Capitalism, there are the two main social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie owns the means of production and private property whereas the proletariat, the working class, owns nothing other than their salaries. Karl Marx pointed out that this created the opportunity for exploitation inherent in the system. He believed the gap in the resources and income between the bourgeoisie and the working class would widen over time. Marx argued that the class struggle between the proletariat and the ruling class was the catalyst for social change. Eventually the proletariat would come to see themselves as equal and as a social class with common interests. This would lead to an overthrow of a capitalist society and the move to communism.

• Communism –Marx’s vision of a socio-economic system based on communal ownership and the production of goods. There would be an abolition of classes and of private ownership, and an elimination of social causes of oppression, alienation, and human unfulfillment.

• Historical Materialism – this is Marx’s central idea that human societies over time were driven by collective economic forces and productive activity. Humans have collective material needs and in order to fulfil these needs, they have to labour together. These social relations of production give rise to super structures such as the political state and ideology found in religion, philosophy, morality, and art.

• Commodity Fetishism – Marx recognized the influence commodities can exert on people and society and saw that we often treated commodities as if they were more special than their worth. One of the ways we fetishize commodities is by identifying ourselves with the things that we own – cars, clothes, jewellery, mobile phones – as part of our existence. When Marx said that the commodity is ‘a very strange thing…which transcends sensuousness’ he meant that we imagined the goods as possessing magical power over us.

• Alienation – Capitalism had led to the sense of alienation. Marx saw that it alienated us from the products of our labor, the labor process, our fellow human beings, and ourselves. Under capitalism, the worker is making products he has no control over and has to accept low minimal wages. Because of the demands placed on the worker and the machine-like way he is working under, he is producing products in an inhuman way and is detached from his own existence.

Conflict theory looks at society as a competition for limited resources. This perspective is a macro-level approach most identified with the writings of German philosopher and sociologist Karl Marx (1818–1883), who saw society as being made up of individuals in different social classes who must compete for social, material, and political resources such as food and housing, employment, education, and leisure time. Social institutions like government, education, and religion reflect this competition in their inherent inequalities and help maintain the unequal social structure. Some individuals and organizations are able to obtain and keep more resources than others, and these “winners” use their power and influence to maintain social institutions.

Marx saw conflict existing between the owners of the means of production—the bourgeoisie—and the laborers, called the proletariat. He maintained that these conflicts appeared consistently throughout history during times of social revolution. These revolutions or “class antagonisms” as he called them, were a result of one class dominating another. Most recently, with the end of feudalism, a new revolutionary class he called the bourgeoisie dominated the proletariat laborers. The bourgeoisie were revolutionary in the sense that they represented a radical change in the structure of society. In Marx’s words, “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”.

For Marx, what we do defines who we are. In historical terms, in spite of the persistent nature of one class dominating another, some element of humanity existed. There was at least some connection between the worker and the product, augmented by the natural conditions of seasons and the rise and fall of the sun, such as we see in an agricultural society. But with the bourgeoisie revolution and the rise of industry and capitalism, the worker now worked for wages alone. His relationship to his efforts was no longer of a human nature, but based on artificial conditions.

Alienation

Marx described modern society in terms of alienation. Alienation refers to the condition in which the individual is isolated and divorced from his or her society, work, or the sense of self. Marx defined four specific types of alienation.

• Alienation from the product of one’s labor. An industrial worker does not have the opportunity to relate to the product he labors on. Instead of training for years as a watchmaker, an unskilled worker can get a job at a watch factory pressing buttons to seal pieces together. The worker does not care if he is making watches or cars, simply that the job exists. In the same way, a worker may not even know or care what product to which he is contributing. A worker on a Ford assembly line may spend all day installing windows on car doors without ever seeing the rest of the car. A cannery worker can spend a lifetime cleaning fish without ever knowing what product they are used for.

• Alienation from the process of one’s labor. A worker does not control the conditions of her job because she does not own the means of production. If a person is hired to work in a fast food restaurant, she is expected to make the food the way she is taught. All ingredients must be combined in a particular order and in a particular quantity; there is no room for creativity or change. An employee at Burger King cannot decide to change the spices used on the fries in the same way that an employee on a Ford assembly line cannot decide to place a car’s headlights in a different position. Everything is decided by the bourgeoisie who then dictate orders to the laborers.

• Alienation from others. Workers compete, rather than cooperate. Employees vie for time slots, bonuses, and job - security. Even when a worker clocks out at night and goes home, the competition does not end. As Marx commented in The Communist Manifesto (1848), “No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker.”

• Alienation from one’s self. A final outcome of industrialization is a loss of connectivity between a worker and her occupation. Because there is nothing that ties a worker to her labor, there is no longer a sense of self. Instead of being able to take pride in an identity such as being a watchmaker, automobile builder, or chef, a person is simply a cog in the machine.

Marxist thinking claims that capitalists and workers are constantly struggling. They call this "Dialectical Materialism." This is the idea that the history of humans is the history of conflict between classes. Different classes with different interests argue or fight each other. Social change (or in its absence, social stagnation) is the result.

Marxism says that capitalists want to exploit the workers as much as possible and make their pay as low as they can. The capitalists do this to create as much profit for themselves as possible, as quickly as possible. Workers, on the other hand, have to struggle to keep their wages up and to keep the "rate of exploitation" low, so that they can live more peaceful lives. This is what Marxism calls "class struggle": where workers and their bosses fight against each other to gain for themselves.

Marxists think that all of written human history has been divided by economic classes. One example is feudal society (a medieval society controlled by feudal lords and nobles). The ruling class got their power and wealth from the labor of peasants (farmers). But as peasants demanded more and more for themselves, small shopkeepers and tradespeople began to appear. Many of these people formed guilds and eventually began to employ workers. These workers were able to gain wealth for themselves at these jobs. These historical events created capitalism. In this way, Marxists think that history has been pushed forward by class struggle. They think that change will be born from this struggle, just like capitalism was. However, they also think that capitalism will give way to communism; as the exploitation of workers becomes worse it will lead workers to revolt against their capitalist rulers.

A Classless Society

Marxism recognizes that in earlier time periods, we lived first under rulers who owned everything. Then we lived under lords who owned land with workers who lived and worked on that land. In Marx's time, people lived under governments that allowed many people to own property. Eventually, Marxists believe that we will move to a society where everyone owns everything in common. This will be called communism. In other words, human society has always been based on the economic forces that human beings can control. For Marxism, this means that each society would take its form based on its "mode of production."

Marxists believe that humans' ability to produce goods and services today means people can move beyond the conflicts of a society that is divided into classes. Many Marxists believe that there will always be revolts and with the right conditions revolutions. In these revolutions, the workers will fight the capitalists. If they win, they will set up a socialist "workers' state" (a form of government where the workers are the rulers of society). This workers' state will only be temporary. Its job will be to take power away from the capitalists, until all the capitalist countries in the world are defeated, and social classes no longer exist.

Marxists believe that if the working class makes itself the ruling class, and destroys the basis for class society (private property, or what Marx called "Bourgeois Property"), there will be a "classless society." In a Marxist society, no social classes are in conflict, and there is no government anymore. The state will no longer be needed. There would be no countries. The world will have no borders. There will be communes around the world. Workers will organize production of goods and services based on what people need, not based on profits.

Marxism says that people in the world are organized into different groups, or classes, based on what they do for work. Most people are called "workers" because they work in factories, offices, or farms for money. They belong to the "working class" (or "proletariat"). Another group, who are not as big as the working class, are "capitalists" (or "bourgeoisie"). They own the factories, land, and buildings that the workers work in. They also own some of the tools the workers have to use. Marx calls capitalists the "Ruling Class" because they live off of the work of all the workers. He also says that the capitalists own the government, army, and courts.

In Marxist views, capital is the "means of production" and money which the capitalist can invest in different places of business, so that they can "profit" or gain more Capital. Most workers work for companies owned by capitalists or "petit-bourgeois" (small business owners). The capitalist pays the worker in exchange for the worker's time. The capitalist has bought a period of time from the worker, which the worker must then use to labor for the capitalist. According to Marxist thinking, this is the only way that a capitalist can create extra money from a commodity (a piece of merchandise).

The capitalist exploits the worker's time as much as they can. The capitalist receives a certain price for the commodity the worker made. The capitalist builds up capital by paying the worker less than that price. In this way, the capitalist exploits the worker's labor by:

• 1. Not paying the worker what their labor was worth

  2. Keeping the extra money that they did not pay the worker

• EXAMPLE: Jane is a shoemaker. She works for Michael, who owns a shoe factory that can make 60 pairs of shoes in a day. Jane makes 60 pairs of shoes every day. Michael pays Jane $20 a day. However, Michael sells each pair of shoes for $2 each. This means he makes $120 in a day. After he pays Jane her $20 wage, Michael has $100 left over. However he then has to pay for materials which cost $1 for each pair, so that's $60 each day. Then running expenses of the factory cost him $10 a day. So he only gets $30 at the end of the day for managing the business. This remaining wealth is called "Profit" or "Surplus [extra] Value." In other words, even though Jane makes 60 shoes every day, she only gets paid the value of 10 pairs of shoes. The rest of the day, while she is making the other 50 shoes, she is creating money for her boss. Her labor is making him richer and helping him earn money.

According to Marx, there are multiple stages of economic development. These include:

• TRIBAL: Tribal society has no social classes but is structured around kinship relations, with hunting the province of men and domestic work the province of women. The tribal form, according to Marx and Engels, is quite elementary at this stage, "a further extension of the natural division of labor existing in the family". During this stage, it is also possible to see a slave culture established, particularly as the population increases, leading to "the growth of wants" and the growth of relations with outside civilizations (through war or barter). With slave culture, we see the beginning of class society.

• PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM: During this stage, the concept of private property begins to develop: "With the development of private property, we find here for the first time the same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more extensive scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the concentration of private property...; on the other hand, coupled with this, the transformation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat".

• FEUDALISM: "Like tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry".In the city, the feudal structure manifested itself in trade guilds. The organization of both the country and the city "was determined by the restricted conditions of production—the small-scale and primitive cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry", which meant that there "was little division of labour in the heyday of feudalism". Exploitation functioned differently during stage than during the height of capitalism because each feudal peasant knew exactly what proportion of his labor had to be handed over to the aristocracy and the church; the rest was his or hers to use.

• CAPITALISM: Because of the eventual growth of commerce (and of human populations), feudal society began to accumulate capital, which, along with the increased debt incurred by the aristocracy, eventually led to the English Revolution of 1640 and the French Revolution of 1789, both of which opened the way for the establishment of a society structured around commodities and profit (i.e. capitalism). In such a society, the proletariat is fooled into believing that s/he is free because s/he is paid for his/her labor. In fact, the transformation of labor into an abstract quantity that can be bought and sold on the market leads to the exploitation of the proletariat, benefitting a small percentage of the population in control of capital. The working class thus experiences alienation since the members of this class feel they are not in control of the forces driving them into a given job. The reason for this situation is that someone else owns the means of production, which are treated like private property.

In Part 1. Commodities and Money, Chapter 1. Commodities, Marx begins his investigation of societies and their wealth with an analysis of commodities. As analysis will demonstrate, the idea of commodity itself becomes the framework through which the larger concept of capitalism may be accessed and understood. Marx therefore initiates his critique of capitalism by defining commodity as the following: “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside of us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production".

More simply put, a worker produces an object (i.e. fabric, shoes, plastic, houses, etc.) that, despite the investment of their personal labor, remains as the boss’s property. This simple, yet crucial fact turns the object into merchandise, or a commodity. The boss who possesses wealth and commodities, is, for Marx, the embodiment of the bourgeois; and the worker thus becomes the embodiment of the proletariat. More important, however, is that the bourgeois, in possessing the capital, maintains control over the use and exchange of those commodities. With this in mind, Marx continues his discussion of commodity by defining use-value and exchange-value.

Commodities And Use-Value

According to Marx, “[e]very useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity”. The diversity of production necessarily yields diverse modes of use, and it is therefore the “work of history” to identify the various modes of use as well as the social standards by which those uses are assessed. Consequently, use-value is defined in the following terms: "The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use-value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labor required to appropriate its useful qualities. […] Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth."

What is especially important to extract from this preliminary definition of use-value is the claim that “[u]se-values become a reality only by use or consumption.” More simply put, the utility, or use-value, of a commodity cannot be fully realized or assessed until the object itself has entered into a system of exchange. Use-value is thus intrinsically related and dependent upon exchange-value. Furthermore, use-value, and subsequently exchange-value, cannot be neatly defined into either quality or quantity, but instead resides within the realms of both quality and quantity.

Commodities And Exchange-Value

Identifying the immediate desire to define exchange-value within quantitative terms, Marx notes that “exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms” (Marx 46). The “contradiction in terms” that Marx aptly identifies is simply the argument that the exchange-value cannot be exclusively evaluated in terms of the commodity itself. Rather, the exchange-value, which, as earlier stated, makes the use-value a reality, must be productive of something that is both separate from and common to the commodities in question: "Therefore, first: the valid exchange-values of a given commodity express something equal: secondly, exchange-value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, or something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it. […] the exchange-values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity. This common ‘something’ cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use-values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterized by a total abstraction from use-value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity."

In arguing that exchange-value is a “phenomenal form” capable of expressing that which is outside of as well as contained within the commodity, Marx necessarily implicates commodity as that which must contain some quality whose utility, in “sufficient quantity,” is identifiable by social standards. That utility, however, is brought to light only when the exchange-value becomes an abstract act that is manifested as independent from the use-value.

Commodity and Human Labor

Recalling that a commodity is first a product of the worker, the commodity has inherent in it the character of human labor: “All that these things now tell us is, that human labour-power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them” (Marx 48). Human labour-power, in this regard, is the “total labour-power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities, produced by that society” (Marx 49). Marx’s inclusion of society is crucial as it necessarily values “labour-power” in terms what it is socially necessary. As such, the actual value of commodity is itself assessed in terms of what is regarded as “socially necessary for its production: "The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. […] In general the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour-time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallized in that article, and the less is its value; and vice versa, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour-time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it."

The magnitude of the value of a commodity is therefore directly related and dependent upon the conception of human labor as that which is both composed of countless individual labors as well as expressive of the utility of the commodity. Human labor is therefore manifested in the commodity as both an expression of the individual investment of labor; and additionally as what is considered to be “socially necessary for its production.” In fixing the commodity within a social context, the notion of human labor becomes an abstraction as it functions to represent what the current society recognizes as beneficial. Important to note, however, is the distinction that the labor “finds expression in value,” but is not in possession of those qualities that create use-value (Marx 51). Implicated in this twofold nature of labor is the notion that useful labor becomes a reality when the object is seen as an object of utility.

In a fashion similar to use-value, the value of the actual labor is materialized when the product of labor becomes an object of utility. In its manifestation of value and utility, labor is then subject to similar modes of assessment: "To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of exchange. Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value […] The labour, whose utility is thus represented by the value in use of its product, or which manifests itself by making its product a use value, we call useful labor. In this connection we consider only its useful effect."

What utility in an object and by extension, value in a commodity, come to represent is “human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general” (Marx 54). The literal expenditure of human labor, specifically, the physical work invested into the object, is representative of both the directed aim of the product as well as human labor in the abstract. As such, the expenditure of labor, in terms of the abstract qualities assigned to human labor, functions to create and shape the value contained within commodities. With regard to the specific aim of labor, expenditure also represents that which is characteristic of useful labor; thereby producing “use values” (Marx 56). Ultimately, the value of the commodity and by extension the collective human labor, is relative to what is regarded as necessary by current society, by current human wants and needs; lending itself to a much more complex reading and understanding of the idea of commodity.

https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/21/marx-and-the-idea-of-commodity/

Abstract labor and concrete labor refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labor in general as economically valuable worktime, and human labor as a particular activity that has a specific useful effect. So, Marx argues that human work is both (1) an activity which, by its useful effect, helps to create particular kinds of products, and (2) in an economic sense a value-forming activity that, if it is productively applied, can help create more value than there was before.

The act of exchange abstracts from the individual peculiarities of different laboring activities, leaving something common to all of them, which Marx calls “human labor in the abstract”, or abstract labor. Abstract Labor, he says is labor stripped of all the particularities of concrete labor. It is human labor in general. Commodities, according to Marx, have economic value “only because human labor in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it”. In other words, abstract labor is what allows different commodities to be exchanged. Now, we have to be careful with the term “embodied”. Marx doesn’t literally mean that abstract labor inheres within the material body of the commodity. Abstract labor is not a physical property of a thing. What he means is that some fraction of the total labor time of society must be used-up, or expended, to produce the commodity and bring it to market. So abstract labor is not concrete labor, not a specific type of laboring activity, but something else, something deeper and more general.

So, for example, the measurement of distance, that we call a foot, originated in the fact that, once, distances were measured out using human feet – indeed, many measures are based on lengths of human body parts. Once it became necessary to have not only more accurate, but standardized measurements of distance, the problem of using “concrete” human feet becomes obvious, and so an “abstract” foot is developed, which is a fixed length.

The product of abstract labor is value, the product of concrete labor is the commodity itself.

https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/06/13/what-is-abstract-labour-and-who-does-the-abstracting/

As a theory of Objective Value, the Labor Theory of Value stands in contrast to Theories of Subjective Value, which form the basis of orthodox economics. These theories place their emphasis not on the Exchange Value of commodities, but on their Use Value. That is they argue that Value is subjective, depending upon the utility that each consumer obtains from any commodity as opposed to all other alternatives. To use the comparison with length used earlier, these subjective theories of value derive the Exchange Value/Price of a commodity on the basis of the sum of all the individual valuations of it made by consumers. The equivalent would be measuring the length of a table not by using a standard meter, but instead asking a large number of people to rank its length in relation to everything else, and then arriving at some average length!

The fact that Marx develops a theory of objective value, of course, does not mean that his overall economic theory of capitalism can be reduced to some similarly objective, and, therefore, mechanical basis. On the contrary, Marx's analysis of Capitalism has to deal with the subjective nature of the psychology of individuals, be they workers, capitalists or consumers, precisely because his theory is a theory about real people, not automatons.

So, for example, Marx states that although there is an absolute minimum of wages, determined by what is physically needed to ensure the reproduction of the working-class, there is no such minimum for the rate of profit. Yet, Marx is fully aware that below a certain level, capitalists will tend to stop investing in productive capital, and instead spend on unproductive consumption, speculation and so on. There is no objective basis for determining when that will occur, because it depends upon the subjective decisions of the capitalists themselves, about what they think is an adequate level of reward.

Similarly, although an objective theory of value can determine what the Exchange Value/Price of any commodity is, it cannot determine what the level of demand for that commodity will be at that price. That again depends upon the subjective assessments of consumers. And Marx was fully aware of the idea of diminishing marginal utility derived from commodities the more of them are consumed. In other words, he understood the principle of Price elasticity of demand. In fact, it forms a central aspect of his theory of overproduction.

The Labor Theory Of Value’s basic claim is simple: the value of a commodity can be objectively measured by the average number of labor hours required to produce that commodity. If a pair of shoes usually takes twice as long to produce as a pair of pants, for example, then shoes are twice as valuable as pants. In the long run, the competitive price of shoes will be twice the price of pants.

The labor theory of value, in a nutshell, holds that the value of an item is not determined by its exchange price, but is related to the amount of labor that went into constructing it. For instance, think about a simple abstract barter economy with two people:

• Person A makes product X and person B makes product Y. There are only two ways to construct value in this economy: The value of X and Y are determined by how much of X A is willing to give to get Y, and how much of Y B is willing to give to get X: supply/demand value model.

• The value of X and Y are determined by how much effort A and B need to produce X and Y: labor value model.

• If X is a hand-woven Persian rug that took six months to complete and Y is a hand-carved duck that took about a week to complete, then X is far more valuable than Y under labor value, system but might be of equal or lesser value to Y in a supply/demand value system (depending on the market).

Marx’s argument was that the labor model was a far more realistic way of understanding value in an economy. However, once money is introduced as a medium of exchange, labor value becomes obscured: no one sees the effort that is put into creating an item, they only see the finished item and the price tag. This creates the opportunity for exploitation. Profit is the difference between what a middle-man pays for goods and what he resells those goods for, so the more that a middle man can undercut the price of laborers and overcharge consumers, the more profit he makes. This leads to full capitalism, where a middle-man (the capitalist) actually owns the tools necessary to produce items (e.g. owns the factory in which Persian rugs are now made). The people doing the labor are then completely dependent on the capitalist for a wage (they no longer engage in labor and sell the product, they now sell their labor directly to produce products that someone else sells), and since the capitalist is trying to maximize his own profit, he will naturally minimize the wage he pays for the labor he buys. And so you end up with exploitation: people investing large amounts of labor into created products, but receiving next to nothing for all of that labor investment. The value of their labor goes almost entirely into the pockets of middle-men.

The usefulness of a commodity vs. the exchange equivalent by which the commodity is compared to other objects on the market. Marx distinguishes between the use-value and the exchange value of the commodity. Use-value is inextricably tied to "the physical properties of the commodity"; that is, the material uses to which the object can actually be put, the human needs it fulfills. In the exchange of goods on the capitalist market, however, exchange-value dominates: two commodities can be exchanged on the open market because they are always being compared to a third term that functions as their "universal equivalent," a function that is eventually taken over by money. Exchange-value must always be distinguished from use-value, because "the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values"; In capital, money takes the form of that equivalence; however, money in fact hides the real equivalent behind the exchange: labor. The more labor it takes to produce a product, the greater its value. Marx therefore concludes that "As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labor-time".

As a form of reification, commodity fetishism perceives economic value as something that arises from and resides within the commodity goods themselves, and not from the series of interpersonal relations that produce the commodity and evolve its value. In Marxism, reification is the process by which social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.

Marx turns to fetishism to make sense of the apparently magical quality of the commodity: "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". Fetishism in anthropology refers to the primitive belief that godly powers can inhere in inanimate things (e.g., in totems). Marx borrows this concept to make sense of what he terms "commodity fetishism." As Marx explains, the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value. When a piece of wood is turned into a table through human labor, its use-value is clear and, as product, the table remains tied to its material use. However, as soon as the table "emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness". The connection to the actual hands of the laborer is severed as soon as the table is connected to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object. As Marx explains, "The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things". What is, in fact, a social relation between people (between capitalists and exploited laborers) instead assumes "the fantastic form of a relation between things". In other words, once something becomes a commodity, it is no longer connected to the laborer who created it.

This effect is caused by the fact that, in a capitalist society, the real producers of commodities remain largely invisible. We only approach their products "through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products". We access the products of the proletariat through the exchange of money with those institutions that glean profit from the labor of the proletariat. Since we only ever relate to those products through the exchange of money, we forget the "secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities"; that is labor: "It is... precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labor and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly"

In summary:

1. Fetishism refers to the nature of the commodity as both an ordinary physical object and as a generator of social relations.

2. In capitalism, social relations are relations between commodities and not people.

3. Commodity fetishism conceals private labor; private labor is only social at the point of exchange.

Communism And The State

The state has not always existed. It is inseparable from class society. Ultimately, it is the instrument for the ruling class to oppress and hold down the masses, guaranteeing the status quo and the sanctity of property. Although the modern state performs many other functions, these are secondary to its real basis - the protection of a set of property relations. To do this, it needs “armed bodies of men” and a monopoly on the use of violence. To establish socialism, it will not be possible for the working class to use the state as it currently exists - that is, with the same network of judges, heads of police and army etc.

Communism And Innovation

The Marxist analysis of history explains that the main motor force in history is the need for society to develop the productive forces: to increase our knowledge of and mastery over nature; to reduce the socially necessary labour time needed to produce and reproduce the conditions of life; to improve lifestyles and raise the standards of living. In periods when society can no longer develop the productive forces – when science, technology, and industry stagnate; when economic growth, employment, and rising living standards cannot be guaranteed – that revolutions occur, in order to remove the barriers standing in the way of progress.

In their article, The Economist explains how economic growth can primarily be broken down into two categories: extensive and intensive. Extensive growth refers to the increase in output due to an increase in the factors of production; for example, by expanding the workforce – as has happened in many periods in the history of capitalism through the growth in the population, the use of migrant labor, the introduction of women into the workforce, or in modern times by increasing the retirement age – and increasing the amount of capital (e.g. machinery and factories) in proportion to this expanded workforce.

Intensive growth, by contrast, is the increase in output for a given size of the workforce. This reflects an increase in the productivity or intensity of labor – what Marx refers to as an increase in “relative surplus value” in terms of capitalism. The difference between “extensive” and “intensive” growth, therefore, is a difference of quantity and quality: extensive growth merely increases the quantity of the productive forces; intensive growth increases their quality.

Marx explained how capitalism, in its early, progressive phase, gave a huge impetus to the development of the productive forces. Competition between different capitalists, in the pursuit of increased profits and greater markets, led not only to extensive growth – through accumulation and reproduction – but also to intensive growth, as the capitalists reinvested profits into the development of new machinery, technologies, and productive techniques. Those who could not keep up with the application of the latest technology and technique produced at a higher cost and were undercut by their competitors. The weak went under and were consumed by the strong, leading over time to a concentration and centralization of capital in the hands of the few, as Marx describes in Capital.

It is notable that the main development in technology and innovation from our period came not from capitalism and the competition of the free market, but from the state control over industry and the planning that capitalist nations were forced to adopt for the purposes of war. Nationalization and public control of the key sectors of research and development were introduced in the advanced capitalist countries during the Second World War in order to innovate and develop new technologies. Aircraft, plastics, synthetic rubber, medicines, telecommunications, nuclear energy, etc., all of these technologies and many more were either invented or given an enormous boost due to WW2, alongside a general development of industry and the introduction of new production techniques for the purpose of the war.

What this all demonstrates is that, for almost a century now, the motor force of innovation has not been capitalist competition, but planning and public ownership. Capitalism, far from developing science and technology, has become an enormous fetter on the development of the productive forces. Private ownership over the means of production has become a gigantic barrier to innovation and ingenuity and must be replaced by a plan of production under the democratic control of society itself.

Communism And Oppression

For Marxists, the fight against oppression goes hand in hand with the class struggle. While we recognize that different groups in society suffer different forms of oppression, we affirm that this oppression is rooted in the class system itself. Racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia are deeply ingrained in capitalist society. However, the Marxist method of historical materialism allows us to trace the roots of these ideas, looking at how they’ve evolved historically and the role they play in society today.

No form of oppression is built into our DNA, nor naturally ordained. The systematic attack against specific groups was not possible before the emergence of the state and class society. As it developed, these ideas have helped uphold the position of the ruling class. In modern society, segregation, violence against women and disenfranchisement are all examples of ways to keep the working class divided, downtrodden and less able to organize against its common exploiter – the capitalist class.

In Lenin’s book, What is to be Done? he explains how uniting struggles is not the same as merging them all into each other. It is precisely this approach that we take in the fight against oppression. Using class methods, we seek to strike these forms of discrimination at their core. By pitting us against one another, the ruling class creates the idea that an individual worker can benefit from the oppression of another. This is a lie. All means of discrimination serve to put a constant downward pressure on conditions and quality of life for the working class, creating a race to the bottom. The only way to fight against this is to unite the workers of all nations, races, genders and sexualities along class lines. This is how we will ensure the full liberation of all of humanity.