How are use value and sale value determined of a commodity, for example a linen coat? And how does commodity fetishism enter into this?
Use value is determined quite simply by the needs of individuals within a given societyâi.e., the temperature of the weather would determine the use value of a linen coat.
Now, before talking about sale value, though, we have to talk about exchange valueâwhen commodities are traded with each other on the market, there must necessarily be something within them which is being compared. The one thing which each and every commodity has in common is that an amount of labor has gone into bringing it to the market, and so these amounts of labor are what merchants compare to make their trades. Three things should be noted about this labor:
What's compared here is labor in general, not any one kind of labor in particular. Butchers and seamstresses perform incomprably different tasks in their jobs, but both require a definite expenditure of labor power on the part of the workers, and this expenditure is what is being measured. Hence, Marxists will often refer to "generalized labor" as the measure of value.
It's not the exact labor of the specific individuals who made the particular commodity that determines exchange value, but the average amount of labor it takes to produce the average commodity. So, a new seamstress might take twice as long on a linen coat as her coworkers, but that wouldn't make her coat twice as valuable exchange-wise. Conversely, an individual or firm who figures out how to produce their commodities twice as fast as everyone else will be able to make extra profits of their work for a bit of time until everyone else catches up and the average goes down.
It's not just the labor that goes into directly making the thing, but all the labor involved in bringing it to marketâthat is, exchange value includes transport, procurement, training and upkeep of the workers, etc. If a commodity takes two weeks to transport to a given market, then that excursion will be incorporated into its exchange value; if a commodity requires someone to undergo five years of training to produce, then those five years will be incorporated into the exchange value of the commoditie; if a company has monopoly control over a bottleneck within the production of a commodity, then by artificially raising the labor power it takes everyone else to get the commodity they can actually increase the exchange value it presents on the market. (These, btw, are some of the reasons why things generally cost more in the imperial core than the periphery.)
Exchange value is a kind of social fiction that exists in the same way that race and gender doâit can't be directly observed within the material existence of things, but enforcing the idea that it exists allows the ruling class to do the things it wants to do. Marxists will also often call exchange value just "value", which is a bit confusing, but at least we're consistent about it đ
Because exchange value isn't actually directly observable (and is arguably impossible to precisely calculate), merchants can't trade by it exactly: this brings us to sale value, that is, price. Price is the capitalists' approximation of exchange value
We know intuitively when we go shopping if something is priced (often) much higher đ or (luckily) much lower đ than its exchange value, but within this window it's nebulous. During periods of heightened competition, merchants will price commodities as low as they can get away with whilst still turning a profit, and during periods of low competition, they will price commodities as high as they can get away with whilst still making sales. So, sale value is determined by capitalists interpreting exchange value in line with their class interests at a given moment.
A "fetish" is an object that stands in place of a relationship. European anthropologists racistly presumed that indigenous peoples were worshiping physical idols instead of the deities they representedâhence the classical meaning of the term. Sigmund Freud sexistly pathologized people who were sexually excited by objects other than penises and vaginasâhence the current popular meaning of the term. Marx non-problematically analyzed the way in which, under capitalism, our relationships with each other are mediated through the exchange of commoditiesâhence the meaning of the term we're currently examining.
This is a complecated social phenomenon which emerges from the circulation of values. Let's explore an example:
I am typing this message on a smartphone, made out of precious metals extracted from the DR Congo, assembled most likely in Vietnam or India (the fact that I can't easily find out where is part of the problem !!), shipped finally to Amerikkka, where retail employees stocked it before selling it to me. By purchasing this smartphone, I have effectively paid the Congolese miners to extract these materials, the Vietnamese or Indian workers to manufacture the smartphone, the Amerkkkan retail clerk to handle it, and all the sailors and drivers to trasnport the component parts at each stage. But this isn't how people typically experience the commodities we purchaseâwe experience them as though they spontaneously appear before us!
Nearly the entire human species is engaged in one, gargantuan economic system together, and yet we do not often relate to each other in this way. The people of the world don't gather to decide what to produce and how to produce it, rather a handful of capitalists decide what to produce, and then the people of the world are thrust into relations with each other based off of the needs of the commodity!
The circulation of exchange values enables capitalists to play their game, whilst the fetishism of commodities is the ideological result of our living as alienated subjects within this exchange circuit.
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