I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do. You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery —more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
Inspired by economist Adam Smith’s concept of the “invisible hand,” the essay “I, Pencil” has been championed by conservative economists and politicians since its publication. In the afterword, economist Milton Friedman wrote, “[Read]...[spread] the basic idea that human freedom required private property, free competition, and severely limited government.”
However, Marx would see “I, Pencil” in quite a different light: the abstraction of the labor necessary to make a pencil from the pencil itself reduces its value, as "A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified... or materialized in it.” In other words, the value of the pencil itself is at least partially due to the labor put in to create it. Marx goes on, writing, “How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ‘value-forming substance’, the labour, contained in the article” (Capital, 129). Ergo, the more labor put into an object the more valuable it is.
In the story, the pencil begins by remarking that it is taken for granted and considered commonplace, despite the complex nature of its creation. This supports Marx’s theory that capitalist systems are unstable because the commodity value of items in a free market becomes disassociated from their use-value. Another way to put it would be that, since the pencil is the product of an enormous amount of labor, or “value-forming substance,” should its value not be much higher than it is? Marx would perhaps have been entertained to hear Read’s own admission (in the pencil’s voice, of course) that the pencil is not valued as it should be, as detailed in the first full paragraph.
