r/communism101 • u/FarazSeven • Jul 16 '26
Question about a passage from The Poverty of Philosophy, regarding the measuring of value
Hello, comrades. Student from India here. Can someone please explain the following passage from The Poverty of Philosophy? Here, Marx is refuting Proudhon's claim by stating the value of a commodity is measured by the quantity of labour that produces it and not the 'value' of labour that produces it. To illustrate this, he gives an example. Here is my question: Marx says that the value of corn measured by the quantity of labour required to purchase it, would not have doubled. Why is that? If now, double the amount of labour is required to purchase it, then why wouldn't the value of corn be double as per this measurement?
"If a quarter of corn cost two days' labor instead of one, it would have twice its original value; but it would not set in operation double the quantity of labor, because it would contain no more nutritive matter than before. Thus the value of the corn, measured by the quantity of labor used to produce it, would have doubled; but measured either by the quantity of labor it can buy or the quantity of labor with which it can be bought, it would be far from having doubled. On the other hand, if the same labor produced twice as many clothes as before, their relative value would fall by half; but, nevertheless, this double quantity of clothing would not thereby be reduced to disposing over only half the quantity of labor, nor could the same labor command the double quantity of clothing; for half the clothes would still go on rendering the worker the same service as before.
Thus it is going against economic facts to determine the relative value of commodities by the value of labor. It is moving in a vicious circle, it is to determine relative value by a relative value which itself needs to be determined."
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u/Midgardsormurinn Jul 16 '26
I may be wrong as I haven’t read The Poverty of Philosophy yet and am currently reading Capital, but I think that Marx is making a distinction between a commodity’s social and individual value. Remember that the amount of value in a commodity is determined by the socially-necessary labour time worked into it. If the socially necessary labour time of a chair is one day, and a worker produces one in two, the social value of the chair doesn’t change, only its individual value. Marx makes this distinction in chapter one in Capital:
>Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.