NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF THE THEORY OF COMMODITIES.
The analysis of commodities according to their twofold aspect of use-value and exchange value by which the former is reduced to work or deliberate productive activity; and the latter, to labor time or homogeneous social labor, is the result of a century and a half of critical study by the classical school of political economy which dates from William Petty in England and Boisguillebert in France16 and closes with Ricardo in the former country and Sismondi in the latter.
Petty reduces use-value to labor, without deceiving himself as to the natural limitation of its creative power. As regards concrete labor, he sizes it up in the magnitude of its social aspect, as the division of labor.17 This view of the source of material wealth does not remain more or less fruitless as in the case of his contemporary, Hobbes, but leads up to his Political Arithmetic, the first form in which Political Economy is differentiated as an independent science.
He defines exchange value, however, just as it appears in the process of exchange of commodities, viz. as money; and money he defines as an existing commodity, gold and silver. Laboring under the ideas of the monetary system, he declares the special branch of labor which is devoted to the production of gold and silver as the labor which determines exchange value. What he really means is that the labor of members of society must produce not direct use-values, but commodities or use-values which by means of exchange are capable of assuming the form of gold and silver, i. e. of money, i. e. of exchange value, i. e. of embodiments of universal labor. His example, however, shows strikingly that the recognition of labor as the source of material wealth by no means excludes the misconception of the particular social form in which labor constitutes the source of exchange value.