Early in the Grundrisse, Marx notes that families, clans, and many traditional communities once produced what was necessary to meet all their needs and wants. Here, there was no formal “exchange” of products of labor. For example, grain that one person harvested in a family or clan would not be exchanged for bread that another baked. Indeed, in most families today labor is directly social, and there is no formal exchange among family members when, for example, one person prepares a meal and another gardens.
But unlike previous conditions where families and clans produced just enough to meet more basic needs and wants, “progress” in science and technology, always people to produce much more and, indeed, a surplus of needs and wants in a given period of time. However, this is also accompanied by a greater division of labor, where people rarely produce things from start to finish but contribute a portion to the final product, increasingly in factories and other workplaces outside of the home that produce one or a limited number of things. Therefore, few produce everything that is required to meet even basic needs in one place. It thus becomes necessary to exchange the surplus of what is produced to secure wants and needs from many different sources. So too, with a surplus of what is required to meet needs and wants, there is time to produce a greater variety of things. Marx argued that there is thus an expansion of needs and wants; and with improved means of transportation and communication, there is greater ability to exchange surplus products for products from around the world.
Marx then notes that only things that vary qualitatively are exchanged. For example, it would not make sense to exchange a pencil for a pencil of the exact kind. The question then becomes how qualitatively different things are exchanged. Marx noted Aristotle’s frustration when he attempted to explain how qualitatively different things were exchanged: such as five beds for a house in ancient Greece. Marx argued that in order to exchange two commodities with different qualities they must share something in common: a third thing that is qualitatively different from the two things. Moreover, as it would not always be possible to exchange one thing for another, such as exchanging one pencil for one watch, this substance must also vary in amount from one commodity to another. Clearly, if a number of pencils are exchanged for a watch it is not because these two things share a quantity of a particular chemical or other natural substance.
At least as far back as Aristotle, numerous philosophers and political economists, including Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and the North African social philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), contended that the substance that facilitated exchange was labor. And, in particular, Marx focused on the work of Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823), two of the most influential political economists of the late 18th and early 20th century who argued that what explains how things are exchanged is the human labor embodied or objectified in a product. Isaak Rubin and others argue that Marx did not view the value of things as something material or created by the physical activity of laboring. While physical activity related to specific sorts or qualities of labor is of course necessary to produce things according to Marx, it is not sufficient to create value. Marx called the physical activity of laboring concrete labor. Concrete labor creates tangible things that are useful and thus have what he and other political economists called use value.
For example, the specific, qualitatively distinct activities of milling grain and baking are necessary to produce bread and use value that provides nourishment and taste. However, as Marx describes, the use value of something does not depend on the quantity of this useful, physical labor. As he notes, even if the concrete labor required to produce a loaf of bread decreased by 95% with improved techniques of production -- or it ‘fell from the sky’ -- its use value would still be the same. Consequently, the use value of a thing cannot explain variations in the proportion that is exchanged for other things. For example, the use value of a loaf of bread does not explain why it might exchange for a dozen apples at one point in time and a half dozen later on. Moreover, the concept of concrete labor does not explain how qualitatively different types of labor such as baking bread and picking apples are compared and exchanged. Thus, neither useful, concrete labor nor the use value of what it produces can explain the exchange of qualitatively different things produced by qualitatively different types of labor.
However, Marx remarked that “everyone knows” that things have a “value-form common to them all, and presenting a marked contrast with the varied bodily forms of their use-values. I mean their money-form” (Capital, Vol. I: 47). But this still does not solve the problem. For example, a certain quantity of gold or a dollar bill is, of course, not contained in everything that is produced. And although “everyone knows” that things are exchanged for money, most are puzzled by the origin and character of money. Marx thus proffered that he would attempt to do what no other bourgeois economist had attempted: to “trace the genesis of money” and thereby solve the “riddle” of money (Ibid: 48).
