The wealth of societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production appears in the form of an “enormous accumulation of commodities.”1 The individual commodity appears as the elementary form of that wealth. i Hence our investigation begins by analyzing the commodity. A commodity is, first of all, an external object—a thing whose properties satisfy human wants or needs of whatever kind. The nature of these wants and needs—whether they come from our belly or our imagination— doesn’t matter here. 2 It also doesn’t matter how an object satisfies them: whether directly, as a means of subsistence or enjoyment, or indirectly, as the means to produce something else.ii Every useful thing—iron, paper, etc.—can be considered from two perspectives at once: quality and quantity. Since every such thing is a whole that combines many properties, it can be useful in different ways. Discovering these ways and thus the diverse applications of a thing is a historical act. 3

So is the creation of a society’s standards for measuring amounts of useful things. The standards of measurement for commodities differ in part because of the natural differences among the objects measured, in part by convention. The usefulness of a thing makes it into a use-value.4 Usefulness, in this sense, doesn’t hover above us in the air. Determined by the properties of a commodity’s body, it would not exist without them.iii Thus a commodity’s body—as with iron, wheat, diamonds, etc.—is itself a use-value or good. Whether or not it has this character doesn’t depend on how much work, or how little, human beings have to do to appropriate its useful properties. iv When considering use-values, we always suppose that we are dealing with definite amounts, for example, dozens of watches, yards of linen, tons of iron. The use-values of commodities supply the material for an independent discipline: commodity studies. 5 Use-value is realized only when something is used or consumed. Whatever social form wealth takes, use-values make up its material content.v Within the form of society that concerns us here, they also function as the material bearers of … exchange-value.vi Exchange-value first appears as a quantitative relation, the ratio in which one type of use-value is exchanged for another. 6 This relation changes constantly, varying with time and place. Exchange-value thus seems to be something accidental and purely relative, and the idea of exchange-value as something inherent in (valeur intrinsèque) or imma-nent to a commodity seems to be a contradictio in adjecto.7,vii But let’s take a closer look. A single commodity, say eight bushels of wheat, can be traded for other goods in the most diverse ratios of exchange. But the wheat’s exchange-value remains the same whether it is expressed as this much boot polish, that much silk, this much gold, or something else. Its exchange-value, then, must have a content that can be distinguished from these different modes of expression. Let’s now consider two commodities—for instance, wheat and iron. Whatever their relation of exchange may be, it can always be represented as an equation in which some quantity of wheat equals some quantity of iron: eight bushels of wheat, for example, equals 100 pounds of iron. What does this equation say? That the same amount of a common something exists in two different things: eight bushels of wheat and 100 pounds of iron. These two things are thus equal to a third, to something that in and for itself is neither the one nor the other. Each, insofar as it is an exchange-value, must be reducible to that something. A simple geometrical example will illustrate this point. In order to establish and compare the surface areas of rectilinear figures, we redraw them as triangles, then reduce the triangles to an expression very different from their vis ible shapes: one-half the base times the height. The exchange-values of commodities are likewise reduced to a common something, which they represent in greater or smaller amounts. This common something can’t be a geometrical, physical, or chemical property, or any of a commodity’s natural properties. The physical properties of commodities matter only insofar as they make commodities useful and, thus, into use-values. But what characterizes the exchange relation of commodities is clearly that it involves abstracting from their use-values. Within this relation, one use-value counts for exactly as much as any other, given the right proportion. Or as old Barbon says,viii “One sort of wares are as good as another, if the value be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value.” 8 As use-values, commodities differ above all with respect to quality; as exchange-values, they can differ only with re spect to quantity, and they contain not even an atom of use-value. If we set aside the use-value belonging to the physical bodies of commodities, just one quality remains: they are products of labor. But the product of labor, too, has been transformed in our hands. If we abstract from its use-value, we will be abstracting also from the physical components and forms that made it into a use-value in the first place. The product of labor is no longer a table, house, spool of yarn, or any other useful thing. All its sensuous components are wiped away. Neither is it any longer the work of carpentry, construction, weaving, or some other par ticular kind of productive labor. When the useful character of labor products disappears, so, too, does the useful character of the instances of labor represented in them; what happens, in effect, is that the different concrete forms of those instances of labor vanish as well. They can no longer be distinguished from one another and have all been reduced to the same human labor, abstract human labor. Now let’s consider what remains of these labor products. Nothing of them is left over except the same ghostly objecthood—a bare gelatinous blob of undifferentiated human labor, of human labor-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. ix All that these things still represent is this: when they were made, human labor-power was expended, human labor accumulated. As crystallized pieces of this social substance, which they consist of collectively, they are … values. x The exchange-value of commodities presented itself to us in their exchange relations as something fully independent of commodities’ use-values.xi If we now abstract from the use-value of labor products, we will arrive at their value as it was defined above. The common something expressed by commodities’ exchange relations or exchange-value is, in fact, their value. The course of this examination will eventually bring us back to the notion of exchange-value as value’s necessary mode of expressionxii or form of appearance. xiii First, however, we need to consider value without taking that form into account. A use-value or good has value only because abstract human labor is objectified or materialized in it. How should the magnitude of its value be measured? By the amount of “value-creating substance” it contains: labor. The amount of labor is measured by its duration, and labor-time has its own standard of measurement in definite units of time, such as hours, days, and so on. We might be tempted to think that since the amount of labor expended to produce a commodity determines its value, the lazier or more incompetent the person producing it, the more valuable the commodity will be. After all, he will take longer to produce it. But the labor that constitutes the substance of values is equal human labor— the expenditure of the selfsame human labor-power. All the labor-power represented in the values of the commodity world, the sum of a society’s labor-power represented in them, counts for something here as one and the same human labor-power, even though labor-power belonging to innumerable individual people goes into it. xiv Each person’s labor-power is the same human labor-power as any other person’s, insofar as it has the characteristic of being socially average labor-power and functions as such socially average labor-power, which means that it requires only the labor-time necessary on average, the labor-time socially necessary, to produce a given commodity. Socially necessary labor-time is the labor-time needed to produce a given use-value under a society’s normal conditions of production, using labor that has an average level of skill and intensity. When the power loom was introduced in England, the labor needed to turn a given quantity of yarn into fabric likely fell to half of what it had been. xv The English hand weaver had to expend as much labor-time as ever to transform the same amount of material, but now the product of his individual labor-hour represented only half a social labor-hour, and thus its value dropped by half. It is solely the quantity of socially necessary labor—or the socially necessary labor-time—that goes into making a use-value that determines its magnitude of value. 9 Here, each individual commodity counts for something only as an average instance of its type. 10 Commodities that contain equal amounts of labor—in other words, commodities that can be produced in the same amount of labor-time—will therefore have the same magnitude of value. A commodity’s value has the same relation to the value of every other commodity that the labor-time required to produce it has to the labor-time required to produce every other commodity. “As values, all commodities are nothing but discrete masses of coagulated labor-time.”11,xvi A commodity’s magnitude of value will not vary, then, as long as the amount of labor-time needed to make it remains constant. But the labortime it takes to produce a commodity varies whenever labor’s productive power does. A number of factors determine labor’s productive power, including workers’ average skill-level, how far scientific knowledge and its technological applications have developed, the social organization of the production process, the scope and efficiency of the means of production; and conditions in nature.xvii The same quantity of labor that is represented in eight bushels of wheat during a good harvest might, for example, be represented in only four bushels during a bad one. The same quantity of labor will extract more metal from rich mines than poor ones, and so on. Diamonds are hard to find in the earth’s crust. Discovering them thus requires, on average, a lot of labor-time, and from this it follows that much labor is represented in a small quantity of diamonds. Jacob doubts that the price of gold has ever corresponded to its full value.xviii That is even truer of diamonds. In 1823, according to Eschwege, the spoils from Brazilian diamond mines over the previous eighty years didn’t equal the total price of one and a half years of the country’s average sugar or coffee production, even though the diamonds represented far more labor, and thus more value. xix Applied to more bountiful mines, the same quantity of labor would be represented in a larger number of diamonds, and the diamonds’ value would fall. If we could easily turn coal into diamonds, their value would drop below that of plain bricks. In general, the greater labor’s productive power, the smaller the amount of labor-time needed to make a good; and the smaller the amount of labor crystallized in a good, the smaller its value. The reverse is also true: the less productive power labor has, the greater the labor-time needed to produce a product and, in turn, the greater a product’s value. A commodity’s magnitude of value varies directly with the amount of labor realized in it, and inversely with that labor’s productive power. A thing can be a use-value without being a value. This happens when labor doesn’t mediate a thing’s usefulness for human beings, as with air, virgin soil, naturally occurring meadows and trees, and so on. A thing can also be both useful and a product of human labor without being a commodity. Anyone who satisfies one of his own wants or needs with something he produced has made a use-value, not a commodity, because to produce a commodity is to produce not only a use-value but also a social use-value, a use-value for others. Finally, nothing can be a value without being a use-value. If a thing is useless, then so is the labor it contains. The labor doesn’t count as labor and thus generates no value.

1. Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie Berlin, 1859,” pag. 3. [Editor’s Note: This book was published in English under the title A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. We cite the translation by S. W. Ryazanskaya in Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 269. Translation modified.]
2. “Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body … the greatest number [of things] have their value from supplying the wants of the mind.” Nicholas Barbon: “A Discourse on coining the new money lighter, in answer to Mr. Locke’s Considerations etc. London 1696,” pp. 2, 3.
3. “ Things have an intrinsick vertue [this is Barbon’s specific locution for use-value], which in all places have the same vertue; as the loadstone to attract iron” (op. cit. p. 6). The magnet’s property of attracting iron first became useful when, as a result of that property, magnetic polarity was discovered.
4. “The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniences of human life” (John Locke, “Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest. 1691” in “Works edit. Lond. 1777.” V. II, p. 28). [Editor’s note: Quotation not fully consistent with Marx’s source text, which reads “the intrinsick, natu ral worth,” rather than “the natural worth.”] Seventeenth-century English writers still tended to use “worth” for use-value and “value” for exchange-value, which is very much in the spirit of a language with an affinity for expressing unmediated things with Germanic words and reflected things with Romance ones.
5. A governing notion in bourgeois socie ties is the fictio juris that every person who buys commodities also has an encyclopedic knowledge of them. [Editor’s note: Here fictio juris means an assumption or presupposition that runs counter to reality.]
6. “Value consists in the exchange relation between one thing and another, between a given quantity of one product and a given quantity of another” (Le Trosne: “De L’Intérêt Social.” Physiocrates, éd. Daire. Paris 1846, p. 889).
7. “Nothing can have an intrinsick value” (N. Barbon op. cit. p. 6). Or as Butler says: The value of a thing Is just as much as it will bring. [Editor’s note: An adapted line from Samuel Butler’s poem Hudibras: “For what is the worth of any thing, but so much money as ‘twill bring?”]
8. “One sort of wares are as good as another, if the value be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value… . One hundred pounds worth of lead or iron, is of as great a value as one hundred pounds worth of silver and gold” (N. Barbon op. cit. pp. 53 and 7). [Editor’s note: Marx translated the passage into German for the body of his text and quoted the original more fully in his footnote, misquoting it very slightly: “values” becomes “value,” etc. He translated the word “value,” as he often did, as “Tauschwerth,” the German term generally rendered into English as “exchange-value.”]
9. Note added to the second edition: “The value of them (the necessaries of life) when they are exchanged the one for another, is regulated by the quantity of labour necessarily required, and commonly taken in producing them” (“Some Thoughts on the Interest of Money in general, and particularly in the Public Funds etc.” London, pp. 36, 37). This remarkable anonymous work from the previous century is undated. From its content, however, we can infer that it appeared during the reign of George II, probably in 1739 or 1740.
10. “All products of the same type properly form a single mass, the price of which is determined in general and without regard to particu lar circumstances” (Le Trosne op. cit. p. 893).
11. K. Marx op. cit. p. 6. [Editor’s note: The line can be found on p. 272 of the English translation, which has been modified. In the earlier text, Marx writes “Tauschwerthe,” “exchange-values,” but here he changes it to simply “Werthe” or “values.”]