Lecture V

The question could be put differently, and in the usual socialistic way of thinking it is put thus: How is man to be refunded in the right way for his labour power? The socialistic ideals run mostly on the lines of making adequate refund for power expended on manual labour. But the facts are quite otherwise. A human study of folk-economy makes it clear that no form of human labour power can be exchanged for anything else—neither goods nor anything representing goods, such as money, are interchangeable with labour power. Even when transformed into reality it is no real process but only a thing of the imagination that the manual worker should give his work, and then, in exchange, receive money for what he expends in labour power. That is absolutely false and the true process is masked; something quite different happens. In the present social organism the worker brings his labour power to market and the employer, the contractor, buys it with wages. But it is not really thus. In the economic life there can only be exchange of one commodity with another, commodities, that is, in the widest sense; and in reality the whole of economic life consists in the exchange of commodities. What is a commodity, if we think of its reality? A piece of ground is not a commodity; coal, when under the earth is not a commodity. A commodity is the result of human activity alone, something transformed by human activity or something men has moved from one place to another. Under those two headings you find everything that can be brought into the concept ‘commodity’. The nature of a commodity has been the subject of much argument. A close study of economic connections generally shows that in reality only this definition will hold water.