Labour and Monopoly Capital - Essay Example

As opposed to the use-value, exchange-value is a quantifiable worth of something. It determines what one can obtain in exchange for some other thing.

In other words, it can be said it is the proportional quantity in which it can be bartered with all other commodities and things. Value: In Karl Marx's perspective, value is a social substance of an object, which renders use-value entirely meaningless; and exchange value is traditionally the relative value of an object in relation with another. Although it does not mean to ignore the use-value and exchange-value, because it is the use-value of a thing that forms the basis for determining the exchange-value; which determines its ultimate value.

Answer 3:Karl Marx has defined commodity as 'an external object that satisfies wants or needs, these commodities differ from each other because of its use value and the exchange value. Whereas, Marx used the word fetish to describe some object or commodity that fascinates and blinds one from seeing the truth. Hence, coined the term 'commodity fetishism'. The reality of the world is that money fascinates and so do commodities. The people living in this world question who has it, how is it acquired and spent According to Marx, commodity including money is a fetish that puts a blind eye on the understanding, that, there is one class of the society which is exploited.

Further to his beliefs, in a capitalistic economy, the factory owners are exploiting laborers to generate surplus value from the value that goes into the production of a commodity. Since the capacity of an individual was the production of labor power, and individuals had the freedom to use their own hands for productivity purposes, they had an option to sell their laborious efforts to the capitalist; hence labor power was treated as a commodity. And accordingly, the capitalist with their money bought one commodity, labor power (the socially needed labor), did some value addition, and further sold the value-added commodity for a certain value and the cycle would go on, until the final consumption.

In the value addition stages, profit was accumulated at each stage of the exchange. This is the cycle, Paul Sweezy refers to. Commodity fetishism talks about the generation of surplus-value by exploiting labor and this is the profit for the capitalists.