Recently studied Chapter 1, Section 3 of “Introduction to Political Economy” — The Dual Nature of Labor in Commodity Production: Concrete Labor and Abstract Labor. It mentions that commodities are not objects, but rather social relations between producers concealed under the shell of objects. When people exchange commodities, they are actually exchanging their own labor. This makes one think of the many parasitic bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie in Chinese society today, as well as the large parasitic student groups under the middle-road society. They all buy commodities with money on the market and exchange labor with others (commodity producers). Petty bourgeois students do not engage in labor, so they are certainly using others’ labor to exchange, occupying others’ labor, parasitizing others, or more plainly, exploiting others. The harm of parasitism is very significant.
Another issue. The book states that the value amount is determined by labor time, but for various reasons, the labor time required by different producers to produce the same commodity varies, and the value of the commodity is not determined by individual producers’ labor time. Because if it were, for example, producing a table, someone with high technical skills, good tools, and diligence might produce the table in only 10 hours, while another producer, due to poorer tools or effort, takes 13 hours. It cannot be that the lazier or less skilled person (the one who takes 13 hours) produces a commodity of higher value. In reality, the value of a commodity is determined by socially necessary labor time. However, I still do not understand why the value of a commodity is specifically determined by “socially necessary labor time” and not by some other kind of labor time. Is there a direct explanation?
In fact, Marx already answered this question in Volume I of Capital: "Some may think that since the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor socially necessary to produce it, then the lazier and less skilled a person is, the more valuable his commodity would be, because it takes him more time to make it. However, the labor that constitutes the value is the same human labor, the expenditure of the same human labor power. The total social labor power embodied in all the value in the commodity world is regarded here as a single human labor power, although it consists of countless individual labor powers. Each of these individual labor powers, like any other, is the same human labor power, provided it has the nature of social average labor power, and plays the role of such social average labor power, thus only using the average necessary labor time or social necessary labor time in the production of commodities. Socially necessary labor time is the labor time required to produce a certain use value under the normal production conditions of society, with the average level of skill and intensity of labor in society. For example, after the use of steam-powered looms in Britain, the labor needed to weave a certain amount of yarn into cloth might be cut in half compared to the past. In reality, the handloom weavers in Britain still take as much labor time as before to weave yarn into cloth, but now the product of their one-hour personal labor only represents half an hour of social labor, so its value has also fallen to half of what it was before.
I think the main issue is that political economy should be viewed from the perspective of relationships between people. Political economy studies the relationships between people in production, such as categories like value, capital, surplus value, and profit, which are essentially social relations of production between people. If we treat these things as some kind of object—for example, understanding value as paper money or gold, understanding commodities as items on a shelf, understanding capital as machinery, and understanding profit as excess paper money or gold—then we fall into fetishism. Marx said, “A black person is just a black person. Only under certain relations does he become a slave. A spinning machine is just a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain relations does it become capital. Outside of these relations, it is not capital, just as gold itself is not money, and sugar is not the price of sugar.” Essentially, as Marx said, we shouldn’t obsess over what these concepts are ‘things’; rather, it’s better to think about what social classes, strata, groups, and people in various situations are actually doing in production and what kinds of social relations they have.