Marx's Coat

Marx defines capitalism as the universalizing of the production of commodities. He writes in the Preface to the first edition of Capital that “the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of the commodity” is “the economic cell-form” (Marx 1976 [1867]: 90). ¹ The “economic cell-form” that occupies the first chapter of Capital takes the form of a coat. The coat makes its appearance not as the object that is made and worn but as the commodity that is exchanged. And what defines the coat as a commodity, for Marx, is that you cannot wear it and it cannot keep you warm. But while the commodity is a cold abstraction, it feeds, vampire-like, on human labour. The contradictory moods of Marx’s Capital are an attempt to capture the contradictoriness of capitalism itself: the most abstract society that has ever existed; a society that consumes ever more concrete human bodies. The abstraction of this society is represented by the commodity-form itself. For the commodity becomes a commodity not as a thing but as an exchange value. It achieves its purest form, in fact, when most emptied out of particularity and thingliness. As a commodity, the coat achieves its destiny as an equivalence: as 20 yards of linen, 10 lb. of tea, 40 lb. of coffee, 1 quarter of wheat, 2 ounces of gold, half a ton of iron (Marx 1976 [1867]: 157). To fetishize the commodity is to fetishize abstract exchange-value—to worship, that is, at the altar of the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal which trace the number of paper cups that will buy you an academic book, the number of academic books that will buy you a Cuisinart, the number of Cuisinarts that will buy you a snowmobile. In Capital, Marx’s coat appears only immediately to disappear again, because the nature of capitalism is to produce a coat not as a material particularity but as a “supra-sensible” value (Marx 1976 [1867]: 165). The work of Marx’s Capital is to trace that value back through all its detours to the human labor whose appropriation produces capital (see Scarry 1985). This leads Marx theoretically to the labor theory of value and to an analysis of surplus-value. It leads him politically to the factories, the working conditions, the living spaces, the food, and the clothing of those who produce a wealth that is expropriated from them.