Emancipatory Implications of Karl Marx’s View of The Commodity

In his analysis of the commodity (Capital: Volume One, Chapter One), Karl Marx distinguishes two different aspects to the commodity. It has both a use-value and an exchange value. Its ‘use-value’ simply means the commodity is prized for its capacity to satisfy a particular human want. It is valued in this sense because of its usefulness. But commodities are also prized in another way as well – they can be exchanged for any other commodity on the basis they share, in varying degrees, different quantities of exchange-value. So, to take an example where the quantities of exchange value broadly match, an apple can be exchanged for a pencil or a packet of cigarette rolling papers.

The reason why this has emancipatory implications lies in considering what happens if you need that pencil or those cigarette rolling papers, but you do not posess the apple in the first place. Obviously then, you go without. If you cannot afford something, you do not get it. Therefore, the human freedom is, in some sense, curtailed. The product may exist, but you do not get it unless you have an equivalent amount of exchange-value with which to obtain it, usually a quantity of money. So, for example, supermarkets throw away around a third of their quickly-perishable foodstuffs whilst the United Nations estimates 10% of the world population is hungry or malnourished. This is not a moralistic criticism: the supermarket management, now matter how benign they may be, really cannot just give away that food because then everyone would be demanding it for free, in which case they would not be in business. The criticism is levelled at the law of value which governs all economic transactions in a capitalist society. This economic law is inhibiting freedom.

What is worse, as market conditions deteriorate, wages have less purchasing power. So, the level of unfreedom increases in capitalism – ‘progress’ is very mixed, to say the least.

To change the law of value, society would need to be producing directly to meet the needs of the individual consumer, rather than producing goods for sale. The only way this can be done is via the mediation of a social plan. Using powerful online technologies, society could adapt its production to what is reasonably requested, and distribute the common bounty without the need for money, or any other token of exchange-value. It is only in this way, humanity will become largely free and happy.

On Capitalism: The Metaphor of the School Bully

High school bully Biff Tannen (‘Back to the Future’ trilogy) was inspired by Donald Trump


Capital is like a bully at school who is supremely dominant. He goes around nicking the other kid’s lunch money. He harasses the girls and litters the place. He doesn’t do his homework but steals the work done by others. The school authorities are aware this guy is a problem for the functioning of a harmonious atmosphere, but, apart from the occasional “ooh you naughty boy”, refuse to expel the bully. Indeed, most of the time, they turn a blind eye to his behaviour, educate the other children that this is just unchangeable ‘human nature’, the only way of running a school. It would take a sea-change in the school authorities to actually expel the bully and create a nice school.

In the real world the struggle between those that want the sea-change and the lying complacent traditional authorities, is manifested as a struggle between political progressives (including the direct victims of the bully who rebel), and conservatives. So beware of the right-ward drift of the Conservative Leadership contest. Your taxes just are what lunch costs. Cutting taxes will not make you richer, it will simply remove any support you have against the bully. You will get less lunch. And allowing the bully to run amok even more will just mean he robs more and more from you. If the bully wasn’t taking part of your lunch money, taxation would not be a problem. Indeed one would see it as good for the school as a whole.

Regime change begins at home, and goal-directed regime change to expel the bully is the only consistent form of humanism. Sometimes, thinking metaphorically can be an aid to truth.

3 Million Light Years From Earth – BT Phone Home: In Conversation With Striking Telecom Workers

British Telecom (BT) workers walked out on two days last week, with more strikes in the pipeline until their demands are met. Their trade union, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) balloted for strike action and 95.8% of engineers voted in favour. Picket lines were formed in dozens of locations up and down the entire UK. I visited one in Chelmsford, Essex, on Friday July 29th 2022, and had a highly stimulating conversation with strikers there.

BT has offered workers a flat-rate bonus of £1,500 to ‘help’ with the cost-of-living crisis which is clearly pathetic given that inflation is over 9% and energy bills have nearly doubled over the past year.

David told me that highly skilled workers do not expect to be eating Asda Smart Price rice in a bedsit as a ‘reward’ for their hard work. He said BT workers were rightly applauded as key workers during the Covid pandemic when telecommunications were absolutely vital for mitigating the social isolation of lockdowns. But now they are being treated like dirt. “But we are the good guys”, he insisted.



Nigel said they had absolutely no faith in the ability of central government to mediate the dispute. They’re all corrupt right-wing nutters, it was said, and the Labour Party is a pile of crap. The strikers clearly hated official politics and did not want to vote for any of the currently existing crop.

The CWU are not alone. They have had strong support from other unions who find themselves in the same pickle. Indeed, there is currently a wave of strike action in the UK involving, among others, railway workers, postal workers, airport workers, civil servants, doctors and nurses, journalists, teachers and lecturers, and even barristers.

Given the inept character of central government and senior management digging their heels in (and perhaps their graves as well), the question posed by the new wave of class struggle is whether the only way we can obtain some social justice is by way of creating a fundamentally new form of economy.

The question raised by strikes of this character is why do companies need to be solely orientated to making a profit in the first place. Currently, the purpose of profit is to reward shareholders for their courage in investing in a particular industry – a reward for their risk, and also to reward senior management for disciplining the value producers – those who do the nitty gritty – in terms of restraining their pay (the so-called ‘fat cats’ are generously rewarded for finding new ways in which to manage pay restraint). But it does not have to be like that.

BT made a profit of £2bn in 2021. If that money were equally divided amongst the producers of that value, each worker (and BT employs just over 100,000 of them, 90% in the UK) could receive a pay bonus of £19,000, in relation to that year, with varying fluctuations according to company performance in subsequent years. That would be more than enough to compensate for the cost-of-living crisis, and allow workers perhaps to pay off their mortgages sooner, or pay university tuition fees for their offspring, or whatever they choose. The strikers in Chelmsford seemed excited by this proposal.

What is more, from the point of view of other workers in other sectors, strikes in one area benefit other areas as well. If successful, a victorious strike, or patchwork of industrial action, will drive up wages for all workers, not just the brave strikers. When wages are higher in one sector, the bargaining power of the whole working class is improved because individuals can retrain for work in the dynamic sector, forcing a retention crisis is companies that do not pay fairly. Nevertheless, there will always be an element of vulnerability whilst the profit system persists, so it is worth thinking about whether class struggle could lead to the more permanent solution of regime change: a new idea of workers receiving the full fruits of their labour, bypassing the central motivation of profit altogether.

In order to achieve such a reformed economy with new economic priorities, workers will find they fundamentally have to run the company themselves. Their collective elects supervisors, of course, paid at the average for a skilled worker, to oversee the day-to-day running (one cannot expect a busy engineer to also do the accounts). But everyone gets rewarded in relation to the overall company performance, rather than being paid a fixed wage which under the profit system, is always going to be under threat. The new system, whilst being more rewarding, would also logically create a greater sense of pride in one’s work and incentivize best practice, innovation, and creativity. Perhaps our current economy is so sluggish only because workers are treated badly. The majority needs to feel like they have a real stake in society, a proper sense it is worth doing what they are doing.

However, none of this is anything any elected Member of Parliament can usher in. Really an idea of worker’s control can only come to fruition by their actions in the workplace itself. Which is why it is so important to back their side in the class struggle, thereby to accelerate their potential for success.