POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other; Bourgeoisie and Proletariat (CM 3) Marx believed that the capitalist society in which he lived had reached a state of crisis The opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat would become steadily stronger and lead to a revolutionary change which would usher in the final stages, first of socialism, in which all property would pass to the state, and finally to communism, after the state had withered away The crisis which capitalism had reached, Marx maintained, was not a contingent fact of history; it was something entailed by the nature of capitalism itself He based this conclusion on an analysis of the nature of economic value How is the value of a commodity determined? As a first step, we can say that a thing’s value is the rate at which it can be exchanged for other commodities: a quarter of wheat may be worth so much iron, and so on But the real value of something must be different from the countless different rates at which it can be exchanged with innumerable other commodities We need a method of expressing the value of commodities that is common to, but distinct from, all the different particular exchanges between them As the exchangeable values of commodities are only social functions of those things, and have nothing at all to with the natural qualities, we must first ask: What is the common social substance of all commodities? It is labour To produce a commodity a certain amount of labour must be bestowed upon it, or worked up in it And I say not only labour, but social labour A man who produces an article for his own immediate use, to consume it himself, creates a product, but not a commodity As a self-sustaining producer he has nothing to with society But to produce a commodity a man must not only produce an article satisfying some social want, but his labour itself must form part and parcel of the total sum of labour expended by society It must be subordinate to the division of labour within society (VPP 30) To value a commodity, we should look on it as a piece of crystallized labour How is labour itself measured? By the length of time the labour lasts A silken handkerchief is worth more than a brick because it takes longer to make 282