“The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World” by G.E.M. de Ste. Croix (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.)

I wish I still had my copy. First ran into it at UCSB in the early 90′s. That’s where I met the only man in the world who has ever made me feel stupid just walking into the room, Cedric Robinson. Been there, done that, wrote the book. Unbelievable intellect.

The ILO is a UN agency with 182 member states it was formed in 1919 as a League of Nations agency and is the only LoN agency still in existence, it also won the 1969 Nobel Peace Prize. So it is a pretty credible source.

The creation of labour and value do not happen at the same time. Value is only produced once the commodity satisfies a human want, or to put it in more practical terms once it is sold.

In other words one can’t produce a commodity, one can only sell it. In this way a worthless rock becomes a commodity worth 1 dollar.

There is always a time delay between labour and value as the existence of “usefull” labour can only be determined retrospectively.

You seem to be talking at cross purposes. The point of defining commodities here is to explore what motivates a producer to produce.

Note: Marx did not claim that coats COULD not be exchanged for coats, just that they ARE not. The implication being that one would not exchange items with identical use values. Hence, pointing out situations where items are exchanged with nearly-but-not-quite-identical use-values misses the point.

While you may choose to resell or exchange a commodity (your old blue coat) you have invested in because it is not as useful or desirable as it once was, your objective in doing this is not to gain profit; rather, it is to minimize loss.

You didn’t buy your coat as an investment, hoping to resell it for a higher price later on. You bought it to keep you warm. When it is no longer as useful to you, you want to recoup as much of the initial cost of the item as you can, so that you will then have money to spend on something new. It’s the “something new” that drives production. And it’s the production that drives the economy.

We can sit around exchanging all our extant tangible assets without producing anything new for just so long before everything wears out, and we need new things.

Note also that (so far) Marx is not talking about what determines the use-value or exchange-value of the commodity; just what makes the commodity a commodity and not something else. Whether the use-value or exchange value is determined entirely by demand, or the amount of labor required to produce the commodity, or some other factor of combination of factors is an argument he has yet to make.

I’m looking forward to when we get to that part myself. However, first, let’s make sure we can agree on the basic terms like what makes a commodity.

If you actually believe that capitalism is based taking identical use-values to the market and exchanging them for each other, there just isn’t any point in talking. If you don’t believe that, then why are you even bringing it up?

Having worked in the garment industry – it doesn’t really take more time or labour to produce a large coat than a medium. It does take slightly more materials but the incremental cost is minimal. If you want to be picky, you could say that the manufacturers price based on the L, so the incremental costs from making the , XL and XXL are balanced out by the savings on the M, S and XS sizes I suppose.

My point being – even among commodities that require exactly the same labour cost to produce, exchange is possible, contra Marx’s claim, because their value is not absolute but relative to the exchangers. The value of the M sized coat is more to the M sized person than the L is and vice versa. Symmetrical exchange, both benefit.

Well, this falls under the same type of idea as the there being two different kinds of coats.

Since they are different sizes, they are different commodities. More fabric went into making the larger coat, and there were at least some differences in the amount and type of tailoring needed to make each one. This makes a quantifiable difference in the exact type of labor, use-value and exchange-value of each coat.

If we posit that a L coat is 2x the labor/material to produce than a M coat, we have the same sort of situation that skzb’s original comment suggested; extra confusion for no benefit to understanding.