Nature, as the material with which men are faced, can only be regarded as unformed material from the point of view of the purposes of human activity. The stuff of nature, which Marx equated with matter, is in itself already formed, i.e. it is subject to physical and chemical laws, discovered by the natural sciences in constant cooperation with material production. Man’s aims can be realized by the use of natural processes, not despite the laws of nature but precisely because the materials of nature have their own laws. The content of these aims is not just limited by history and society but equally by the structure of matter itself. Which of the possibilities immanent in matter are realized, and to what degree, always remains a function of the level of the material and intellectual forces of production, just as the structure of matter is not eternally fixed. The concept of matter has been continuously enriched in the course of the history of the natural sciences, a history very closely interwoven with that of social practice. For this reason Lenin rejected mechanical materialism’s concept of matter, dependent as it is on assertions bound in their content to a historically determined state of scientific consciousness. He adhered rather to Marx’s own concept of matter, the dialectical-materialist view that men, whatever historical conditions they live in, see themselves confronted with a world of things which cannot be transcended and which they must appropriate in order to survive.
At the turn of the century when the ‘disappearance of matter’ and the future impossibility of a philosophical materialism was being mooted in connection with epoch-making discoveries in physics, Lenin pointed out in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism that the philosophical concept of matter is not affected by the historically changing views of physicists on the structure of matter. ‘For the sole “property” of matter whose recognition philosophical materialism requires is its property of being objective reality, of existing outside our consciousness.’1
Lenin took the view that it was not materialism in general which had become untenable, but only its traditional mechanical form. Mechanics, for centuries a total explanation of the world, had been reduced by the progress of natural science to a mere moment of knowledge, indeed a mere moment of the physical world itself:
‘Matter is disappearing’ means: the limit within which we have hitherto known matter is disappearing. Our knowledge is penetrating deeper; properties of matter are disappearing which formerly seemed absolute, immutable and primary (impenetrability, inertia, mass, etc.) and which are now revealed to be relative, and characteristic only of certain states of matter.2
This epistemological definition of matter as objective reality existing outside and independently of all consciousness corresponds entirely to the definition of matter given by the young Marx in the Holy Family from the point of view of social labour:
Man has not created matter itself. And he cannot even create any productive capacity if the matter does not exist beforehand.3
In the Paris Manuscripts he adopted a similarly objective viewpoint:
The fact that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being and a force of nature, means that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being and the expression of his life, or that he can only express his life through real, sensuous objects.4
… A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and does not share in the being of nature.5
Nature is defined here in an entirely Hegelian manner as externality. Nature has essentially the character of things. Man too is a natural thing. Marx, at every stage of his development, owed much to Feuerbach in this connection, in the sense that Feuerbach, whatever criticisms may be made of him, transcended existing materialism, with its largely mechanical or physiological standpoint, by grasping man and nature qualitatively and objectively. For Marx, Feuerbach’s superiority over the ‘pure materialists’ consisted in this realization ‘that man too is a “sensuous object” ’.6 Man objectifies himself in his labour, without however ‘positing’ the objectivity of nature as such. For Marx, to mediate is not the same as to posit.7 The human essence, he wrote:
only creates, posits objects, because it is posited through objects, because it is fundamentally nature. In the act of positing, it does not therefore descend from its ‘pure activity’ into the creation of objects; its objective activity, its activity as an objective, natural essence.8
Themes of this kind are again taken up in Capital. Here the economic analysis presupposes the philosophical-materialist view that labour is a process between things:
Man himself, viewed as a mere item of labour-power, is a natural object, a thing, although a living conscious thing, and labour itself is the material manifestation of this power residing in him.9
Elsewhere, Marx described labour-power as ‘the material of nature transferred into the human organism’.10 Labour, itself only the manifestation of a natural force, is always dependent on a substratum which cannot be reduced to labour alone. Marx dealt with this natural basis of labour in systematic form in Capital, too, precisely in his analysis of the two-fold character of the commodity and of the labour embodied in it. The commodity is a unity composed of mutually opposed determinations. As the ‘cell’11 of bourgeois society, it reflects the relation between nature and the historical process at an advanced stage of development of the forces of production. It contains nature as ‘being-in-itself’ and as ‘being-for-others’.
As a determinant of exchange-value, labour is abstract, general and undifferentiated; as a determinant of use-value it is concrete, particular and composed of many distinct modes of labour. The exchange-value of a commodity has no natural content whatsoever. It is indifferent to its natural qualities because it is the embodiment of human labour in general measured by the time outlaid, and all the determinations of nature are extinguished in it.12 If exchange-value is a ‘non-natural characteristic’13 typical of the bourgeois form of production, in the use-value the commodity confronts us in its ‘plain, homely natural form’.14 The present investigation is particularly concerned with the latter form of the commodity. Use-values are specific natural materials, mediated through specific purposive actions which serve to satisfy specific human needs. Marx defined them more closely in the following manner:
The use-values coat, linen, etc., in short the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, material and labour. If we subtract the total sum of useful labour embodied in the coat, linen, etc., a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by nature without the help of man.15
If labour is the formal ‘creator of value’, the stuff of nature is its material creator. Hence, through what we have already said of the character of labour, the division of natural material and labour cannot be absolute. At the level of the individual use-value, it may in abstracto be possible to make a distinction between what derives from labour, i.e. from the activity of men, and what is provided by nature as the ‘material substratum’ of the commodity. But as far as the world of experience as a whole is concerned, the material provided by nature cannot be distinguished from the practico-social modes of its transformation. The question of the quantitative and qualitative share of man and the material of nature in the creation of the product of labour is one to which there is no general answer for Marx. The fact that this relation cannot be fixed formally is an indication of the dialectical nature of the process.16 Once created, the world of use-values compounded of labour and natural material (i.e. humanized nature) confronts men as something objective, existing independently of them. The material of nature itself confronted men in the same way in its first immediacy, when it had not yet been penetrated by men. Human productive forces stamp the material of nature intellectually and practically. This process however completely confirms nature’s independence of consciousness rather than destroys it. The materials of nature, having undergone the labour-process, remain components of the sensuous world:
The form of wood, for instance, is altered when one makes a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, sensuous thing, wood.17
The immediacy of nature asserts itself at ever higher stages of the process of production, though now humanly mediated through men. Marx had this relationship in mind when he wrote:
While the labourer is at work, his labour constantly undergoes a transformation: from the form of flux to that of being, from the form of motion to that of objectivity.18
In the finished thing which is the result of labour, the motion which mediates it is extinguished. But inversely if the product of labour undergoes further processes, it is reduced again to a mere moment of the mediating motion. What is immediate at one stage of production is mediated at another:
Though a use-value issues from the labour-process as a product, other use-values, products of previous labour, enter into it as means of production. The same use-value is both the product of a previous process, and a means of production in a later process. Products are therefore not only results, but also essential conditions of the labour-process.19
This ‘objectification as loss of the object’20 which defines the labour-process has in addition a more general theoretical content. As against Engels’s assertion that ‘the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes’,21 Marx did not make the idea of the dialectical process an abstract alternative to reified consciousness. One cannot, without falling into error, conceive things in a metaphysically rigid way as finished and unchangeable. Equally however, one cannot dissolve things completely into the moments of the social process which mediates them, for this would amount to the same metaphysical error with reversed premisses. It is a matter rather of unfolding the concrete dialectic of the immediacy and mediacy of objective being in its appropriate forms.
The section in Capital which deals with the ‘Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof’22 has, in particular, given rise to mistaken idealist interpretations. Marx showed that capitalist production, in transforming the products of labour into commodities, bestows a ‘ghostly objectivity’23 on the underlying social relations. The commodity-form of the products of labour ‘has absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.’24 The products of labour become commodities, and therefore no longer incorporate the living interaction between men and nature, but emerge as a dead and thing-like reality, as an objective necessity by which human life is ruled, as by a blind fate.
Deceived by the ‘objective appearance’25 which results from the social transformation of the products of labour into commodities, the economists have engaged in long-winded and inevitably fruitless discussions about the role played by nature in the creation of exchange-value. In doing this they inverted the real relationship between use-value and exchange-value. It appears to false consciousness that ‘the use-value of objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects’.26 The natural determination of the commodity appears as social, its social determination appears as an inherent natural determination. The economists are disconcerted,
when what they thought they had just crudely defined as a thing suddenly appears as a social relation, and then reappears to tease them again as a thing, when they have just defined it as a social relation.27
Production is always social. It is always ‘the appropriation of nature by the individual within and through the mediation of a definite form of society’,28 even if the individuals at first pursue their private labours independently of each other. The use-value of the things produced by them is realized without exchange ‘by means of a direct relation between the objects and man’.29 The social character of the private labours which have taken place independently of each other is first revealed in the exchange of the products of labour, i.e. in the total social process. The pre-bourgeois forms of production, whose essence consists in personal relations of dependence between men, are transparent enough to prevent labour and the products of labour from taking on ‘a fantastic form different from their reality’.30 The products of labour do not become commodities. The fundamental form of social labour is here the concrete, particular, ‘natural form of labour’,31 and not abstract, general and equal labour.
The specifically Marxist discovery that historical relations are objectified in the form of the commodity can be misinterpreted so as to produce the idealist conclusion that, since Marx reduces all economic categories to relationships between human beings, the world is composed of relations and processes and not of bodily material things.32 One of the main endeavours of Marxist analysis is no doubt to penetrate the surface of economic reality which has hardened into things in order to get at the essence behind it – the social relations of men. But as we have already revealed, for Marx these relations are not something final and absolute. It emerges from the analysis of the process of production, on which rests the sphere of circulation, that human labour does not constitute the sole ‘creator’ of material wealth. The mode of existence of abstract-general labour, its ‘form of appearance’,33 is always the concrete-particular, and presupposes a natural substratum irreducible to human social determinations. All social relations are mediated through natural things, and vice versa. They are always relations of men ‘to each other and to nature’.34
Nature can neither be dissolved into the moments of a metaphysically conceived ‘Spirit’ nor can it be reduced to the historical modes of its appropriation in practice. Lukács succumbed to this neo-Hegelian ‘actualist’ view in History and Class Consciousness, in other respects important for the history of the interpretation of Marx. In the course of his comprehensive discussion of the philosophical aspects of the fetishism of commodities, he remarks about Marx’s concept of nature:
Nature is a societal category. That is to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of social development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes, i.e. nature’s form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned.35
Lukács pointed correctly to the socio-historical conditioning of all natural consciousness as also of phenomenal nature itself. But in Marx nature is not merely a social category. It cannot be totally dissolved into the historical processes of its appropriation in respect of form, content, extent and objectivity. If nature is a social category, the inverted statement that society is a category of nature is equally valid. Although nature and its laws subsist independently of all human consciousness and will for the materialist Marx, it is only possible to formulate and apply statements about nature with the help of social categories. The concept of a law of nature is unthinkable without men’s endeavours to master nature. The socially imprinted character of nature and nature’s autonomous role constitute a unity within which the Subject by no means plays the part of ‘creator’ assigned to it by Lukács.36 The material world, ‘filtered’37 through human labour and not actually created by it, remains that repeatedly mentioned ‘substratum …, which is furnished without the help of man’.38 The theoretical and practical supersession of alienation (Entfremdung) aimed at by Marx did not signify, as with Hegel, the supersession of objectivity as such, but rather of its alienated character.39 In the Phenomenology, the Hegelian Spirit, in the course of its advance to ever higher stages of development, grasps the external world of object-forms as mere appearance, grasps the world as something posited by itself, until finally, at the stage of absolute knowledge, reflecting on the totality of the moments it has traversed, it returns completely from its alienation (Entäusserung) into itself. Marx, viewing the Spirit solely in its relation to finite and transient human beings (a view held also by Feuerbach), criticized Hegel’s philosophy as a colossal subjectivism, according to which absolute self-consciousness lies at the basis of all objectivity.40 Hegelian speculation, Marx thought, was concerned less with the fact that the human essence objectifies itself in a manner opposed to itself (Marx was thinking here of the real division between the products of labour and their producers) than with the fact that it ‘objectifies itself by distinction from and in opposition to abstract thought’ – constitutes ‘the essence of alienation as it is posited and as it has to be superseded’.41
As opposed to this, the Marxist view is that the supersession of alienation takes place not in philosophy but with socialism, since socialism is the highest form of real mediation between man and nature. With socialism, nature’s objectivity does not simply disappear, even when it is adequate to men, but remains something external, to be appropriated. In other words, men will always have to work:
So far, therefore, as labour is a creator of use-values, i.e. is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of human beings; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, through which is mediated the metabolic interaction between man and nature, i.e. human life itself.42
Marx made still more use of philosophical categories in the Grundrisse,43 where he developed the theme of the indissoluble connection between nature’s dependence on men, and its independence.
In their formative and functional activity, men transcend the natural-born, abstract immediacy of material existence. Marx, like Hegel, regarded productive activity as consumption as well, which used up both the material worked on and the activity of work.44 Work is not just a spiritual but also a physical negation of the immediate, a negation which is also a negation of the negation, since nature’s material objectivity is restored after it has undergone men’s theoretical and practical activity.
The process of production has three abstract moments: raw material and the instruments of labour (which together comprise matter in this context), and form which, as labour, constitutes a material relation among moments themselves material. Not only the raw material worked, but also the instrument applied to it are translated from possibility to actuality through labour and absorbed through labour’s relation to the material. The three moments of the process are as much annihilated as reproduced in the ‘neutral product’45 of labour:
The whole process appears therefore as productive consumption, i.e. as consumption which ends neither in nothing nor in the mere subjectification of the objective, but is itself again posited as an object. The consumption is not a simple consumption of the material, but a consumption of consumption itself; in the supersession of the material it is the supersession of this supersession and hence the positing of the same. The FORMATIVE [this word is written in capitals in Marx’s text, A.S.] activity consumes the object and consumes itself, but it only consumes the given form of the object, in order to give it a new objective form, and it consumes itself only in its subjective form as activity. It consumes the objective character of the object (its indifference towards the form) and the subjective character of the activity. It forms the one, while materializing the other. However, as a product the result of the process of production is a use-value.46
All materials of nature appropriated through labour are use-values. But not all use-values are appropriated, i.e. humanly mediated, materials of nature. Air, water and so on, are furnished without human intervention, just like the rest of nature. Their useful character for men does not depend on labour. The means of labour, the instrument of production, is in general ‘a thing or a complex of things which the labourer interposes between himself and the object of his labour, and which serves to conduct his activity to that object’.47 The instrument of production is itself already a use-value, a ‘combination of natural substances with human labour’.48 As, however, the labour-process originally only takes place between man and the earth, the ‘universal object’49 of labour, there always enter into it means of production which are not themselves products, and therefore do not present any combination of natural substances and human action, although the whole of nature only takes on significance in the particular historical framework of social processes. These means of production bring forth use-values without at the same time bringing forth exchange values.
All labour begins by ‘separating things from their immediate connection with the environment’,50 by felling timber or by extracting ores from their veins. Most of the objects of labour men deal with are however already ‘filtered’51 through previous labour. They are ‘raw material’. The raw materials can now contribute to the creation of a product as the ‘principal substance’ or as an ‘accessory’.52 Whether a use-value functions as raw material, means of labour or product, depends entirely on the role it plays in the labour-process.
A use-value attains to its actual determination by being negated. It maintains itself while being consumed. If it enters into further processes of production as already modified material, it shows itself to be still as it were an ‘untrue existence’ of nature for man, to be still insufficiently mediated, still inadequately adapted to his needs. The labour which is here already objectified, rigidified into a thing, is revivified when the material in which it was incorporated is subjected to further treatment. The previous mediated immediacy is dissolved, submerged, in the new, richer use-values,53 the ‘more mediated immediacies’:
Living labour must seize upon these things, awaken them from the dead, and transform them from merely possible to real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as its organic parts, and made alive for the performance of their conceptual and utilitarian functions in the process, they are in truth consumed, but consumed with a purpose. Their purpose is to act as the constituent elements of new use-values, of new products, which are capable of entering, as means of subsistence, into individual consumption, or, as means of production, into some new labour-process.54
While individual consumption consumes use-values as the means of subsistence of the living individual, productive consumption consumes them as ‘the means whereby labour, the labour-power of the living individual, is enabled to act’.55 In order to maintain the products of past labour in their objective existence as use-values, it is necessary for them to remain in contact with living labour, to be ‘thrown’56 (as Marx put it) into the labour-process as the results and the conditions of existence of that process.
If the possibilities inherent in a use-value are realized neither in the sense of individual nor in that of productive consumption, if it is not put to the service of human purposes, it reverts to the sphere of the ‘metabolism of nature’.57 The artificial, humanized, ‘second’ nature which was erected on the basis of the first nature is transformed back into the latter. The ‘transformation’ of the materials of nature by men is undone by the destructive force of the extra-human influences exerted by nature. Every breakers’ yard confirms the Marxist notion that ‘the continuous absorption of the individualized [i.e. what has been appropriated by man, A.S.] into the elemental is just as much a moment of the natural process as is the continuous individualization of the elemental’.58
Marx interpreted this natural process of the decay of use-values not applied to human purposes in another way as well, which is just as relevant for the understanding of his philosophy.59 We have repeatedly pointed out so far that for Marx use-values are combinations of two elements, the stuff of nature and the labour which shapes it. It is true that nature has ‘slumbering powers’, and that its own forms can be reshaped by man. However, this does not mean that the combined concept of matter and nature (both of which are included in pre-human nature) becomes a ‘semi-mythical Nature-Subject’,60 and thus restores the Hegelian identity of Subject and Object, which Marx criticized, indeed, from a materialist point of view. Nature, the material of the world, which comprises both the Subject and the Object of labour, is not a homogeneous substratum. The moment of non-identity is retained under all social conditions, precisely on the basis of labour, which nevertheless, on the other hand, unites the Subject and the Object. The view that physical nature’s ‘meaning … has at the present not yet appeared’ and that this meaning ‘like that of men is still in a position of utopian latency’61 only has a place in an eschatologically oriented metaphysic such as that of Bloch.
In relation to the problem we are discussing here, the non-identity of Subject and Object has the consequence that the human form is indifferent towards the stuff of nature, that it remains external to it. This is particularly noticeable when a use-value is subjected to the process of natural decay.
Marx strongly emphasized this mutual indifference of form and material. He wrote in the Grundrisse of the distinction between the natural form of the material, which all labour must take as its starting-point, and its determinate form, as mediated through men:
The indifference of material towards form develops from mere objectified labour-time, in whose objective existence labour only continues to subsist as the vanished, external form of its natural substance. The form is itself external to the substance (as the form of the table is external to the wood, or the form of the roller is external to the iron), in other words it merely exists in the external form of the material. The material does not maintain its form through any living, immanent law of reproduction, in the way that the tree maintains its form as a tree. The form exists only as a form external to the material, or only Materially [Marx’s capitalization]. For example, wood maintains itself in the definite form of a tree, because this form is a form of wood; whereas in the case of a table its form is an accidental property of the wood, not the immanent form of its substance. When the material is destroyed, therefore, the form is destroyed along with it.62
With the destruction of the use-value, the quantum of labour embedded in its material is similarly lost.
We are dealing here, of course, with a merely relative indifference of form towards material. In the above-mentioned instance, where a product composed of natural material and labour is incorporated into further labour-processes, the amount and type of labour already concealed within the product is by no means a matter of indifference:
The quantity of objectified labour is maintained by the maintenance of its quality as a source of use-values for further labour through contact with living labour.63
It is characteristic of the simple process of production that in it the qualitative determinacy of the labour already expended continues to be upheld. This maintenance of quality in the process of creating value simultaneously involves the maintenance of the quantity of labour. It is true that living labour adds a new quantity of labour to that already objectified. But it is not the added quantity of labour which maintains the objectified labour, rather it is labour’s quality as living labour in general. When added to the product, it transcends the mutual indifference of the form and the material subsisting within it:
The objectified labour ceases to exist as something dead, a form external to, indifferent to the material, since it is again posited as a moment of living labour; as a relation of living labour to itself in an objective material, as the objectivity of living labour (as Means and Object) (the objective conditions of living labour). In this way living labour, through its realization in the material, transforms it, and this transformation (which is determined by the purpose of the labour and the activity engaged on with a view to achieving that purpose, and which does not, as in a dead object, posit the form as external to the material, a mere fading reflection of its existence) maintains the material in a definite form, and subjects changes in that form to the purpose of the labour. Labour is the living, shaping fire; it represents the impermanence of things, their temporality, in other words their formation in the course of living time.64
The material which has been worked on assumes a form more suitable to human consumption as stage follows stage in the process of production, ‘until at last it acquires a form in which it can be the direct object of consumption, in which the consumption of the material and the abolition of its form results from its enjoyment by man, and in which its transformation is its utilization’.65
The material’s highest form of mediation is at the same time the highest form of its immediate existence as a use-value for men. As far as possible, human labour transforms the in-itself of nature into a for-us.
In the Paris Manuscripts, while under the influence of Feuerbach and Romanticism, Marx portrayed labour as a process of progressive humanization of nature, a process which coincided with the naturalization of man. He therefore saw in history, stamped as it is with the imprint of human labour, a clearer and clearer equivalence between naturalism and humanism.66 The later, and more critical, Marx of the economic analyses took the view that the struggle of man with nature could be transformed but not abolished. In this connection, he made use of the term ‘metabolism’,66a which, for all its scientific air, is none the less speculative in character. This ‘metabolism’ is subject to laws of nature anterior to man. Any attempt to form the stuff of nature must take heed of the regularities proper to matter. ‘Man can only proceed in his production in the same way as nature itself, that is he can only alter the forms of the material.’67 The alteration of the forms can itself only take place with the help of natural forces, amongst which Marx also counted the active human Subjects.
By releasing the ‘slumbering powers’68 of the material of nature, men ‘redeem’ it: changing the dead ‘in-itself’ into a living ‘for-itself’, they so to speak lengthen the series of objects brought forth in the course of the history of nature, and continue it at a qualitatively higher level. Nature propels forward its process of creation by the agency of human labour. Revolutionary practice therefore assumes a ‘cosmic’69 as well as a social significance.
It is very remarkable that here, where Marx described human labour as the alteration of the form of matter in accordance with its natural laws,70 he also had in view a very general philosophical state of affairs: the world is matter in motion in definite forms. Marx agreed with Engels71 on this point, at least in abstracto. This appears from his selecting the following quotation from the book Meditazioni sulla Economia Politica, by the Italian economist Pietro Verri, published in 1773, as corroboration of the view quoted above, that man can only proceed in his production in the same way as nature itself:
All the phenomena of the universe, whether produced by the hand of man or by the general laws of physics, are not in fact newly-created but result solely from a transformation of existing material. Composition and division are the only elements, which the human spirit finds again and again when analysing the notion of reproduction; and this is equally the case with the reproduction of value … and of riches, when earth, air, and water become transformed into corn in the fields, or when through the hand of man the secretions of an insect turn into silk, or certain metal parts are arranged to construct a repeating watch.72
While natural processes independent of men are essentially transformations of material and energy, human production itself does not fall outside the sphere of nature. Nature and society are not rigidly opposed. The socially active man
confronts the material of nature as one of her own forces. He sets in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate the material of nature in a form suitable for his own needs. By thus acting through this motion on the nature which is outside him and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.73
The content of this metabolic interaction is that nature is humanized while men are naturalized. Its form is in each case historically determined. Labour-power, that ‘material of nature transferred to a human organism’,74 acts on the materials of nature which are outside man; it is therefore through nature that nature is transformed. Men incorporate their own essential forces into natural objects which have undergone human labour. Through the same process, natural things gain a new social quality as use-values, increasing in richness in the course of history.
In referring to ‘the motion of man on nature’ Marx was seeking to express the view that the things which serve to satisfy human needs undergo a qualitative change. For dialectical as opposed to mechanical materialism, motion, that essential category of dialectical thought, is ‘not merely a change of place, but also, in fields higher than mechanics, a change of quality’.75
There is thus a qualitative distinction between appropriated natural materials and those not yet subjected to human activity. We must remember, however, that even the most ingenious human discoveries can only unfold the possibilities latent within nature. Only on this basis can there take place the ‘transformation’, the ‘composition and division’ referred to by Verri. Only in this way can quantitative lead to qualitative changes. Nature is, and remains, the only substance ‘by means of which and in which man’s labour can be embodied’.76
With the concept of ‘metabolism’ Marx introduced a completely new understanding of man’s relation to nature. At first he shared Bacon’s view, which was inherited and developed by the Enlightenment, that nature should be seen essentially from the point of view of its usefulness to man. However, when he engaged on his analysis of the social life-process, thus concretizing the concept of appropriation, Marx went far beyond all the bourgeois theories of nature presented by the Enlightenment. The epoch of the Enlightenment was incapable of analysing labour as the means of appropriation, of moving from this to the necessity of the division of labour and the accompanying class divisions, and finally of revealing with this analysis the class character of bourgeois society, since this was an epoch ‘when the bourgeoisie posited itself as an absolute, and viewed the concept of class, if it did so at all, purely as a moment of past history’.77 Hence the real background of the Marxist concept of metabolism did not even enter the field of vision of the Enlightenment. Nature was seen as something immediately given, instantly capable of apprehension, whereas Marx stated that:
The object of labour can only become raw material when it has already undergone a change mediated through labour.78
The whole of nature is socially mediated and, inversely, society is mediated through nature as a component of total reality. The hidden nature-speculation in Marx characterizes this side of the connection. The different economic formations of society which have succeeded each other historically have been so many modes of nature’s self-mediation. Sundered into two parts, man and material to be worked on, nature is always present to itself in this division.79 Nature attains self-consciousness in men, and amalgamates with itself by virtue of their theoretical-practical activity. Human participation in something alien and external to them appears at first to be something equally alien and external to nature; but in fact it proves to be a ‘natural condition of human existence’, which is itself a part of nature, and it therefore constitutes nature’s self-movement.
Only in this way can we speak meaningfully of a ‘dialectic of nature’. Unlike Engels (who agreed for once with Feuerbach on this), Marx the nature-dialectician did not limit himself to contemplating pre-human nature and its history, viewing reality only ‘in the form of the Object’,80 nor, despite his admiration for Hegel, did he view reality ‘in the form of the Subject’. He insisted instead on the indivisibility of the two moments. The awareness of this indivisibility lies at the core of Marx’s materialism.81 Marx’s Subject-Object, in contrast to Hegel’s, is never entirely incorporated into the Subject.
The nature-speculation inherent in Marx referred to above is nothing but an attempt, which runs through the whole of his work, to provide an appropriate concept for the mutual interpenetration of nature and society within the natural whole. To this end Marx used new and in part peculiarly biological metaphors, of which the expression ‘metabolism’, used throughout Capital, seems finally to have been chosen as the best formulation.
Nature appears in the Paris Manuscripts, with reference to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, as ‘the inorganic body of man; that is to say nature, excluding the human body itself’.82 It is his body, ‘with which he must remain in continuous interaction in order not to die’.83 Just as in living nature assimilation changes the inorganic into the organic, so man assimilates that ‘inorganic body’ in his work and converts it in an ever-increasing measure into an ‘organic’ part of himself. Man can only do this, however, because he himself belongs directly to nature, which is by no means a purely external world entirely separated from his internal characteristics:
The interdependence of the physical and mental life of man with nature has the meaning that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is part of nature.84
Whereas the animal is bound, in his appropriation of the world of objects, to the biological peculiarities of his species, and hence confined to definite regions of the world, the universality of man is signified by the fact that he can appropriate, at least potentially, the whole of nature. Through labour he can make nature ‘his inorganic body, both as a direct means of life and as the matter, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity’.85 Whether as the end-product or the starting-point of labour, nature retains its ‘inorganic’, self-sufficient objectivity. Yet man, unlike the animal, ‘is free in the face of his product’,86 because his relation to nature does not consist purely in the satisfaction of immediate physical needs:
Animals construct only in accordance with the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while man knows how to produce in accordance with the standards of every species and knows how to apply the appropriate standard to the object. Thus man constructs also in accordance with the laws of beauty.87
Man ‘lives’ from nature; this point has not only a biological but also and above all a social significance. It is only the social life-process which makes possible man’s biological species-life.
In the Grundrisse, as well as in the final version of Capital, Marx used terms of a somewhat ontological flavour to describe the appropriation of the material world. The earth is described in the Grundrisse as the ‘laboratory’,88 the ‘primitive instrument’,89 and the ‘primitive condition of production’,90 and in Capital as ‘the original larder’ and ‘the original tool house’.91 Moreover, the theme of the Paris Manuscripts that nature is the inorganic body of man appears again in the Grundrisse in a remarkably more concrete form in the course of the analysis of the origin of property:
What M. Proudhon calls the extra-economic origin of property … is the pre-bourgeois relation of the individual to the objective conditions of labour, and first of all to the natural objective conditions of labour; because, as the working Subject is a natural individual, having a natural existence, the first objective condition of his labour appears as nature, i.e. as earth, his inorganic body. The individual himself is not only the organic body of nature, but also this inorganic nature as a Subject.92
Marx’s statement that man is as yoked to his natural existence as to his body is not applied here to the labour-process in general, but only to its pre-bourgeois forms. Under slavery and serfdom there is basically no division between labour and its natural preconditions. Both moments merge to form an undifferentiated natural basis for the existence of the slave-owner or the feudal lord:
The slave stands in absolutely no relation to the objective conditions of his labour; it is rather the labour itself, in the form of the slave as of the serf, which is placed in the category of inorganic condition of production alongside the other natural beings, e.g. cattle, or regarded as an appendage of the earth.… These natural conditions of existence, to which he is related as if they were his own inorganic body, are of a twofold, that is to say of a subjective and an objective nature. He finds he is a member of a family, a clan, a tribe, etc.… and as such a member he is related to a definite area of nature … as his own inorganic existence, as the condition for his production and reproduction.93
This original and, precisely on that account, abstract identity of man with nature, goes so far that man not only appears as a mode of nature’s organic existence, but nature appears inversely as ‘its own inorganic existence’.94 With the emergence of bourgeois conditions of production, this identity changes into its equally abstract opposite: the radical divorce of labour from its objective natural conditions. In so far as the unity of man and the stuff of nature is retained even under bourgeois relations of production, in the shape of use-values, this is something self-evident for Marx and does not require any explanation since it is ‘common to the most disparate epochs of production’.95 What the critique of political economy is interested in and wishes to explain is something only typical of bourgeois society, namely the ‘division between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence itself, a division first posited in its completeness in the relation between wage-labour and capital’.96
Under capitalism the worker is eliminated as an objective condition of production, and enters for the first time in a real sense into a ‘relationship’ with production; for the slave and the serf this was not the case, since they were merely accidental properties of the material earth. The capitalist does not appropriate the worker directly, as he would a natural thing, but through the mediation of exchange, as the bearer of abstract labour. The worker thus becomes a ‘purely subjective power of labour, lacking in objectivity’,97 and this power meets its negation ‘as a value existing for itself’98 in the alienated and objective preconditions of labour.
Marx presented here a significant side of the much-discussed dialectic of the transition from the antique-feudal to the bourgeois era. As long as nature is appropriated through agriculture and is therefore absolutely independent of men, men are abstractly identical with nature. They lapse, so to speak, into natural existence. However, where men succeed in universally mastering nature technically, economically and scientifically by transforming it into a world of machines, nature congeals into an abstract in-itself external to men.99
On this basis we may glance briefly at the problem of utopia, to be dealt with in detail in Chapter Four: the just society would be a process in which men would neither simply coincide with nature nor be radically distinct from it.100
It was pointed out earlier that the analysis of the division of wage-labour and capital in Marx amounts to an analysis of the exchange-value character of the commodity, which is independent of its use-value. This analysis is particularly directed towards the commodity-form of the products of labour in bourgeois relations of production, a fact which allows us to explain what in Marx the dialectician would otherwise be a peculiar circumstance: wherever he described the labour-process as a metabolic interaction between man and nature, he confined himself to an enumeration of its moments, ‘purposive activity of labour’, ‘object’, and ‘instrument’,101 moments which are abstract because they are valid for all stages of production, and disregarded their specific historical determinations. Where labour appears as the creator of use-values, it is for Marx ‘a necessary condition, independent of forms of society, for the existence of man; an eternal natural necessity, which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and hence makes possible human life in general’.102
In Marx’s view, the general nature of the production of use-values was not altered by the fact that it took place in the service of the capitalist, and he therefore considered the labour-process ‘independently of the particular form it assumes under given social conditions’103 as a process ‘in which man through his own acts mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature’.104 This does not mean, however, that the Thomist philosopher Marcel Reding, who views dialectical materialism as an ontology, is right to interpret this passage in the sense that for Marx ‘the most general structures of man and labour are supra-historical and timeless’.105
The change from one historical epoch to another is by no means without impact on the moments of the labour-process. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx insisted that all work done on nature is only done ‘within and through the mediation of a definite form of society’.106 Thought fixes general determinations which are common to all economic formations, ‘but the so-called general conditions of all production are nothing but these abstract moments, which do not refer to any real stage of production’.107
The general, whenever Marx uses this term as anything more than an abbreviated expression for the purposes of inquiry, is always a ‘concrete’ in the Hegelian sense. It contains within itself an accumulation of particular determinations.108 When Marcel Reding asserts that Marx describes the ‘structure of labour and the labouring man’109 as invariant, he is losing sight of the equally important historical moment, without which what Marx says remains empty and impotent. It is possible to point to a very striking example of how seriously Marx took the historical dialectic of the identity and non-identity of man and nature. History itself projects into the physiological structure of the human being:
Hunger is hunger. But the hunger which is satisfied with cooked meat eaten with knife and fork is another hunger than that which swallows raw meat with the aid of hands, nails, and teeth. The mode of production produces, both objectively and subjectively, not only the object consumed but also the manner of its consumption.110
Human nature, this ‘totality of needs and drives’,111 is only to be conceived as a historical process, involving not the unmediated coexistence of a constant and a variable component, but rather the constitution of the life of the general through the particular.112 The essence of man arises in each case from a definite form of society; it is ‘not an abstraction inherent in each single individual’ but rather ‘the ensemble of social relations’.113
Marx was not a positive ontologist. Yet Reding’s ontological misunderstanding is no accident. It is reinforced by Marx’s occasional failure to explain the relation between nominalism and conceptual realism, as it is mirrored in his way of handling the relation between the general and the particular laws of historical development. Thus Adorno, when pointing out that the dialectical theory does not in fact completely transcend Comte’s dichotomy between social statics and social dynamics, had the following comment to make:
Marx confronts the invariant natural laws of society with the specific laws of a definite stage of development, ‘the higher or lower level of development of social antagonisms’ with the ‘natural laws of capitalist production’.114
Marx distinguished between the laws valid in general for a social formation and their more or less developed forms of appearance. Beyond this, he emphasized, in a still more trenchant manner, the ‘eternal nature-imposed necessity’115 of the metabolism between man and nature in its abstract moments as opposed to its concrete historical forms. We are not confronted here with a problem to be decided purely theoretically, a problem of the insufficiently determined dialectic of the particular and the general. We have rather to deal with the fact that our historical reality itself, understood at the outset as ‘pre-history’, is ruled by eternal categories which are relatively independent of all change, so that according to Marx wage-labour has within it moments of slavery and serfdom, just as slavery and serfdom have within them moments of wage-labour: the distinction consists in this, that in the one case labour-power is reproduced directly, in the other case indirectly, through the market. There existed very well-nourished slaves in antiquity; while at present there exist in the most highly developed countries itinerant labourers below the poverty line.116 What is decisive is that serfdom and slavery can only arise at a certain stage of productivity.
If the labourer needs all his time to produce the necessary means of subsistence for himself and his dependants, he has no time left in which to work gratis for others. Without a certain degree of productiveness in his labour, he has no such superfluous time at his disposal; without such superfluous time, no surplus-labour, and therefore no capitalists, no slave-owners, no feudal lords, in one word, no class of large proprietors.117
Marx criticized the attempt to connect ‘mystical notions’118 with this naturally conceived productivity of labour, developing instead the view that surplus-value has a ‘natural basis’ only ‘in the very general sense’, and that ‘there is no natural obstacle absolutely preventing one man from disburdening himself of the labour required for his own existence and burdening another with it, any more, for instance, than unconquerable natural obstacles prevent one man from eating the flesh of another’.119
Furthermore, if the productivity of labour is considered in the context of the specific capital relation, it must be remembered that this starting-point is not simply ‘a gift of nature, but rather of a history embracing thousands of centuries’.120
However, even if the naturally determined productivity of labour ceases to form the equally naturally determined source of the domination of man over man, even if what arose historically can no longer perpetuate itself as something ‘natural’, life still remains determined by its most general necessity, the metabolism between man and nature.
It is true that this necessity will then have been mastered, and that men will no longer be struggling amongst themselves, but with material nature. Nevertheless, the continuance of this struggle means that classless humanity will also be confronted with something ultimately non-identical with itself, so that, in an ironic way, Reding’s thesis of the time-lessness of the structure of labour is in fact correct. There is in fact in Marx something like an ontology, although this is to be conceived in a negative sense.121
Marx liked to illustrate the necessity of social processes in a somewhat drastic manner by using the model of natural relations. The best example of this is the concept of metabolism, at present under discussion. Like Engels, Marx took a great interest in the advance of natural science in the nineteenth century and its philosophical implications for the further development of the theory of society. The preparatory work for Capital took place in the decade between 1850 and 1860, a period in which there flourished in Germany the natural scientific materialism associated with Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott. Marx and Engels repeatedly and severely criticized this dogmatic and, in general, crudely mechanical form of materialism.122 This does not however exclude the possibility that Marx owed certain insights to this materialism. As emerges from a passing remark, Marx was entirely familiar with the use made of the concept of metabolism by Jacob Moleschott, the spokesman of the materialist movement. Moleschott, who is today almost entirely forgotten, was first influenced by Schelling’s philosophy of nature and Hegelianism, but later (partly through his acquaintanceship with Feuerbach) became an investigator into nature and a physiological materialist with social leanings. In his later years, having himself come more and more under the influence of natural-scientific materialism, Feuerbach regarded Moleschott’s work as the fulfilment of his own earlier programme of a ‘philosophy of the future’.123
Let us take, for example, such popular writings of Moleschott’s as the Physiologie des Stoffwechsels in Pflanzen und Tieren (1851), Der Kreislauf des Lebens (1857), and Die Einheit des Lebens (1864). The materialism put forward in these books, and supported with a mass of empirical material, portrays nature, on the model of human physiology, as a vast process of transformation and metabolism. This materialism is still imbued with speculative elements. Since in his view all the being of things was presented through properties, Moleschott did not accept that a thing could have a property which did not simply manifest itself through the fact that this thing was in a relation with another thing.124
We shall only quote certain statements from Der Kreislauf des Lebens, from which it may be concluded with some certainty that Marx made use of Moleschott’s theory of metabolism, not, of course, without altering it:
What man excretes nourishes the plant. The plant changes the air into solids and nourishes the animal. Carnivorous animals live on herbiverous animals, to fall victim to death themselves and so spread abroad newly germinating life in the plant world. The name ‘metabolism’ has been given to this exchange of material. We are right not to mention this word without a feeling of reverence. For just as trade is the soul of commerce, the eternal circulation of material is the soul of the world.125
… The quintessence of all activity on earth is the movement of the basic materials, combination and division, assimilation and excretion.126
… The wonder lies in the eternal existence of the material throughout its changes of form, in the change of the material from form to form, in metabolism as the fundamental basis of earthly life.127
… I make no bones about stating this: the pivot about which the wisdom of the present-day world turns is the theory of metabolism.128
One point of interest here is that the concept of metabolism, although it relates to the natural context, was clearly suggested to Moleschott by the analogy with the social sphere.129 Moreover, Moleschott’s formulations are strongly reminiscent of the passage from Pietro Verri’s Meditazioni sulla Economia Politica, quoted approvingly by Marx in Capital, where it is similarly stated that ‘all the phenomena of the universe’ are based on ‘transformation of the material’, and on ‘composition and division’.130 Finally, and this is the most important point, Marx, like Moleschott, lent the concept of metabolism the somewhat ‘ontological’ dignity we have mentioned before, when he described it as an ‘eternal nature-imposed necessity’.131
In order to understand Marx’s concept of metabolism we must also refer to the crypto-materialist elements in the philosophy of Schelling. Marx showed that he was familiar with these in a letter of 1843 to Feuerbach, in which he contrasted Schelling’s philosophy of nature as ‘the genuine conception of his youth’ with the ‘positive’ philosophy of his later years, which he encouraged Feuerbach to attack.132 He thought Feuerbach’s naturalism marked the realization of the ‘fantastic youthful dream’133 of Schelling’s nature-speculation.
Moleschott’s conception of nature as a process of circulation is also found quite frequently in the early Schelling.134 ‘The first transition to individuality,’ according to Schelling, ‘is the forming and shaping of matter.’135 Things are disengaged from their immediate natural context through work, and they take on the imprint of individuality. The process of nature itself leads unconsciously to this imprinting by man. According to Schelling, there already exists an ‘organizing process’ in nature, which transcends inorganic matter by producing an ‘infinite individualization of matter’.136 Through the mediation of human labour, this individualization proceeds at a higher level:
In common life everything which has attained a shape, through itself or through the hand of man, is considered or treated as individual.137
In the Grundrisse Marx wrote, in entirely Schellingian language, of the ‘constant individualization of the elemental’, which is as much a moment of the natural process as the ‘constant dissolution of the individualized into the elemental’.138
The labour-process is embedded in the great context of nature. In the final analysis, nature triumphs over all human intervention, since it is the higher unity of society and the particular segment of nature which has been appropriated. The materials of nature, despite their permeation by man, sink back into their original immediacy. Schelling pointed out correctly that raw matter can only be described as destructible ‘in so far as it has assumed a definite form through human ingenuity’.139
The concept of the life-process, which is present in Marx’s writings from the German Ideology onwards, is related in Schelling and Hegel only to organic nature. In the same way, the notion of external nature as the inorganic body of man, as it appears in the Paris Manuscripts, and the description of the labour-process as the metabolism between man and nature, as it dominates the preliminary studies and the final version of Capital, belong to the physiological rather than to the social sphere. These concepts of natural science attain a qualitatively new character by being applied to social situations, as a result of the Marxist transition from narrowly naturalistic to historical materialism; at the same time they remain closely tied to their origin, even in their socio-historical application. In the same way as the continued existence of an individual is bound up with the functions of the body, society too must stand in an uninterrupted productive contact with nature. Men pass through the materials of nature, while these materials pass through their hands in the form of use-values, only to be transformed back into mere nature. From Marx’s criticism of the abrupt division between town and country typical of the capitalism of his time, it emerges unmistakably that he understood the concept of metabolism not only metaphorically but also in an immediately physiological sense. This division, Marx said, severely disturbed ‘the metabolism between man and the earth, i.e. the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing, and therefore violated the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil’.140 The conglomeration of great numbers of human beings in the towns had the result both of depriving the soil of an immense quantity of fertilizer, and of endangering the health of the town population. Marx had in view for the society of the future a ‘higher synthesis … of agriculture and industry’, which of course presupposes that the metabolism between man and nature comes about ‘systematically, as a regulating law of social production, and in a form appropriate to the full development of the human race’.141
As we have tried to show, the Marxist distinction between general and specific laws of history does not imply the existence of two levels of reality, accompanying each other without mediation. Consequently, the material side of the metabolism between man and nature emerges more sharply in Marx, notwithstanding his recognition of the historical mutability of its formal determinations. The iron compulsion towards the production and reproduction of human life, which defines the whole of history, has in it something of the rigid cyclical form of nature.
The Subject and the Object of labour are ultimately determined by nature. On the objective side, men remain dependent on at least such basic materials as earth, water, and air, despite the artificiality of the kinds of objects they produce.142 Apart from this, such an important phenomenon for the understanding of social processes as the division of labour does not simply result from the immanent development of the economy. It is also a response to a situation found in nature:
It is not the absolute fertility of the soil, but its differentiation, and the variety of its natural products, which form the natural foundation for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the surroundings within which he lives, spur man on to the multiplication of his needs, his capacities, his means and modes of labour.143
Marx particularly emphasized that regions with certain geographical and climatic disadvantages tend at first to favour the development of industry more than regions which dispose of a rich supply of the means of subsistence, provided by nature without human activity:
A too prodigal nature ‘keeps man in hand, like a child in leading-strings’. It fails to make man’s own development a nature-imposed necessity. It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the temperate zone, that is the mother-country of capital.144
On the subjective side too, there are natural boundaries which limit historical change. In the German Ideology, Marx had already taken as his starting-point the ‘bodily organization’ of individuals, and their ‘relationship with the rest of nature, determined by this’.145 In Capital he dealt much more exhaustively with the question of how far the labour-process is bound to man’s physiology:
… However varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever its form or content, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, senseorgans, etc.146
… A single man cannot operate upon nature without calling his own muscles into play under the control of his own brain. As in the natural body head and hand wait upon each other, so the labour-process unites the labour of the hand with that of the head.147
It is precisely modern industry which shows how much the working Subjects are bound to the presuppositions of the system of nature. Labour processes are, admittedly, significantly differentiated in modern industry, in that they change increasingly into ‘consciously planned and systematically particularized applications of natural science to the attainment of given useful effects’.148 However, technology simultaneously reveals
the few main fundamental forms of motion, which, despite the diversity of the instruments used, are necessarily taken by every productive action of the human body; just as the science of mechanics sees in the most complicated machinery nothing but the continual repetition of the simple mechanical powers.149
It is no accident that Marx should have introduced here a comparison with mechanics, an unhistorical model. In its material aspect, the labour-process does not undergo any change radically dividing the stages of production from each other. This is why Marx expressly stated that the stages of production are distinguished from each other not by what is produced but by the way in which it is produced.150
With the concept of metabolism Marx presented a picture of the social labour-process as a process of nature. We shall attempt to show how far Marx went in this direction151 and how far he was justified in making use of such an analogy. Since classical times, and right up to Machiavelli and even Pareto, alterations in the configuration of society have been understood as part of a cyclical movement proceeding according to natural laws. We find, just as early, attempts to interpret the changes and mutual interactions of natural objects by means of social categories. A model which frequently appears in this connection is that of the exchange of commodities and money, or money and commodities. Thus, in the dialectics of Heraclitus:
All things can be exchanged for fire, and fire can be exchanged for all things, in the same way as commodities exchange for gold, and gold for commodities.152
In Marx we meet with an analogous conception. The metabolism between man and nature – a special case of the general interaction of natural things – was placed by Marx in the category of exchange and, inversely, he had recourse to the concept of metabolism when characterizing the process of exchange. In the direct labour-process, i.e. the metabolism between man and nature, the material side triumphs over the historically determined form; in the process of exchange, which depends on the labour-process, the historically determined form triumphs over the material side.
In the Marxist representation of the metamorphosis of the commodity, it is the reduction of the different forms of concrete labour to qualitatively equal, abstract human labour in general conditioned by a specifically bourgeois society, which is dealt with, rather than the directly productive relation of men to nature (as the useful material of their use-values), i.e. the ‘natural precondition of human existence’153 which is characteristic of all forms of society. The commodity possesses exchange-value as the ‘materialization’ of abstract human labour, not through its subjective and objective determination by nature. The investigation of the creation of use-values through the labour-process does not at first require a characterization of the relations of production within which that process takes place. The historical specificity of an economic epoch appears first through the social relations of individuals in the process of exchange, which are distinct from those occurring in the labour-process.154 Marx described the exchange of commodities under bourgeois relations of production in the following manner:
The exchange of commodities is the process, in which the social metabolism takes place, i.e. the exchange of the particular products of private individuals, as well as the creation of definite social relations of production through which the individuals enter into this metabolism.155
In the process of exchange, the use-value, which is a product of the direct exchange between man and nature, takes on an ‘existence as an exchange-value or general equivalent, cut loose from any connection with its natural existence’.156 Then, through the mediation of this social metabolism, the exchange-value returns to its former immediacy, again becomes a use-value. With the transition from circulation to consumption, the commodity’s social determination becomes extinguished and is replaced with its natural determination, since its use-value is independent of the amount of time required for its manufacture.