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average movie enjoyer: "I want passive entertainment made by studio executives"

average das kapital fan: "Let us consider two commodities, a coat and 10 yards of linen, perhaps. Let the first have twice the value of the second, so that if 10 yards of linen = w, the coat = 2w.

The coat is a use-value which satisfies a particular need. In order to produce it, a particular kind of purposeful productive activity is required. This is determined in accordance with purpose, manner of operation, object, means and result. The labour whose usefulness is represented in the use-value of its product or in the product in such wise that its product is a use-value, let such labour here be called for simplicity’s sake simply useful labour. From this viewpoint it is constantly under consideration with respect to the utility, production of which is the intent of the labour.

Just as coat and linen are qualitatively different use-values, so the deployments of labour which mediate their realities are qualitatively different – tailoring and weaving. If those things were not qualitatively different use-values and hence products of qualitatively different useful deployments of labour, then they would never be able to confront each other as commodities at all. A coat is not exchanged for a coat. One use-value is not exchanged for the very same use-value.

In the totality of various use-values or commodity-incarnations, there appears a totality of varying deployments of useful labour – just as manifold and differing in genus, species, family, subspecies, variety: a social division of labour. This is the precondition for the existence of commodity production, and it is not the case that commodity production is the precondition for the existence of the social division of labour. In the community of ancient India, labour is socially divided without the products becoming commodities. Or a more immediate example, in every factory labour is systematically divided, but this division is not thereby mediated by the fact that the workers exchange their individual products. Only products of those deployments of private labour which are self-sufficient and independent of one another confront one another as commodities. So we have observed the following – that a particular purposefully productive activity or useful labour lurks in the use-value of every commodity. Use-values cannot confront one another as commodities unless deployments of qualitatively different useful labour lurk in them. In a society whose products generally assume the form of commodity (i.e., in a society of commodity producers) this qualitative difference in the deployments of useful labour which are carried on independently of one another as the private businesses of self-sufficient producers develops into a multi-faceted system – to a social division of labour.

It is a matter of indifference, in any case, to the coat whether it is worn by the tailor or one of his customers. In both cases it acts as a use-value. Just as little, is the relationship between the coat and the labour which produced it changed in and for itself by virtue of the fact that tailoring is a profession in itself – an independent member of the social division of labour. Where a need for clothing compelled him, man plied the activity of tailor for whole millenia before he became a tailor instead of a man. But the reality of coat, linen, and every element of material wealth which is not given by nature in all cases had to be mediated by a special, purposely productive activity which assimilates particular natural entities to human needs. As the former of use-values, as useful labour, labour is thereby the precondition of existence for man – independent of all social forms – and an eternal necessity of nature for the sake of mediating the material interchange between man and nature (i.e., human life).

The use-values coat, linen, etc. – in brief, the commodity-bodies – are connections of two elements, natural matter and labour. If one subtracts the total sum of all different instances of useful labour which lurk inside the coat, linen, etc., there always remains a material substrate left over which is present naturally without the interference of man. Man can only proceed in his producing like nature does herself; i.e., only change the forms of material. And what is more, in this labour of formation itself he is constantly supported by natural forces. Labour is not, therefore, the only source of those use-values which are produced by it – material wealth. Labour is its father, as William Petty says, and the earth is its mother."