Material goods

“ A, B, and C represent different raw materials, and they are changed by a series of transmutations into A ́ ́ ́, B ́ ́ ́, and C ́ ́ ́, which stand for all the consumers' goods that the society uses. They represent food, clothing, furnishings, vehicles, and countless means of comfort and pleasure. ”

“ Hence arises a demand for every sort of material which human invention can employ, either usefully or ornamentally, in building, dress, equipage, or household furniture; for the fossils and minerals contained in the bowels of the earth, the precious metals, and the precious stones. ”

“ A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use-value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use-value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use-values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities. ”

“ Select for study some common commodity which passes through all or most of the stages of manufacture in your community, as, for example, a hammer, a shoe, flour or canned goods. Make a list of the various individuals who are connected with the production of this commodity. ”

“ In regard to manufactures, as opposed to raw products, it is to be remarked “that, as the course of price in the field of raw products is, on the whole, upward, so in that of manufactured goods the course is, not less strikingly, in the opposite direction. ”

“ The abstract idea of utilizing that which is at present a waste can play no important rôle in such activities, the successful commercial outcome of which must be based on the three fundamental factors—market or demand for product, satisfactory raw material, and cost. ”

“ In calculating the exchangeable value of a commodity we must add to the quantity of labor last employed, the quantity of labor previously worked up in the raw material of a commodity, and the labor bestowed in the implements, tools, machinery, and buildings, with which labor is assisted. ”

“ Tradesmen, in the narrower sense of the term, produce only a change in the form of the material, the higher value of which depends on the quantity of other material consumed for the purposes of the tradesman's labor. ”

“ The great writers and thinkers on economic subjects discuss with care the elements that enter into the production and distribution of wealth. They follow in detail the manufactured article through all its stages, from the crude material to the finished product ”

“ In relation to product it means any substance on which industry is to be exerted. In relation to industry, the material on which industry is about to confer value, that on which it has conferred value; the instruments which are used for the conferring of value, as well as the means of sustenance by which the being is supported while he is engaged in performing the operation.”—Elements of Political Economy, Book I, Chap. ”

“ It is entitled to a fair profit on the raw materials it uses in manufacture.... But how much of the final cost of its axles does raw material represent? A fraction! What gives the axles the rest of their value?... LABOR! You men are paid two, three, some of you even four dollars a day—for your labor. ”

“ His food, his clothing, etc., are all prepared in a more elaborate way, and he has more of what we call form utility which results from the fashioning of things, and relatively less of the elementary utility which inheres in the raw material. ”

“ To simplify the consideration of this subject, I have been supposing that a rise in the value of raw materials would affect, in an equal proportion, all home commodities; that if the effect on one were to raise it 10 per cent., it would raise all 10 per cent.; but as the value of commodities is very differently made up of raw material and labour ”

“ Nearly every manufacturer is aware by painful experience of the great and almost incessant variation that occurs in the quality and properties of the materials used in his trade, and the frequent risk of failure of his process. ”

“ As a storehouse of material for the benefit of working naturalists it stands unique; and as an auxiliary to the purest, highest research, it is one of the signs of the times that wealth is not absorbed in material interests; that commerce counts it an honor to contribute to original investigation. May the number of such men increase, and such institutions multiply! ”

“ If we suppose that the same body of labourers carried on a manufacture, and grew food to sustain themselves while doing it, they have had for their trouble the food and the manufactured article; but if they also grew the material and made the tools, they have had nothing for that trouble but the manufactured article alone. ”

“ The natural raw material is then worth what the artificial substitute costs in terms of capital and labor, and the finished product which contains some of the natural material sells for the amount which the finished product costs, which is made altogether by labor and capital applied to valueless elements in nature. ”

“ This classification, which suggests important considerations on the order of society in general, is like the preceding one in that it is subject to the same inversion in popular estimation, so that the use of raw material is the work of the lowest and worst paid trades, while the oftener the material changes hands, the more the work rises in price and in honour. ”

“ It was necessary in order to complete our study of the second class of material commodities, namely, those produced from valuable and rentful lands, to glance in passing at the frequently disturbing effect on these, aside from their cost of production, of sinister laws plausibly imposed upon an unsuspicious people in the interest and at the instance of a privileged few. ”

“ The genealogy of value may thus be traced through the various intermediate products to consumption goods. A single product having a single source of supply shows most clearly the reflection of value directly from the product. The discovery of a mineral spring or of a good quality of building-stone on worthless land, will cause a value to attach at once to the source of supply. ”

“ It is through the agency of man's labour that these utilities are embodied in material objects which give them their exchange value. For instance, the utility which man confers upon coal is to place it in those situations in which it may be required. in conferring utility directly.There can be no doubt, therefore, that all that labour is productive which confers utility upon material objects. ”

“ The basic material resources, consisting of the materials of the earth's surface and the natural climatic conditions which together provide the physical conditions necessary for human existence, and which furnish the stuff out of which men can create new forms of wealth. ”

“ One where the material is itself an object of general or extensive consumption, and a fit and productive source of revenue. Another where a manufacture of a simpler kind, the competition of which with a like domestic article is desired to be restrained, partakes of the nature of a raw material from being capable by a further process to be converted into a manufacture of a different kind, the introduction or growth of which is desired to be encouraged. ”

“ For example, let us imagine a society, of no great extent, occupied in procuring and laying up store of corn, wine, wool, silk, and other such preservable materials of food and clothing; and that it has a currency representing them. ”

“ Men of science, for the most part, look down upon such knowledge. The practical uses of any substances, the wants and difficulties of the manufacturer, are regarded as mere trade questions, vulgar and low—simple questions of money. ”

“ In the case of the raw materials that gradually ripen into articles for consumption and which we have called passive capital goods, the waste of tissues that takes place is quite unlike that which takes place in the case of active capital goods, the tools and implements that are used in the process. ”

“ If any one commodity could be found, which now and at all times required precisely the same quantity of labour to produce it, that commodity would be of an unvarying value, and would be eminently useful as a standard by which the variations of other things might be measured. ”

“ In some instances, such as stone, clay and a few other rough commodities for which only production figures are available the same have been taken as equivalent to consumption, which doubtless is near enough. ”

“ The constant discoveries of new treasures in our material world, of gold, silver, iron, and copper, of states to be built up and of harvests to be sown and reaped, [Pg 24] are accompanied by corresponding discoveries concerning the variety of human gifts and their application to useful ends. What men and women can be good for may be more voluminously stated to-day than in any preceding age of the world's history. ”

“ The laws of the production of manufactured articles involve the whole of chemistry and the whole of mechanics. The laws of the production of the wealth which is extracted from the bowels of the earth, cannot be set forth without taking in a large part of geology. ”

“ You exchange your labor-power—to the boss—for perhaps $2 in gold a day, and in turn the gold is exchanged for the necessities of life—food, clothing and shelter. Why do these commodities exchange for each other? ”

“ The ultimate effect of labor applied to the production of universal wealth is "abundance of silver, gold and jewels, which are not perishable nor so mutable as other commodities, but are wealth at all times and in all places." ”

“ It has been long remarked, and justly, that commerce, properly so called, i.e. the transportation of raw materials or finished products, from one market to another, by adding to the worth of the objects transported, creates value or wealth in just the same way as the labour of the miner who extracts metals from the bowels of the earth, or the workman who adapts them to our needs. ”

“ Workers make shoes; bakers of bread are working men or women; houses, street cars, trains, palaces, bridges, stoves—all are the product of the laboring man. All commodities are the product of labor.
There is one common thing which all commodities contain. This is labor. A commodity only has value (exchange value) because it contains human labor.
Horses are commodities, cows are commodities, gold is a commodity. Human labor has been spent in producing all these. Labor-power is also a commodity, the result of human labor in the past. ”

“ Taken thus, products present themselves not merely according to their sources, but according to their value as well, as the syntheses of their productive elements. That product which requires them in greater quantity has the greater value. ”

“ But gold is a commodity just like bread, or overcoats, or dresses, or automobiles. And commodities tend to exchange for the sum of gold containing a quantity of labor equal to the quantity of labor contained in them. ”

“ Like any other product of labor, its value is determined by the quantity of labor employed in obtaining it; and the amount of this product is divided between wages and profits as in any case of a manufactured commodity. ”

“ But in addition to the mercantile faculty of discovering how they were to be exchanged and wrought into a profitable trade, their use in arts and manufactures required skill, invention and aptitude for manufacturing labour, and those again, in many cases, were found to depend on abundant possession of natural materials, such as coal and iron. ”

“ These three elements, Nature, Labor, Capital, conspire in all production of commodities. Nature comes first with her free forces and materials; and then present toil aided by the results of past toil in the form of capital does all the rest in getting commodities ready to sell and selling them. ”

“ But since the commodity value exists in gold also, itself being a commodity, a new factor arises in the society which produces and exchanges commodities, a factor with new social functions and operations. ”

“ Such a selected commodity becoming in the manner already explained an actual medium passing from hand to hand in Exchanges, impresses its name on the minds of men as an ideal measure of services, which measure they can use, and do constantly use, without handling at the time the commodity itself. ”

“ With this reminder as to the production of unexchanged commodities, which, while important, are yet but an exceedingly small part of the product of the entire activities of our people, I proceed to an examination of the money value of that greater part of the product which is bought and sold. ”