“The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret” Response”

While I was reading this section in Marx’s “Capital Volume One” I really didn’t understand what far out, groundbreaking point Marx was trying to make. He kept going on and on for way too long on different points he could make very clearly in a sentence or two. Overall, the point that Marx was trying to get at was how the value of a commodity and the magnitude of labor to create a final product affected its worth. Obviously the more valuable a commodity, the more valuable what you make out of it will be. I don’t quite understand how Marx can say this was discovered by a “scientific study” since it is rather simple, but either way he’s correct about how an item made of a more valuable commodity makes it a more valuable product. Anybody looking to turn a resource into a new product in search of making a profit understands this very well. Nobody in their right mind is going to take an expensive resource like gold, mold it into some type of jewelry, and charge less for it than what the raw gold is worth. Scarcity is what drives the price of gold to be so high at $1,725/oz. right now. Since gold is a hard resource to find it makes it more valuable. On the other hand, a resource like wood isn’t going to be an expensive resource since it’s so readily available and common. Wood comes from trees which are found almost everywhere in the world. Being that it’s so easy to obtain, if I make some sort of product out of wood such as a baseball bat, it won’t be all that expensive. A baseball bat made out of solid wood compared to solid gold are drastically different in value because of the values of each of the commodities. Now the second part that affects a product’s worth is magnitude of labor. By magnitude of labor I mean the difficulty of labor, amount of labor, and what is needed to make a product. The difficulty of labor means how hard it is to make a product. This can be either heavy manual labor or precise, in depth calculations. For example how engineers tend to be paid more than most other professions because of how difficult their work is. Not everybody can handle the heavy math work they do so they tend to be paid better. Next is the amount of labor it takes to create a final product. Would you expect the labor costs to be more for building a bridge or a home? Clearly the building of a bridge would be more costly because of how much longer it would take to complete over a house. This example of a bridge can also be used for how equipment use can affect a products price. The difference between building a bridge over a river or another road can greatly influence the worth of a product. Think about what equipment you would use for each, and how much more difficult some of this equipment may be to obtain or use. Building a bridge over flat land makes it much easier to use equipment with wheels which are decently common. If you were to build a bridge over water you would need equipment that could perform the same tasks as a bridge over a roadway, but this equipment would also need to float above water. This makes it more of a hassle, which causes it to be more costly. In conclusion, I’m not too sure why Marx tried to make this topic so much harder to understand than it had to be. It’s a simple concept of a ratio of difficulty to worth. The more difficult or time consuming a product is to make, the more worth the product will have.