A case study in the commodity fetish: organic vs. value composition

Based on the commonplace understandings of the terms, the organic composition would seem to merely be the “correct” version of the value composition: the value composition that we’d compute based solely on knowledge of the technical composition and the values of its component parts.

But of course, that’s the thing: “the values of its component parts” isn’t a well‐defined notion in the absence of further clarification. Are those current values on the market, or values qua advanced capital?

Interestingly, the first two editions of Capital vol. 1 (the ones published during Marx’s lifetime) make no use of the term value composition nor of technical composition. Organic composition is defined once and then mentioned only one other time (both in part vii, ch. 23 “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”). An unqualified composition [of capital] is used a few times throughout, without the need to define it less vaguely than “the ratio between the capital’s constant and variable components”.

In ch. 25 of the third edition (corresponding to ch. 23 of the second), we get the usual definition: “I call the value‐composition of capital, insofar as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter, the organic composition of capital” (a similar passage occurs in vol. 3, part ii, ch. 8). But Marx quickly goes on to say that unless otherwise specified, the organic composition is always meant — seemingly suggesting that the value composition was necessary only as a stepping‐stone to defining organic composition.

But a closer look at Marx’s definition reveals that insofar as the value composition isn’t synchronically determined by the technical composition, it’s not the organic composition at all.

Marx knew this perfectly well, but chose to simplify matters for the purpose of exposition, thinking that an essentially (political‐)economic version of his theory — the exoteric version which my Of value series argues against — would suffice. In particular, taking the organic composition to be The Composition Of Capital™^[1] implies a tendential “equilibrium” in which de/valorisation isn’t real and there is no MPP. Then we’d be justified in taking a long‐run view on which the value composition is “typically” equal to the organic composition anyway.

This purely theoretic (and theoretically‐deficient) “tendency” is something like a valuewise eventual consistency: all capitals eventually agree on the “state of the system”, where the latter is taken to encompass The Values™ of all relevant variable capitals, constant capitals, and commodity capitals, such that — moreover! — these are consistent with the linear combination of their commodity components’ Values™.

Lest the reader doubt that Marx was aware of this (over)simplification, take the following passage from vol. 3 for example:

A capital of lower organic composition, on the other hand, considered simply in terms of its value composition, could evidently rise to the same level as a capital of higher organic composition, simply by an increase in the value of its constant parts. […worked example…] Capitals of the same organic composition can thus have a differing value composition

So it seems safe to say that the organic composition is the technical composition valued relative to some particular valuation of its parts. By contrast, the value composition is the composition of capital as such; that is, value in its capital‐form, advanced as value in want of surplus‐value to annex to itself.

Conflating organic composition with value composition is therefore a particular case of the commodity fetish: it implies that capital — a form of value — is things (raw materials, equipment, labour‐power, etc.) and that these things, in turn, have Value™ simpliciter.

Further reading: The fundamental incoherence of so‐called “equilibrium”.