PART-3
About the Prelude of Allama Iqbal: According to the first paragraph of this book, it deals with the day to day common things of business. The ambition of this research is to understand, that how people earn money for their daily use? How do they spend this earned money? This means, that this subject deals with the topic of wealth. Its importance increases when we observe that it is one of the branches of science, popularly known as ‘science of economics’. The daily work or job of a common man has a longstanding effect on his/her lifestyle. Even the question of economical status also affects mind and organs of human body. In the human history, the principles of religion, have also affected the lifestyle of human being. It can be proven with the day to day life experiments and observations, that earning and job or work has remained every time with human being without this type of work or job, a man has been understood a mystic, a boring person, who only consumes but doesn’t earn.
The mystics in the whole history, in the majority did nothing, but ate the food of others who worked with hard labour and pains. The job or work of a man represents his/her class, status, and understanding. His outer physical body demonstrates his features among which capital has its own importance. Poverty also affects a man’s life, it changes the whole physical structure of man. That is why the poverty is basic aspect, where we understand mans poor facet through his/her gestures.
What is wealth?Wealth is created when we invest the common life substances in a place, called as market or Bazar in east. It is circulation of a substance for the buyers and sellers. When the buyer sells it in raw, its value remains neutral. So, the basic necessity of any object is, that it must have a value. Like, clothes, pizza, tea etc. Karl Marx defines:
“Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms. Let us consider the matter a little more closely.
A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. – in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold &c., each represents the exchange value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c., must, as exchange values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.”
Karl Marx, ‘Das Capital’, Progress Publisher’s Moscow, USSR 1971. Third edition Vol-1st, Page No:1.
”Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third.
A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base multiplied by the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.
This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use of value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says:
“One sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value…A hundred pounds worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold.”
Karl Marx, ‘Das Capital’, Progress Publisher’s Moscow, USSR 1971. Third edition Vol-1st, Page No:2.