The importance of foreign trade for the increasing multiplicity of use values

The progress of capitalism increases the mass of surplus product accruing to capital. The number of human needs is unlimited and when people have enough of some products there are always others which they can use. Towards the middle of the last century people consumed a greater variety of products than fifty years earlier, and today this variety is greater still.

Foreign trade plays an important role in expanding this multiplicity of products. Here what matters is international exchange as such, regardless of whether it takes place with capitalist or non-capitalist ones. By increasing the multiplicity of products foreign trade has the same impact as product diversification on the home market. An increasing variety of use values facilitates accumulation and weakens the breakdown tendency. Marx says:

If surplus labour or surplus value were represented only in the national surplus product, then the increase of value for the sake of value and therefore the exaction of surplus labour would be restricted by the limited, narrow circle of use values in which the value of the [national] labour would be represented. But it is foreign trade which develops its [the surplus product’s] real nature by developing the labour embodied in it as social labour which manifests itself in an unlimited range of different use values, and this in fact gives meaning to abstract wealth. (1972, p. 253)

Thus the limits on the production of surplus value are extended; the breakdown of capitalism is postponed.

This aspect of the exchange relationship does not exhaust the problem of foreign trade and its impact on the tendencies of capitalism. Looking at the matter from the value side, I have shown that the problem of breakdown by no means lies in an excess of surplus value but in its opposite, a lack of sufficient valorisation. Therefore we have to examine foreign trade from the aspect of its impact on valorisation.