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Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity' (hexbear.net)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. This will repeat yearly until communism is achieved. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included, but comrades are welcome to set up other bookclubs.) This works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested.

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Use any translation/edition you like. Marxists.org has the Moore and Aveling translation in various file formats including epub and PDF: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

Ben Fowkes translation, PDF: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D

AernaLingus says: I noticed that the linked copy of the Fowkes translation doesn't have bookmarks, so I took the liberty of adding them myself. You can either download my version with the bookmarks added, or if you're a bit paranoid (can't blame ya) and don't mind some light command line work you can use the same simple script that I did with my formatted plaintext bookmarks to take the PDF from libgen and add the bookmarks yourself.

Resources

(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)

Harvey's guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
A University of Warwick guide to reading it: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/worldlitworldsystems/hotr.marxs_capital.untilp72.pdf
Engels' Synopsis of Capital or PDF
Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I may not fully understand your question so apologies if I am speaking in a different direction.

In this case, Marx understands value as having a form primarily in exchange and in anticipation of exchange, the idea being to increase total capital through production and sale. Capital becomes represented by the money form so that exchange need not be directly understood as linen yards to coats to hammers, but we also know that money itself, exchange, is representing exactly that. A coat is $50, a yard of linen is $15, a hammer is $20, so they all implicitly relate to one another, at a moment in time, via the act of exchange and via the potential to be exchanged.

Producers, if you mean the bourgeois, are doing this because they want to increase their profits and they (attempt to) understand their costs vs. intended sale values so that they accumulate a larger volume of capital tgaty they will use to "outcompete" their rivals by repeating this process better than them. But we are all subject to this idea of value, as we buy the coat and the hammer (and maybe sometimes the linen), by definition for its perceived use value (Marx didn't try to distinguish an idea of valid or necessary use value from the rest, which was a good call).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

In the context of that paragraph and chapter, it looks like he's also saying that this idea is absurb and coming from the top down. (well, the last two paragraphs). Like, previously he talks about commodity fetishism where commodities appear to have their labour value imbued into them (abstracted as price), and that's what you see (because of your separation from the actual productive process and the actual laborers that do them) because this is what the producers are doing.

idk if I'm making sense or talking about a real point here.

When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labor and the collective labor of society in the same absurd form. The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

this paragraph, second to last

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

The absurdity he first mentions (as self-evident) is the idea of a linen coat as the universal form of abstract labor. We don't go around saying everything literally in terms of the number of linen coats it's worth. "Yeah these headphones were pricey - 2.5 linen coats!" But he then proceeds to say that the existing universal forms like gold are just as absurd in the same way, just not self-evidently (it's normalized for us under capitalism). "Yeah these headphones were pricey - $125!" Why is that abstraction "expensive"? We compare it to our own wage labor price and the prevailing wage labor price, implicitly. Capitalism teaches workers this by their nature of being wage laborers. Capitalism teaches the owner class this through the drive to maximize the volume of profits, abstracting all of their inputs to production as the commodity and its price, including, per Marx, the most miserable commodity (the worker). The universal exchange form represents the abstraction of profit maximization through the capitalist mode of production: the drive to minimize the cost of inputs is quantified through it.

This is an incredible abstraction given what is going on behind the production of even one commodity, turning it into just one number to maximize lest you perish. As a wage worker, your labor price and everything you work with at your job is just a number to be minimized to the owner, if the owner wants to "succeed". This naturally leads to a stark class antagonism. Marx is laying the groundwork for this via the establishment of what a commodity is and how strange of a thing it truly is under capitalist production.