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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] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Okay. I'm sure it will be made clear, it just seems like, from this chapter, money being a commodity is a necessary attribute for it to fill the role of an equivalent. But maybe this is just describing how money emerges, first as a commodity and then as the contrasting realities of value develop it can be applied more abstractly?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

A few thoughts.

First, just because government actors and economists have declared that commodity money has been abolished in favor of fiat money, does not necessarily make it so. I’m not saying that fiat money is not actually money, only that there is a dissonance between appearance and actuality, and modern (vulgar^1^) economists are the least capable of distinguishing the two. For example, chapter 1 section 4 on the commodity fetish^2^.

Second, the main purpose of money is to provide an independent existence of value apart from commodities. If this form somehow fully detaches itself from even a money commodity, it does not necessarily upset the law of value.

All that said I’m not that well versed on this topic, so someone else probably has a more detailed and current explanation.

Footnote 33:

”… by classical Political Economy, I understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society in contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily use, but for the rest, confines itself to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds.”

“… the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.”

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

but for the rest, confines itself to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds.

Gonna email this to Larry Summers everyday

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

just because government actors and economists have declared that commodity money has been abolished in favor of fiat money, does not necessarily make it so

Yeah from my (very limited admittedly) understanding of high level modern economies we're on a de-facto oil-standard (as opposed to a gold-standard)