As this first week draws to a close, I wanted to give a big thanks to @[email protected] for organizing and for their occasional inputs and clarifications! It's been great learning with other Hexbears reading it, perhaps for the first time, and seeing the epiphanies happen.

Sorry if anyone felt like I was over explaining or being overzealous in my replies. It is sometimes hard to share content you enjoy without being extremely intense lol

hey, add me to the list, i finally got myself logged in after the latest hexbear update (had to delete 72MB in hexbear.net cookies).

Add me to the list

Sign me up for big theory hours. Went through Ch1 S1-2 for now, will report back in once I am done with the entire chapter and share notes. Right now I am a bit right-hand impaired and long posts are hard.

I had a few thoughts/questions that might get addressed later. Chpt 1 is a lot of simple examples but I can't help but think on them more:

How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.

Maybe oversimplified here, but what about particularly difficult, dangerous, or unpleasant jobs? An hour in the mines is surely worth more than an hour driving trains. I can think of a lot of ways to properly value different jobs without resorting to trying to value the product, but it's odd it's not mentioned here when the next quote is.

Skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour.

In my mind, experience/training/knowledge is a form of capital. Time spent training or learning should be considered a part of the labor, so someone inexperienced who is making coats should be compensated the same as an expert making coats, assuming they are laboring the same, no? Again, I can think of ways of rewarding craftsmanship and experience without basing it on the product, but saying a coat made by one person is more valuable using non-commoditized attributes seems prone to rent seeking.

The same labour extracts from rich mines more metal than from poor mines. Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the earth’s surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour time. Consequently much labour is represented in a small compass.

How is this difference resolved in a global society with commodities? A poor mine yielding less than a rich mine - is the price paid the average labor cost so the rich mine miners are underpaid and poor mine miners overpaid? Are they paid their labor value and subject to the needs of the local factories, the poor mine is shut down?

It's my opinion that the mine should only operate if the ore is absolutely necessary or the transportation costs from the rich mine are prohibitive, in which case the rich mine would be paid less per ore while the poor mine is paid more per ore. This would keep the value of labor consistent between the two environs but I'm not sure this is what marx is saying or maybe it's just glossed over at this chapter?

There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers.

I see authors and journalists so often get close to the contradictions in something only to never reach the conclusion and state it. I assume it's intentional but sometimes I wonder if everyone's just fucking clueless. It's funny to see even Aristotle didn't get it, or died a grifter.

When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron in spite of their different physical and chemical qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.

People who do no work are unable to value the work, so they use shortcuts, trend lines, technical analysis to incant the price points. "An ounce of silver is always worth x ounces of gold so if gold goes up silver must too. " -someone who has never seen the inside of a mine

alright add me to that tag list, gonna finally get through it

The following is part questions and part reflection on Chapter 1 Section 3A. I've really had to chew on this section, and I still don't think I've completely grasped it. All my page numbers are from the Fowkes translation.

The quote below threw me for a bit of a loop yesterday, but reading it again today and considering an earlier quote ("Now we know the substance of value. It is labour. We know the measure of its magnitude. It is labour-time. The form, which stamps value as exchange-value, remains to be analysed. But before this we need to develop the characteristics we have already found somewhat more fully." p 131), it seems like I should have expected this.

“In other words, the value of a commodity is independently expressed through its presentation [Darstellung] as 'exchange-value'. When, at the beginning of this chapter, we said in the customary manner that a commodity is both a use-value and an exchange-value, this was, strictly speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use-value or object of utility, and a 'value'. It appears as the twofold thing it really is as soon as its value possesses its own particular form of manifestation, which is distinct from its natural form. This form of manifestation is exchange-value, and the commodity never has this form when looked at in isolation, but only when it is in a value-relation or an exchange relation with a second commodity of a different kind. Once we know this, our manner of speaking does no harm; it serves, rather, as an abbreviation.” (Marx et al., 1981, p. 152)

Before this, I had loosely defined "value" as a concept quite separate from "exchange-value", perhaps by conflating exchange-value and price in a way that I should not have (as it is not price persay, but the equivalence between two commodities as determined by the difference between their magnitude of value?). So if I am understanding this right, he is developing how while the commodity has a dual form, with use-value being the "natural form" i.e. possible outside of a commodity economy as an intrinsic property of utility, its form as a value/exchange-value are what differentiates it as a proper "commodity" in a commodity economy (where production is done for exchange), as a "value-form"?:

“The product of labour is an object of utility in all states of society; but it is only a historically specific epoch of development which presents the labour expended in the production of a useful” (Marx et al., 1981, p. 154) article as an 'objective' property of that article, i.e. as its value. It is only then that the product of labour becomes transformed into a commodity. It therefore follows that the simple form of value of the commodity is at the same time the simple form of value of the product of labour, and also that the development of the commodity-form coincides with the development of the value-form.” (Marx et al., 1981, p. 153-4)

Going back a page, he writes:

“The modern pedlars of free trade, on the other hand, who must get rid of their commodities at any price, stress the quantitative side of the relative form of value. For them, accordingly, there exists neither value, nor magnitude of value, anywhere except in its expression by means of the exchange relation,” (Marx et al., 1981, p. 153)

So what Marx has introduced into the bourgeois understanding of a commodity is that what underlies exchange-value, is value provided by labor and the magnitude of that value by abstract labor-time so that exchange-value is an expression of that underlying value?

Moving forwards again, he writes: "We perceive straight away the insufficiency of the simple form of value: it is an embryonic form which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the price-form." p.154

I feel like the method Marx is using here is completely backwards from anything else I have read, where he constantly works from the most "embryonic" forms of what he is dealing with, which on its face always seem too simplistic, but then builds on that again and again. In other words, this is breaking my brain lol.

But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterized by a total abstraction from use-value.

Does this get expounded on later? I realise that use-value gets abstracted as "demand" in liberal economics (the driver of everything, apparently, but obviously a shortage of food means prices go up and people are still hungry), but I feel like it can't be discarded so early.

The labour-time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.

He's obviously talking about mass society here, can the total labour across society for yards of linen constitute a portion of total possible yards of linen across society? Is that a worthwhile line of thinking? (e.g. We produce, idk, a million yards of linen a year. We could produce 2 million yards of linen if we dismantled all our other exports and started putting people unsuited to linen weaving in there. If all of society didn't care about food, bathing, etc... we could produce 2.5 million yards of linen. This scaling of commodity production across society and how technology interacts with it is our "socially necessary" labour time for a single yard of linen)

I should keep reading, trying to take it all in.

I'm due for a re-read, please feel free to add me to the list :)

Here is a link to the Fowkes translation, pdf, with good quality and ocr: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D0

I know we're going to get to money later but I'm really curious how it will work with the way money is treated now. As I understand it from this chapter money is basically just a commodity that has been agreed to be a universal equivalent, but it would seem to me that fiat currency is not, at least at first glance, able to fill that role.

Fiat doesn't take labor to produce, unlike gold or other precious metals; fiat is not a commodity in the sense we seem to be using it here, and the labor power that goes into creating money is negligible compared with the value it denotes. I'm pretty sure "commodification" is a later innovation but it seems like fiat currency would need to somehow convert people's abstract faith in human labor power into a commodity on its own or it couldn't actually be an equivalent as we are told gold is for the British pound in this chapter.

I had forgotten that Chapter 1 Section 3 is the worst thing ever written

Section 1 exercise suggestion: Draw a diagram of some kind (Venn, mind map, chaos dragon, etc.) that contains at least the information in the last paragraph of the section. For example, the circles of a Venn diagram could be labeled "use value", "has value", and "commodity".

How is everycomrade getting along? It's Friday, so you should be about 72% complete. Is the pace too fast or too slow?

Wait, how does this work?

Do you just read on your own time?

Does anyone want to share what music they listen to while reading? I never really did ‘study music’, but now I have background noise I need to deal with, and could use some suggestions.

I’d love to be added to the list! This seems like the best way to fully tackle this beast