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

posted 10 months ago

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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commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net

19 points

10 months ago

Something I always come back to is how unbelievably obvious it becomes that most critics of Marx have never even opened Capital. Just the first like 10 paragraphs are so immediately enlightening to a different way to consider commodities than marginal value and pure exchange value.

I’m just gonna put all my thoughts in comments under this I guess. At least until more discussion arises

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commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net

8 points

10 months ago

So Marx’s definition of Value as residue comes down to this, right (correct me please if I misunderstand, I’ve struggled here a while): We begin with all aspects/materials characteristics of commodities. Subtract all things which are different between commodities (which includes the aspects we could call use-value) and you are left with the common aspects. These aspects are: 1 exchanges value because the commodities still share the ability to be traded with one another and; 2 Value because all commodities were produced by some form of labour power which crystallizes in the commodity.

He calls it residue because exchange values are not inherent but socially determined while the labour power to produce it is inherent to the commodity. Am I missing something here?

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quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net

12 points

10 months ago

For those who went through Western schooling, especially STEM, the method of chapter 1 is confounding because it is the reverse of how we are normally educated. Normally, in math class for example, you are taught an axiom at the start of class, and its truth is demonstrated by a multitude of examples. In science, you are taught a method by which one makes a hypothesis (based on ??? a gut feeling?), and through empirical data collection, its truth is demonstrated.

The line of thought in chapter 1 is the reverse: Marx starts with truths that are self-evident, and infers a logical structure based on that. Observation -> model instead of model -> observation.

So when you refer to a definition of value, keep in mind it’s not an axiom, it was actually a logical inference based on the observation that commodities in actual fact, in reality, are produced for two contradictory purposes, for their use and for their exchangeability. This necessarily implies value, rather than value implying the rest. It also implies that in the real practice of exchange that people identify something common about all commodities, because without such abstraction it would not be possible to resolve the observable exchange relations we see happening.

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commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net

4 points

10 months ago

Thanks for the clear explanation, valuable even if mostly stuff I knew in some terms! I think this misses my question a bit, though. My question is about that “this necessarily implies value”. How is this implication clear in the process of commodity production and trade? Seems he does deduction from all aspects down to some necessary ones, which support and contradict one another, but I was checking if that’s true. Here you seem to indicate instead that it arises after the deduction as a necessary component to explain exchange and use value as they function.

I said “definition” which was definitely the wrong term though. His derivation, I guess, is what I’m getting at.

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Juice [none/use name]@hexbear.net

6 points

10 months ago

We get to that next. Here’s a diagram from Harvey that I found extremely helpful to understand how Marx structures the work

First we define a commodity, something that is made to be either used or exchanged. Then we kind of shelf use value until we get to defining labor. Then exchange value will be delved into which is where we get to your question. Basically, value comes from comparing the value of this commodity to that commodity, which necessitates the creation of a universal constant, money. One thing that I think about constantly is how alienation is brought about by objectifying and valuing the self, through this constant unconscious process of comparison and evaluating.

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commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net

5 points

10 months ago

Ok thanks again! I think, again, I’m aware that this eventual relation is developed, I was just not sure if this was also what Marx referred to towards the beginning of chapter 1. Seems it was and I just read too much into the paragraph, though, because the “residue” is just later developed more.

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Juice [none/use name]@hexbear.net

5 points

10 months ago

One thing I noticed when I read it was that a lot of the things in Capital is stuff I already kind of figured out. I had read Marx before, but like the way that it works is very familiar, as a worker. I never read a book that I felt was written for me, for us as much as this one. The difference is that where I had a notion of a concept or relationship, Marx has a proof of it; where I had an understanding, Marx goes much, much deeper with historical examples and tables and insight (often interwoven with references to all manner of classic literature and philosophy, the magic is in the notes.) I went into this book expecting to learn an economic theory, but what I really gleaned from it was a method of critique

I recently read Spinoza’s Ethics, and its ordered very similar. It starts with the most basic provable material claims, and from that (not without some liberties) constructs an entire system of ethics and human nature by building, staking provable facts one on top of another, the conclusions are constructed meticulously. It also starts very dry and difficult. Marx is taking it so much further because he is trying to make sure that bourgeois economists can’t say “Marx never considered x.” Its a lot of ground to cover though. And it takes a little patience. There is a ton of value in the detail esp in the later chapters.

Anyway I’m excited for more people to read and learn from this incredible work, just being a nerd over here thanks for humoring me

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quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net

5 points

10 months ago

I got hung up on that question as well, and so have many other people, especially critics like Bortkiewicz. It isn’t helped by David Harvey in his book saying that it is a “cryptic assertion” that the substance of value is abstract labor.

If value is an assertion, then it can be taken on faith or dismissed with as little reason.

First is recognizing that there must be a third thing if qualitatively different things, in different quantities, are compared quantitatively. In section 3 Marx cites Aristotle on this. Strictly speaking it is logically invalid to say “1 table is equal to 3 chairs” because they are different things. What is unsaid in that statement is “some common substance/property between 1 table and 3 chairs is present in equal quantity”. So it implies both qualitative equivalence (same substance) and quantitative equivalence of some third thing.

At this point it’s unclear why Marx singles out labor… let’s see what he thought about this “cryptic assertion”:

What Marx had to say about it

Link

”Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance , is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.

Science consists precisely in demonstrating how the law of value asserts itself. So that if one wanted at the very beginning to “explain” all the phenomenon which seemingly contradict that law, one would have to present science before science.”

If the substance of value being labor was a speculative assertion, then someone else could suggest something else common to all commodities (and many have) such as that they all contain energy, or they are all abstractly useful.

But labor being that common thing is not speculation, it is a prerequisite for a society in which there is a division of labor among independent producers, where exchange of products mediates the exchange of private concrete labors.

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

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

Discuss the week’s reading in the comments.

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