Hop in, comrades, we are reading Capital Volumes I-III this year, and we will every year 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. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

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: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=AA342398FDEC44DFA0E732357783FD48

(Unsure about the quality of the Reitter translation, I’d love to see some input on it as it’s the newest one)

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. Also, please let me know if you spot any errors with the bookmarks so I can fix them!

Resources

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

2024 Archived Discussions

If you want to dig back into older discussions, this is an excellent way to do so.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40 – Week 41 – Week 42 – Week 43 – Week 44 – Week 45 – Week 46 – Week 47 – Week 48 – Week 49 – Week 50 – Week 51 – Week 52

2025 Archived Discussions

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) (Note: Seems to be on hiatus for now) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there’s always next year.

N/A

  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    14·
    7 days ago

    Coincidentally I’ve been studying chapter 1 just this past week so I’m kinda ready to talk about it, if anyone else is. My questions are a bit technical and not necessary for understanding the chapter.

    I am looking for answers to two questions:

    1. How does Marx settle on labor as being the exclusive content of value? Why couldn’t it be any other common property of commodities e.g. that they have an abstract utility?
    2. Does chapter 1 directly reveal a dialectical method? If so, how? Can it be traced out similar to the being–nothing–becoming example in Hegel?

    If anyone has good answers to these, I’d be curious.

    For #1, I think the answer is that Marx does not directly prove it in the text. Rather, he knows a priori that it must be labor. I base this on Marx’s well-known letter to Kugelmann where he explains from the opposite direction, starting from labor instead of value, that value must be labor because that is how labor is distributed.

    I accept this reasoning but I’m not clear whether chapter 1 is intended to demonstrate a proof. It seems maybe not, based on Marx’s afterword to the second German edition, where he says that “the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry.” This implies that he may prove things to himself behind the scenes, and only explain his findings in popular form in the book. As well, this would answer my second question in the negative; however I’m not sure that I’m right about that.

    • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      For 1, as of Chapter 1, it appears Marx is settling on Labor in as much as it, along with natural materials, is the sole requirement of creation of use-values, and builds up from there. There is immense utility in analyzing value in this manner from a predictive capacity and a diagnostic capacity.

      For 2, I believe so. Marx is always describing value as a social relation in motion and as Commodities relate to each other. The dialectical process analyzes the motive and relative aspects of value.

    • Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      12·
      7 days ago

      I thought I’d give my thoughts on question 1. But there are a lot of big brained people here who can give a better and more thorough answer. I’d like to here from others too!

      For question 2, I’d also like to know this, so I’m looking forward to what others have to say. I know that many interpretations of the first chapters regarding the description of commodities and the money-from explain it has a ‘historical-evolution’, but I’ve also heard that the development of these ideas is not meant to be taken as a diachronic description, but instead as the unfolding of a dialectic thought-process. I don’t know enough to speak on this, so I’d like to hear more on this. This latter point was argued by Andrea Ricci in her paper The Specter of Value: The Beginning of Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic of Being, but I’ve only given it a cursory reading. That may be a place to look if you can find a copy of it?

      Here are my thoughts on question 1:

      On pg 127-128 of the Penguin edition Marx states that the exchange values of commodities - the fact that commodities can be exchanged with all sorts of other commodities, expresses something equal between the commodities - between all exchangeable commodities. And this exchange value is a mode of expression or ‘form of appearance’ of some underlying content distinguishable from the commodity itself and its use-value. Two commodities, such as corn and iron can be exchanged, and their exchange value signifies a common element of magnitude exists between them, a common third thing.

      It follows that … the valid exchange-values of a … commodity express something equal, and … exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression … of a content distinguishable form it.

      For instance 1 quarter of corn = x cwt of iron. What does this equation signify? It signifies that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things… Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one nor the other.

      And you can make this argument for any set of two exchangeable commodities, there must be some “third thing”. So the first clue here is that there is some element that is common to all commodities that explains these exchange ratios that can be made for all commodities.

      The second clue is in the next couple of paragraphs where Marx states that this common element can’t be a property of the commodity’s use-value. Why? Because “the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values.” One use-value is worth just as much as another in some appropriate quantity. In exchange, the use-values don’t matter.

      When commodities are in the relation of exchange, their exchange-value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value.

      (Though it is useful to keep in mind that with no use-value, there would be no social demand for products and hence the private labor put into a useless product would never be made/realized as social labor, never realized as value. So no use-value also means no value)

      So clue 1 and clue 2 together mean there must be something that all commodities have in common which is also independent on their “geometrical, physical, chemical, or other natural property”, i.e. independent of their material use-value.

      The only “third thing” between any pair of exchanged commodities that can be abstracted from use-value is human labor in the abstract.

      If we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labor.

      With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labor, the useful character of the kings of labor embodied in them also disappears… They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labor, human labor in the abstract.

      —-

      It’s also important to note that value, and these exchange ratios, emerge independently of the will and foreknowledge of the exchangers. It isn’t that people know that they

      “bring the products of their labor into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as … homogenous human labor. The reverse it true: by equation their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labor as human labor. They do this without being aware of it” (pg. 167)

      And an important part about labor being the origin of value, and this is also important for the law of value is that these exchange ratios, value, signifies the quantitative proportions of the social division of labor. Within an economy there is a “homogenous mass of human labor-power” (pg 129) and to reproduce the use-values of this economy, given some levels of productivity for each branch of industry, this “homogenous mass” must be redistributed into distinct branches. A social division of labor must occur across the branches so the “correct proportion” of labor-time is applied to each branch to adequately reproduce our society (our use-values and ourselves). This necessary proportion of labor-time into each branch is the socially necessary labor-time, and it is what is ‘underneath’ value, in my interpretation.

      … all the different kinds of private labor … are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. The reason for this reduction is that in the midst of accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labor-time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature … The determination of the magnitude of value by labor-time is therefore a secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities. (pg. 168).

      My take is that value, being social, is a product of our own species’ limited social labor-time. There are only so many working hours possible in a day, and in order to recreate our society these limited labor-hours must be divvied up into concrete proportions across various “branches” (types of concrete labor). And unlike any other commodity or product, such as oil, electricity, grain, etc., all products of labor (all commodities) have their ultimate source in labor, hence in a definite division of social labor. So all commodities, and the facts of their production, their supply, the quantities in which they exchange with each other, etc. can be traced down to the labor-time that our society spends on creating them. No other element is the “common element” to all commodities.

      There have also been some empirical studies to investigate this. Cockshott comes to mind (though if you ever look into him be warned he is a transphobe), as well as Zachariah and Petrovic. There have been some studies that investigate the correlation between production prices vs labor values vs the prices of other “potential value sources” such as oil, electricity, etc. These suggest that the empirical evidence also supports the labor theory of value - though I don’t recall much of their methodology. I’d have to go back and reread them more thoroughly!

      • Petrovic - The Deviation of Production Prices from Labor Values: Some Methodology and Empirical Evidence (1987)

      • Zacharia - Testing the labor theory of value in Sweden (2004)

      • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        5 days ago

        Appreciate the write up! I agree with the outline you give here. It’s a good summary of the first couple sections of chapter one.

        I think the question remains, however. I don’t think the third thing argument leads, by internal necessity, to abstract labor as the common social substance of commodities. There is a leap being made here that can’t be made without an additional, external consideration or constraint. In other words, we can’t derive abstract labor as the substance of value merely from the exchange of two commodities.

        There is a third thing, yes, and it’s something which abstracts from the particular material properties of each commodity in the relation; but that third property, from this limited perspective, could be anything one may speculate as common among commodities. One such common property would be that commodities are all abstractly useful: every commodity has utility, regardless of which use it satisfies. So how can it be justified for Marx to set apart labor as the sole determinant of value?

        I have researched more since I posted this question, and I have found an answer I can accept in I. I. Rubin’s lecture on abstract labor.

        I can explain more if needed, but the basic conclusion is that the identification of labor as the third thing can only happen through additional analysis which accounts for the specific character of labor in capitalism as social labor whose division is mediated through exchange value. You mentioned this part already, but I think it is theoretically significant that the third thing argument is not, in itself, a proof that the third thing is labor. (Rubin argues that Marx himself did not intend this as a proof of such.) There are additional points I can make about the necessity of money in Marx’s argumentation, specifically in the assertion that each commodity is replaceable by any other in actual fact, not ideally or hypothetically. This subtle point about money is explained by Rubin but also by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value.

        Rubin excerpt

        [I]t is the concrete structure of commodity production which forms the starting point of all Marx’s reflections and in no way the purely logical comparison of two commodities.

        Marx thus starts out from the fact of the universal equalisation of all commodities with each other, or from the fact that every commodity can be compared with a vast number of other commodities. Nevertheless this assumption alone is not adequate for all the conclusions Marx draws. There is another tacit assumption underlying these which Marx expressed elsewhere.

        The second assumption consists in this: we assume that the exchange of a quarter of wheat for any other commodity, is an exchange which is governed by a known regularity (Gesetzmässigkeit), and the regularity of these acts of exchange is due to their dependence on the process of production. We have to reject the notion that the quarter of wheat can be exchanged for any random quantity of iron, coffee etc. We cannot agree with the assumption that the proportions of exchange are laid down each time in the act of exchange itself, and so have a completely accidental character. We maintain that all these possibilities for the exchange of a specific commodity with another, are governed by a determined regularity which is based in the process of production. In this case Marx’s whole argumentation takes the following form:

        Marx says: let us take not the accidental exchange of two commodities wheat, and iron, but exchange in the form in which it actually occurs in commodity production, and then we will see that each object can be universally equated with all other objects; in other words, we can observe countless numbers of proportions of exchange of a given product with all others. But the proportions of the exchange are not accidental, they are regular, and their regularity is determined by causes which are grounded in the process of production.

        Thus we reach the conclusion, that independently of the fact that the value of a quarter of wheat is expressed on one occasion as two pounds of coffee, on another as three chairs etc., the value of a quarter of wheat remains one and the same in all the different cases. If we were to assume that a quarter of wheat has a different value in each of the infinite number of proportions of exchange — and Bailey’s assertions amount to this — then we would be acknowledging that complete chaos reigns in the phenomenon of price formation, in that sublime phenomenon of exchange of products, through and by means of which a universal inter-relation of all modes of labour is established.

        • Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          19 hours ago

          I wanted to thank you for your response, and ask some more questions. But I think you’ve mentioned them in a separate post. You’re also on to the next chapter already! dog-screm Sorry I have nothing to respond with at the moment, but I wanted you to know I wasn’t ignoring your response! I got to get to reading.

    • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      7 days ago

      On the second question: It’s not an answer but this maybe helpful. Read from left to right and line by line, this lays out the basic structure of argument of capital one, as Harvey sees it. As you can see, it’s not a “line of argument”, but rather an interlinking chain of contradicting forces, which hints at a dialectic method.

      This implies that he may prove things to himself behind the scenes, and only explain his findings in popular form in the book

      Yes, but I think he does intend to show everything and make it as accessible as possible, it’s just, that he has the three volumes in mind from the beginning. That’s why chapter one might be too early to answer both questions actually. Or rather it might be useful in reading capital to keep the totality in mind. Here is another picture by Harvey intend to help with that.