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)
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Harvey's guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
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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
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Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/
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I am hung up on the difference between the labor theory of value and “supply and demand” from school.
In Marx’s example of the corn out of season I understand the labor value is higher, but how is this different from saying less supply yields higher price?
Likewise with the loom example, the powered loom devalues the labor value but it could also be understood as an increase in supply per unit labor.
Is it the same concept framed differently or am I missing something?
So, both the labor theory of value and "supply and demand" can both coexist in Marx's framework. They are compatible ideas. On the most basic level, cloth from a loom has a "use value." I can take the cloth and use it as a towel or a wash-cloth. Or, I can take the cloth, cut it up, and sew it together into a shirt, pants, etc. This "use value" is what basically determines the "demand" part of supply and demand. The "supply" part of supply and demand is basically determined by the labor that goes into making a thing. Someone has to plant the cotton, pick it, put it on the loom, dye it, transport it, sell it at the market, etc.
So, the higher a "use value" is, the higher the demand can be. And the more labor that has to go into making something, the lower the "supply" will be. This is a big, big oversimplification, of course. But to continue the cloth example, if you look at high-quality, durable blue jeans vs. a simple washcloth, the blue jeans have more "use value" to you as a consumer, so they can have a higher demand, increasing their price. You can then take the basic "use value" of the blue jeans and find its "exchange value" by looking at all sort of different things, including advertising, artificial scarcity, etc., which affect demand, and things like labor laws, monopolization, transportation infrastructure, etc. which affect supply.
The main difference between "exchange value" and price is that "exchange value" is independent of many complicating factors affecting price, like currency exchange rates, geographical differences in standard of living, etc. For example, the same blue jeans, with the exact same "use value" and "exchange value," might be sold at a higher price in New York City than Boise, Idaho, because people there are willing to pay more money for the same jeans. In a more online example, the exact same video game is sold at wildly different prices in different countries with different currencies. Discounts and sales affect prices even more drastically. But the existence of a coupon/discount does not change the "use value" of a game, or even its abstract "exchange value," just the price you pay for it.
This is actually a very subtle issue, with a lot of complicated details to work through. Here an entry about it from the literal "Encyclopedia of Marxism:"
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/e/x.htm#:~:text=Exchange%2Dvalue%20differs%20from%20%E2%80%9Cprice,of%20the%20commodity%20against%20money.
But to sum it up, Marx does believe in "supply and demand," which is perfectly compatible with the labor theory of value. It's just that labor determines the "supply" side of supply and demand. Because it is laborers who are ultimately "supplying" the raw materials, and the labor that goes into turning those raw materials into usable commodities. Hope this helps!
This explanation has "use-value" in quotations and is clearly simplified for explanatory purposes. I understand it wasn't meant to be fully precise. But I think it gives a wrong impression of use value.
Use value is not synonymous with abstract usefulness and it isn't a quantity. It's more like a true/false, a product either is or is not a use value, depending on whether it is actually consumed. And of course we should always keep in mind we are talking of mass-produced commodities, not one-off works of art. If a commodity is regularly produced and consumed, in short, if there is an industry for it, it is a use value.
Whether something is a use value does not depend on the degree or magnitude of its usefulness, but exclusively on the fact that it has particular physical, chemical, aesthetic, or other properties that allow it to be useful. So in Capital, use value is more properly understood as the qualitative description of a commodity, like "red" or "nutritious". The physical form of an apple is itself the use-value of an apple. The physical quantity of apples is the quantity of its use-value.
Let me know if you disagree, I'm open to discussion.
This is very helpful thank you. I realize now that I was conflating price and exchange value - you're right, it's a subtle but important difference that I breezed over