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Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity' (hexbear.net)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.