Uhhh... Let me be 30 yards of linen

Just a word of encouragement to anyone struggling with chapter 1, the first three chapters (and chapter 1 especially) of Capital are notoriously heavy and hard to read. Marx and Engles both apologised for them! It’s not just you, you’re not lacking some quality, everyone finds the first 3 chapters tough. So don’t worry, go steady, get through them, especially if it’s your first Marxist reading. These chapters will make more sense retrospectively once you’ve seen how his arguments develop through the book(s). Some people (not me) even recommend reading the book out of order to get more from these chapters later on.

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

Decided to go with a new thread per chapter. One big huge thread would have been messy.

I read section 2 and like couldn't make much sense of it that It feels like I forgot everything in section 2, like I didn't read it at all, and it feels very embarrassing. I know I'm gonna have to reread it just like, got very abstract? At least for section 1 there are things that I could latch onto that like brings it all together? if that makes sense.

also in section 1, I really liked that Marx brought up diamonds in one of his examples since like that very relevant today, mainly with like artificial diamonds

Roast of the Week™ — Chapter One Edition

^brought^ ^to^ ^you^ ^by^ ^Starbucks^

"Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by plunder alone. But when people plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for them to seize; the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It would thus appear that even Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently, an economy, which just as much constituted the material basis of their world, as bourgeois economy constitutes that of our modern world. Or perhaps Bastiat means, that a mode of production based on slavery is based on a system of plunder. In that case he treads on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle erred in his appreciation of slave labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his appreciation of wage labour?" — Karl Marx, Capital vol 1, ch 1, footnote 34

:dwarf-economist:

Fun game! How many common "refutations" of Marxism, the kind you might find in r/neoliberal, are directly addressed in the first chapter, especially in the first few pages of Capital.

Just FYI, you gotta make a comment with all the @ names to ping your list of users to your post.

Chapter 1 has been quite the trip. Difficult but very interesting and rewarding to grapple with. The commodity fetishism chapter is quite the finish.

P. S. It would be nice if the site mods stickied this on the front page to make it easier to find and drive more traffic to it.

I just want to swing in to say I've read the chapter. Honestly, I thought I'd have picked up most of this stuff through cultural osmosis, but the first chapter here has already got me thinking about my employment in a more profound way than I was anticipating. Especially the part about productive power.

I finished part 1 and 2 of chapter 1 today. Thanks to the posters in the other thread. Helped me get my head around some key terms, like value, concrete and abstract abor, and importantly the dual character of labor and its implications which had eluded me before. This is my second reading, but like with any book like this, I retained little the first time around.

I put it down after getting to part 3 as I found it either much harder, it seems like it was written in a more obscure way than the first two. Will get back to it tomorrow.

Hoping to post some notes and questions before the end of the week.

I don't know if anyone else feels like way, but the first chapter so far is so strange compared to other books I've read more recently on political economy, etc., because it starts with the most embryonic forms and works outward.

I read the relevant parts of Harvey's companion afterwards and it was okay. Good to confirm my understanding, but there were some oddities like taking about Marx not following Hegel's "synthesis" and then the next sentence explaining Marxs dialectical method which was pretty much a more accurate version of what Hegel actually does. And he doesn't make as concrete how the Dual Character of Labour is important (Marx does this better) and differs from previous works in political economy.

A reminder to everyone reading. Read the footnotes, sometimes the criticism of previous economists like Smith are written in very clear terms which show what Marx is building from and at times subverting. Also they can be pretty funny.

Looking forward to reading this with all of you!

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?

"A sugar-loaf being a body, is heavy, and therefore has weight: but we can neither see nor touch this weight. We can then take various pieces of iron, whose weight has been determined beforehand. The iron, as iron, is no more the form of manifestation of weight, than is the sugar-loaf. Nevertheless, in order to express the sugar-loaf as so much weight, we put it into a weight-relation with the iron. In this relation, the iron officiates as a body representing nothing but weight. A certain quantity of iron therefore serves as the measure of the sugar, and represents, in relation to the sugar-loaf, weight embodied, the form of manifestation of weight. This part is played by iron only within this relation, into which the sugar or any other body, whose weight has to be determined, enters with the iron. Were they not both heavy, they could not enter into this relation, and the one could therefore not serve as the expression of the weight of the other. When we throw both into the scales, we see in reality, that as weight they are the same, and that, therefore, when taken in proper proportions, they have the same weight."

"bu' iron's hééviuh than sugar..."

Parts of this chapter are easier to understand if you imagine yourself in a commodity-money society. For example –

"a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as an exchange-value."

Imagine you live in a commodity-money society where everything is bought in beans. Presumably it's called Beanland or Beantopia. If I want to buy a television, I am only interested in its use-value; I hand over a certain amount of beans for the tv, and I'm only interested in beans for their exchange-value, not their usefulness as beans in generating farts.

"Since a commodity cannot be related to itself as equivalent, and therefore cannot make its own physical shape into the expression of its own value, it must be related to another commodity as equivalent, and therefore must make the physical shape of another commodity into its own value-form."

Beans are the physical form value takes. A television has its own value. Say its value is 5kg of beans. Then the beans are the "physical shape" that are the "expression" of the value of the tv.

'Relative form' and 'equivalent form'

The discussion of 'relative form' and 'equivalent form' is just saying that when you say 'x units of commodity A is as valuable as z units of commodity B', you conceptualise commodity A in a certain way (which he calls the relative form) and commodity B in the equivalent form. In Beantopia, beans are usually in the equivalent form. The equivalent form is when we use a commodity as a measuring-stick.

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.

If the download expires or you notice any errors with the bookmarks please let me know and I'll take care of it!

Hey, can you add me to the tag list? Thanks for organizing this

Notes – Chapter 1

Not comprehensive or a replacement for reading. My personal highlights and emphases based on my thoughts while reading.

I will add section summaries as replies to this comment. Edit: okay this was a lot more work than I expected, let me know if you want more, otherwise I'm probably gonna stop

could someone help me understand what is meant by the 'dual character of labour'?

Reviewing some passages I highlighted:

I am amused how Marx dispenses with typical Libertarian rebuttals to the Labor Theory of Value 150 years in advance.

E.g.

It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the article. However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power.

also

Finally, nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.

I also had some fun noticing themes that I am generally aware of through osmosis, like the application of dialectical thought very early on

E.g.

The relative form of value and the equivalent form are two inseparable moments, which belong to and mutually condition each other; but at the same time, they are mutually exclusive or opposed extremes, i.e. poles of the expression of value.

Speaking of things happening very early on, Marx hints at a theme I expect we will be seeing in more detail down the road:

Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an external natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.

I suppose we are all generally familiar with the 'stagist' conception of economic development. While Marx hasn't gotten into any of that yet, I read this as foreshadowing that this labor theory of value will transcend all modes of production. That it isn't fundamentally changed whether a society is Feudal, Capitalist, or Communist. As he begins to hint at later in the chapter, it is the emergence of commodity relations and a society mediated through them which defines the Capitalist epoch, not the characteristics of value in and of itself.

Around this time I got too lazy to keep underlining interesting passages. The last one I underlined was this:

Finally, a particular kind of commodity acquires the form of the universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it the material embodiment of their uniform and universal form of value.

I read this and was like

Then I flipped the page and it was like Bam! The Money Form!

Add me to the list

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).

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