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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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.
Yes, I agree with this. I think one of the reasons Marx separates Use Value and Exchange Value is to examine the basic “atom” of the economy - the commodity - through two different lenses, the qualitative and quantitative lenses. Use Value is a qualitative way of looking at a commodity, and Exchange Value is a quantitative way of looking at it. And Marx is asking us, as readers, to consider the Use Value, Exchange Value, and the actual price we pay for the commodities we use in our everyday lives, to try to get us to examine the world around us in a more critical way.
I’m no expert, but I think there is some additional nuance. A cork screw and a bottle of wine both have use-values, even though one is consumed through its use while the other is not. I don’t think consumption is key here. Though if you add the derivative of time, you could argue the cork screw is being consumed for a period of time - Engles cannot open a bottle of wine with the cork screw if it is currently being used by Marx to do the same.
While this example is silly, it can have more profound implications if we think about time spent in the context of production. If it takes a machine tool five minutes to make a nut and ten minutes to make a screw, it cannot make both 12 nuts and 6 screws within the same hour-long slice of time.
I think it is also worth highlighting the non-fungibility of use-values. Not that objects simply have or do not have use-values, but that use-values are unique and concrete. A saw has a use-value and a hammer has a use-value, but at the level of use-values, one cannot substitute another. This requires the introduction of value in abstract as you point out.
Consumption makes more sense when viewed in the aggregate of society. A corkscrew industry presupposes the social need for not only producing, but reproducing corkscrews on a regular basis, depending on the rate of consumption. Corkscrews have a limited lifespan due to corrosion, dulling, breaking apart, being lost, etc. which results in some definite number of corkscrews needing to be produced regularly for replacement, in addition to first-time consumers. In this view, you can think of consumption occurring piecemeal each time a corkscrew is used, just like a machine is used up a little bit each time it is used before eventually needing to be replaced.
I agree with your point on fungibility, although I think it is more accurately termed commensurability. At least, the latter is the term Marx uses. All commodities are fungible, meaning a commodity of type A is interchangeable with another commodity A. They are indistinguishable as instances of the same commodity. However, different use-values are of different quality as use-values and therefore incommensurate, not directly able to be compared quantitatively without a “third thing” common to both. They are different as use-value and the same as value.
When I say use-value is a boolean, I’m talking about one step up in abstraction. A commodity is “a” use-value, and its use value is its physical characteristics which are sought for consumption. Although commodities A and B are different use-values, they are both the same in that they are use-values, and therefore can be exchanged.