Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 2
Commodities
So far in this course we have
had a general
introduction, and then looked at Marx’s 1847 “Wage
Labour and Capital”, the “Communist Manifesto”
of 1848, and Marx’s 1865 “Value,
Price and Profit”.
Now, and for the remaining
eight parts, this course will use text from Marx’s greatest single work:
Capital, Volume 1. We will take nearly all of it, conveniently divided, in
sequence, starting with Chapter 1 – Commodities (download linked below).
Chapter 1 of Capital Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital (attached) is a text that has been the material for
many a political school. It begins with this great definition of commodities:
“The wealth
of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails,
presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a
single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a
commodity.
“A commodity
is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties
satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants,
whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no
difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies
these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means
of production.”
And it later says:
“A use-value,
or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract
has been embodied or materialised in it.”
The second section of the
chapter explores this dual character of commodities.
The third section, which
contains quite a lot of formulas, is omitted for the sake of brevity. Those few
sections of the book that have been left out of this course can be read on Marxists Internet Archive.
The fourth and last section
of the chapter is on the Fetishism of Commodities, meaning that in a capitalist
society the relations between commodities replace the relations between people.
In commodities, writes Marx:
“the social
character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped
upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the
sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation,
existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”
If there is a single purpose
for Marx’s book, it is to re-make human relations so that they are relations
between humans again, or in other words: Marx’s purpose is to restore human
beings to themselves.
·
The above serves to
introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, Chapter 1, Commodities
[abridged], Karl Marx, 1867.
