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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Abstraction of the labor contained in commodities is the basis for determining the proportions at which commodities exchange. It is a necessary component of exchange, but not identical with the act of exchange itself.
An exchange is always an exchange of use-values, for as a prerequisite, there must be inequality of use-value. A commodity is only exchanged for a different commodity, never for the same one.
The fact that abstraction is necessary to resolve the proportion at which these different use-values exchange does not eliminate the presence of use-value in the scenario. If I measure the length of the Grand Canyon in American football fields, the football field “figures” as the pure embodiment of the property length, giving expression to the length of the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon “figures” as itself. If length is expressed in meters, it is always a relative expression of length in reference to a meterstick, a physical object that we have set apart as embodying a standard length, never an absolute measurement.
The starting point of the analysis was concrete human practice. The real act of exchange is a form of appearance of an underlying content, which Marx identified as value. This value is deduced by the logical necessity of qualitative equivalence to resolve the quantitative proportions at which different use-values really exchange in practice.
Yes! This helps a lot. Especially the last paragraph very succinctly ties together some difficult concepts, like “appearance”, “content”, and “form”.
Yes very good eye! Those terms trace back to Hegel, of whom I’m not an expert. My understanding is that Hegel’s use of form and content is in opposition to Kant. Kant viewed form as being external to content, something “tacked on”, whereas Hegel viewed form as necessarily produced by the content.
I. I. Rubin, one of the great Marxist thinkers during the early Soviet Union, wrote a great (if challenging) chapter on exactly this question you are brushing against: What is the difference between value and exchange-value? Particularly around where footnote 1 is placed, he starts a meticulous explanation of the meaning of form and content in Capital chapter one.