Format
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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.
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I’ll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Discuss the week’s reading in the comments.
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Use any translation/edition you like.
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
That’s what tracks according to what was already laid out in these first two sections, and according to what I’ve heard from others, but it still confuses me to think that the actual quality of something does not affect its price.
I mean, surely if two of the exact same thing were made in the exact same timespan, but the one was made in a sweatshop while the other was made in a factory with good conditions and pay, then the latter would be more expensive, right?..
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…Oh, the latter would just be overpriced, wouldn’t it?
Correct. There is a single market price, and competition forces all producers to a minimum of labor expenditure.
If the quality of something is inseparable from what it is, say a gold bar with 99.99999% purity compared to a gold bar that is 98% pure, then you can consider them as two separate commodities because the labor process is distinct for each, and they will have different prices reflecting that.
The method in this chapter is one of observation, observing the real behavior of capitalist society. It is a fact that there are “going rates” for things, quantitative relations between all the commodities (mainly with money, ie prices).
This is basically the Hegelian immanent critique. That is outside the scope of this book, but I thought I would mention it. The commodity is being considered strictly by its own internal logic, without imparting what we already “know” about it. As much as possible, we are observing as it exists in itself and as it relates to other things.
Mindblowing!