I decided to start reading Karl Marx’s Capital: Volume I. I have read it before but I want to get a bit deeper into it and eventually move on to the other volumes. I am not sure where this is headed, but I’m curious if I can use this to gain a better understanding of finance and real estate than I can with the standard neoclassical economics analyses in the bourgeois press.
I will be using David Harvey’s class from 2019 as a general structure for my syllabus. I have supplemented it with readings from Richard Wolff’s syllabus from my time in college, which includes some sections from Harvey’s Limits to Capital and volumes II and III. I am using the Penguin Classics version of Capital. I will try every week (or few weeks depending on how fast I can go) to write up a general reaction to the reading and post it here. Then I will watch Harvey’s class (sort of like being in school).
Here is my reaction to the first week’s reading, chapter 1:
Chapter 1 seems like a slow, deliberate and patient build-up to the conclusions drawn in the final section, “4. The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret.” It felt tedious at times and I started wondering why he goes over the minutiae of the commodity in such detail, but by this last section all the ideas about the relative and equivalent forms of value, etc. come together.
Let’s start with this quotation, which seems to be the most concise distillation of commodity fetishism: “The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social.” (164-5)
Since commodities relate to each other in the market on the basis of exchange value, they express a social relation: the labor-time socially necessary to produce each product. However, this fact is obscured to the producers and these commodities appear to be endowed with mystical properties that give them value. Producers do not compare the prices of commodities by thinking about the relative amount of labor-time that went into them. So, value appears as a natural quality of the thing itself instead of as the stamp of a social relationship.
He goes on to say, “[The commodity form] is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” (165) For Marx, the notion that commodity pricing in the market is solely a “relation between things” irrespective of any social context is wrong. You might say this notion is a product of capitalist ideology, false consciousness. Instead the commodity is an expression of the “definite social relation between men themselves.”
Later, he draws this concept out to define money as a tool that conceals the true nature of the commodity as a representation of social relations: “It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.” (168-9) Perhaps we can say that money does this more effectively by providing the universal equivalent. The commodities that were related in the simple form of value are obscured in another layer of fetishism.
World of Lenidzky 