Basics, Part 8a
Commodities
To supplement “Value, Price and Profit”,
here, attached, is a shortened (by removing one part) version of Chapter 1 of
Karl Marx’s greatest work, “Capital”, Volume 1. This is a text that has been
the material for many a political school. It begins with this tremendous 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 Marx 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. Sections
of the chapter that have been left out 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 between
humans again, or in other words, to restore human beings to themselves.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, C1, Commodities, Marx.
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