Done

I think it can work both ways. I haven’t done a bookclub through a forum like this before so idk what the norm would be. Weekly megathreads seem to usually have their own post, which to me makes sense firstly as a way to weekly advertise the club on the front page, secondly as a way to silo off the old threads if desired by locking them. As well, having everyone post under a parent comment seems prone to user error if people don’t follow the rule instinctively.

That said, it’s a small club and I don’t think it is a big deal which direction is chosen.

Similar excerpt from Value, Price, and Profit (basically a cliff notes version of Capital):

Now, this concept of an ideal price was not innovated by Marx. Adam Smith (regarded by Marx as one of the two great political economists, along with David Ricardo, in Capital chapter 1 footnote 33) thought of this as well and called it natural price.

In fact, Marx was not even the first to come up with a labor theory of value. Adam Smith, a man held in esteem today by modern bourgeois economists, actually himself based his theory on a labor theory of value.

Capital is Marx’s original ideas posed as a critique of political economy (hence the subtitle). So he took these ideas that had already been put forward by Smith, Ricardo, and others, and carried them out systematically to their conclusion, in some aspects more consistently than the original authors.

A flaw in Adam Smith’s theory of labor is the mud pie argument so often thrown at Marx, when really Marx made the theoretical advancement that overcomes it. Smith did not determine what kind of labor creates value and hence counts as social labor. So, someone who makes something socially useless, like mud pies, all day could earn an income in Smith’s model.

What distinguishes Marx’s labor theory from earlier theories is in his recognition of the dual character of labor¹, that a singular act of labor is regarded in two different ways in the real practice of capitalism. On one hand, concrete labor produces use values, but on the other hand, abstract labor produces value. Throughout capital, concrete ≈ natural/physical, and abstract ≈ social. All societies produce use values, but only in the capitalist epoch does society behave as though these use values have a distinct property called value, due to being commodities.

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?..

…

…Oh, the latter would just be overpriced, wouldn’t it?

Is the value of money also treated later? Seems like money has an exhange value that in some manner should equate to the labor expended to produce it. But this labor quantity appears relatively low, and does not vary much between $1 and $100 notes. Does this constitute an exception (e.g. the value of the banknote is representative), or is the labor involved in making money somehow more complex than just the physical process of manufacture?

They’re German sentences, so that sounds about right.

best use of a custom tld I’ve ever seen

“Labor power” is the commodity of labor. When I sell one hour of my labor to a capitalist, I am selling my labor power as a commodity. I’m selling my labor in the same way a farmer sells apples he grows. Unlike a farmer I don’t have an apple tree - I have no capital, I only have my labor. So that’s all I have to sell and selling my labor as a worker is one of the defining characteristics of capitalism.

I think that’s what I forgot to think of… good on you for getting this point

And the final commodity that a capitalist sells - like a car - is an amalgamation of various commodities. In this case, the commodity steel and the commodity labor power.

Remember that labor is treated as a commodity, but Marx also makes it clear that labor is a special commodity in that all other commodities require labor as an input.

The steel in your example required labor and other fractional products, and those fractional products required labor and fractional products.

Which means all commodities contain within them some amount of “dead labor” as Marx calls it, which is just that accumulated labor value from all fractional products.

Actually I have changed my mind. It will be cleaner and people will get less lost if I make a thread for each chunk.

Marx oscillates between use-value being something commodities are and something commodities have as a property (being versus having). So depending on context, a commodity is a use-value, or it has use-value.

As a side note, we could extend this and say that something can gain a use-value as part of a historical process, right? For example, on the first page:

The discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history3

3… The magnets property of attracting iron only became useful once it had led to the discovery of magnetic polarity.

The magnet never changed, but through scientific development became useful.

thank you for the explanation! the emojis really did help 🍎♥️🍌

i know I’m skipping ahead in our reading here, but do we still use the term exchange value when talking about money?