Commodities

Course on Marx's Capital: Week 4

Commodities

So far in this course, running exclusively on "CU Africa" we have had a general introduction, and then looked at Marx’s 1847 “Wage Labour and Capital”, then the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, and last week Marx’s 1865 “Value, Price and Profit”. Links are to the “CU Africa” blog where the course will continue to run for the rest of the year, to be followed by “Capital” Volumes 2 and 3 in ten parts.

Now, and for the next twenty weeks, this course will use parts of Marx’s greatest single work, Capital, Volume 1. We will take nearly all of it, divided up into parts, taken in order, starting with Chapter 1.

Chapter 1 of Capital Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital (you may download the abridged version linked below) is a text that has been the material for many a political school. It begins with this great 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 it 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 book 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 relations between humans again, or in other words, Marx’s purpose is to restore human beings to themselves.

Download:

Click here to download Capital V1, Chapter 1, Commodities [abridged], in MS-Word file format

Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [435]	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	4/6	27 June 2010
CU Africa [232]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	3/33	22 June 2010
CU [3011]	Philosophy and Religion	2/10	29 June 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive