Format

  • 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.

  • I’ll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Discuss the week’s reading in the comments.

  • Use any translation/edition you like.

Resources

(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)

  • Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • ComradeRat [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      As a side note, we could extend this and say that something can gain a use-value as part of a historical process, right? … The magnet never changed, but through scientific development became useful.

      Yeah very much so.

      For example a lotta the aim of “production” in consumer societies as we have in the core is to make basically anything gain more use-values so there’s more opportunities to sell stuff and more possibilities to get higher prices from induced scarcity.

      This ties into Marx’s point ofc about stuff needing to be an object of utility to have value. Much as, if something is no longer useful it is no longer valuable, if something is suddenly useful it is suddenly valuable.