Commodities
We meet in the UJ Doornfontein Library. Next week’s session will be as follows: Date: 11 March (Thursday!!!!!) Time: 17h00 sharp to 18h30 sharp Venue: The Library, University of Johannesburg, 37 Nind Street, Doornfontein, Johannesburg (former Technikon Witwatersrand). Cars enter from the slip road to the left of the bridge on Siemert Road. Topic: Value, Price and Profit (link to full text). To supplement “Value, Price and Profit”, here 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 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 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 between humans again, or in other words to restore human beings to themselves. Click here to download Capital V1, Chapter 1, Commodities [abridged], in MS-Word file format Click here for full instructions for obtaining CU materials in booklet form Click here to go to the Jetline Print on Demand web site (username = password = communistuniversity) -- Posted By DomzaNet to Communist University on 3/07/2010 10:55:00 AM -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
