Understanding Marx's Capital Volume 1 Chapter 1 - Commodities (Sections 1-2)
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- čas přidán 3. 05. 2024
- Karl Marx's Capital Volume 1
Part 1 - Commodities and Money
Chapter 1 - The Commodity (sections 1 and 2)
00:00 - Section 1 Commodities
00:36 - Use Values and Exchange Values
06:03 - Section 2
06:08 - Useful Labour
07:53 - Abstract Labour
09:02 - Socially Necessary Labour Time
This video is a look at the first 2 sections in Chapter 1, Part 1 of Marx's Capital, The Commodity. Marx is investigating the source of Value by examining Use-Value and Exchange-Value and the idea of the commodity. Here we begin to understand Marx' Labour Theory of Value.
The audio from this series of reading and understanding Karl Marx's 3 Volumes of Capital will also be uploaded on my soundcloud for easy listening: / dissidenttheory
Follow me on Twitter: / dissidenttheory
A full online copy of Marx's Capital Volume 1 can be found here: www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
Music used in this video is by:
Apollo Produced It: / prodapollobeats
Uniq / uniqofficial
Blue Boi by LAKEY INSPIRED / lakeyinspired
Creative Commons - Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported - CC BY-SA 3.0
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Music provided by Music for Creators • Blue Boi - LAKEY INSPIRED
I see from your marvelous work that setting prices for commodities was and is and will never be an easy job, that's why they invented the myth of offering and demand... Thanks again...Thanks a lot for the good work and Lots of Love...
You do a really great job explaining this, thank you!!
Great work with this! I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.
Thank you, glad you like them :)
Great work.To understand capital is one thing which is itself difficult.but to explain it with this much clarity is simply great.congrats.i wish you also incorporate the dialectical aspect marx follows throughout the course of his investigation and name the exact phrases marx himself mentioned for the things he explain(eg.substance of value and magnitude of value...Etc).
Thanks for spending your valuable time in explaining the most valuable work of valuable man in history.😊
Great explanation, it helped me with understanding this chapter a lot!! Thank you:)
I'm happy you found it useful 😊
you earned a sub.
that was some good labour there buddy!
That is a great presentation. In todays world when market is king. This values of marx is our hope ,hope for a new world.
ohhh my!!!! thank you, thank you, thank you finally i understood. You made it so simple !!!
Woa these videos are really good my dude!!
Thanks, appriciate the feedback
This is awesome thank you
Great work.... very knowledgeable
Glad you find them helpful
Thank you so much for this
I'm happy you found it useful
Well done mate
Thank you :)
You just got a sub. Great video.
Thanks a lot. Much appreciated :)
Hey man please keep this series going
Will do :)
This is underrated
Well made series. Will continue to watch despite knowing everything :)
I feel like youre too performative in front of the camera, might be my own insecurities I'm projecting lol,,,but this breakdown is legit better than david harvey. I'm reading this book on my own and need to hear it discussed to see what I know. This is a long way of saying excellent video looking forward to be back as go through!
Thanks for the feedback, much appriciated! No, you're right, especially the first couple of videos but I didn't have alternative takes for them unfortunately. Will definitely be taking it on board when filming the next batch. I'm glad you found it useful anyway :)
I have been trying to understand what marx is saying in his first chapters and after watching this vid i feel like i am still not getting it. HELP :(
I dont see anything interesting/important being revealed when thinking about labour/commodities in marxist terms.
1. How are these definitions helping anyone understand the system? Are these specific terms used today for anything at all? Are they accepted as correct by contemporary professors or was it more like a foundation that other scholars elaborated upon and gave meaning to?
2. it seems to me that marx thought that the labour input influences or even determines the use-value of a commodity. Why would a great thinker like him omit the obvious effects that scarcity has in influencing values?
-( i know my questions are phrased in a condescending way. I do this to make it clear where my gaps and biases are, so that your answer can precisely inject knowledge where it is needed.)
To your second question: Marx did consider scarcity, precisely in this chapter. "For example, the same quantity of labour is present in eight bushels of corn in favourable seasons and in only four bushels in unfavourable seasons... In general, the greater the productivity of labour, the less the labour-time required to produce an article, the less the mass of labour crystallized in that article, and the less its value." (130-131). The fact that items may be scarce may be explained by the fact it that there is more labour needed to acquire/make them
Can you add subtitles?
It's on my list of things to do. I'll put the script of each video in the video discriptions soon though in the meantime, hopefully this helps? :)
@@DissidentTheoryYes, For me it will help a lot since I love your videos
K now I need to figure out how to make this into a 8 page essay😅
how did it go?
The repetitive beat makes it excruciating to listen to your Playlist . Erase the Background "Noise" .
A rebuttal to all of this can be found here: czcams.com/video/hkTO4-lKkog/video.html
Ancap -> opinion discarded
@@chadmarx7718 The smartest response from a Marxist I'll get
Ye because ancaps are so stupid that their bar for intelligence isnt that high
Marx's theory of value is wrong in relation to value formation.
According to Marx, surplus value is part of value. He describes the formation of value with the formula W = c + v + s. He applies this formula to the production side of commodity society, because the market has no meaning for him in terms of value formation.
But there is still no surplus value on the production side. There are only costs (c + v) and an expected surplus value that the entrepreneur can estimate based on market observation.
Furthermore, an amount of money handed down to him from heaven by an angel would not add any value, since this money would only replace part of the cost.
Since the suirplus value is part of the value, there can only be one expected value on the production side, matching the expected surplus value. The value formula needs to be specified for the production side:
W|expected = c|cost factor, replacement expected + v|cost factor, replacement expected + s|expected.
This expected value is made visible to potential buyers as an offer price.
Only if a buyer on the market buys the product and the entrepreneur succeeds in recovering the cost of the product (c + v) in full (!) and also succeeds in getting the buyer to pay even more money (equivalent in value to his goods) to move, there is surplus value.
The value formula for the market also needs to be specified:
W|real = c|cost replacing + v|cost replacing + s|real.
This makes it clear that the surplus value can only be paid for on the market. For the above reason, the value cannot be formed before it is clear whether surplus value is being paid and if so, to what extent, i.e. the formation of value entails the purchase of the product.
In addition, this formula makes it clear that the surplus value is not paid directly on the costs, but on the reimbursement of the costs. This is also a criterion for value being formed on the market.
One can only produce the prerequisites for value relationships and for values, but not the values themselves.
There is no difference between exchange value and real value. What Marx calls real or commodity value or labour value is merely an expected value. At this point in time there is no work for a product that can be described as socially useful, because work was only socially useful if the product was really useful for society. Only through exchange, when the product becomes a use value for others through exchange, can the labor expended on it be qualified as socially useful and the product of labor as a commodity.
The so-called socially necessary labor and the surplus labor can only be determined after the product has been sold, since only then can the surplus labor be determined as a proportion of the total labor through the real surplus value. Before that, the entrepreneur can only expect the workforce to “work more” for a certain period of time.
I've skipped to your concluding paragraph since i'm still too new to this to understand what came before. Based on that paragraph, i don't think marxists would disagree with you at all, at least based on the companion books i've read (Harvey's and Ben Fines') and some other lecture videos. assuming i correctly remember the contents and properly understood them.
@@chadmarx7718
Thank you for your reply!
This is deceptive! They contradict - at events like the "Marx is must" conference, "Socialism Days" - there they break off the discussion; in blogs on the net - there they locked me in two blogs and explained that they want to see Marx in this forum as they always saw him; as part of public lectures in Magdeburg (OvGU) - there some students jumped up and even formed a kind of "Red Front"; FU Berlin (it wasn't that extreme there, but also block formation); in Zurich (there the professor, who initially agreed to the discussion after the official part, disappeared with the words "Then maybe Marx was wrong."; Professors, universities and institutes I write to do not answer; the discussion is published in several blogs aborted or not even started...
But this is not unique to Marxists. I also try to argue with the followers of the Austrian school of economics, but they also avoid the discussion.
I was better able to discuss this topic in the GDR, although Capital was considered a "holy book" there. Admittedly, I didn't have the status of my arguments back then that I have today - but it kept going!
I made a few videos on this topic, including this one:
czcams.com/video/3GHutT-8blc/video.html
I'm not sure I'm completely satisfied with the arguments for marx' value theory. I don't see why the fact that commodities are exchanged implies that there is a common property. I also don't see why it would have to be this property would have to be being the product of labour instead of e. g. being useful to ppl.
I mean, it's not Marx' value theory, moreso the value theory of Ricardo, Smith etc. (Political Economy) but regardless, why would there not be a common social property to exchange? (a social act).
I can exchange my hat for 3 of your footballs, my hat now is a resource for obtaining a certain number of footballs. Maybe someone else in the world will exchange 5 footballs for my hat. So when we look at this "accidental" relationship of 2 things and it's variability of exchange, it appears that there's no intrinsic property to my hat that makes this exchange possible. However, every commodity can be exchanged for every other commodity. My hat is not just a resource for footballs but (with sufficient amount) a resource for obtaining every other commodity. We live in a social system that allows all commodities to be exchanged, that anything made by one producer can be exchanged for that produced by another. That my hat can be (with enough quantity) exchanged for everything else is revealed not in it's relation to footballs, but as a general characteristic of my hat in relation to everything else. The fluctuations in the amounts of hats needed for exchange doesn't change this. "exchangeability" still remains, regardless of the variability. My hat holds the general characteristic of "exchangeability," of being a resource and access to social wealth. It has a social property.
The use or usefullness of something is also incredibly important. It's obviously impossible to exchange something that doesn't have a use, likewise something that cannot be exchanged cannot be used. However, hats have been produced for their use throughout all societies, long before their production for exchange via money (selling) and as such the 'use' quality of hats in this regard doesn't help us to understand the specifity of commodities under capitalism.
However this 'use' does help if we now go back to why things have a social property. Where does this general property of "exchangeability" come from? From the fact that there's a division of labour. Some people labour to produce some things and other people labour to produce other things. Through the division of labour people produce (via labour) for each other and are dependent on each other for the social satisfaction (use) of our needs.
as such a commodity (as something which is sold) has a two-fold social nature, it's use and it's exchange (it's social relation to others labour)
You are absolutely right: Marx describes the process of creating value incorrectly.
I'll post a comment explaining that.