One of the most important works to many left-wing circles, especially from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint just so happens to be one of the most massive and difficult to digest. Considered the "Communist Bible" to some, taking the form of three volumes total, Capital is the work of Marx (and Engels) that critiques the capitalist economic model down the the absolute barest of bones, and it's naturally a dry read and struggle for many to get through.
Going chapter by chapter, the aim here is to summarize the main ideas presented in each chapter and attempt to connect them to each other, eventually conveying the overall theory presented in Capital. Essentially, I will do the tough reading so that others don't have to. Each part within each volume will get its own article, starting here with the very first one.
Chapter 1: The Commodity
Heavily considered the hardest part of the entire three-book series, the first three chapters break down the concepts of value to their core ingredients, and boy can it be a slog to get through. The first chapter focuses on the commodity, so perhaps we should start by defining this term. A commodity is a thing outside us that satisfies human wants of some sort or another. Literally just about anything can be a commodity (though isn't always), be it the raw form or a manufactured good. The examples Marx uses throughout the first chapter is linen and a coat. But why do we care about this?
The simple answer is because of the values that are held within commodities, which also come in different forms. First, we'll look at use value, which is the fact that it has (or doesn't have) utility, or some sort of usefulness in life. Another word for this is the qualitative form of value, and what it can do for someone. This is realized through consumption, which is the basis of a capitalist economy. The properties of the commodity are what's used, thus, they are what determines how useful something is. For example, look at a microwave. Its usefulness is determined not by what it's made of, but of its actual properties. It heats up your food quickly, and that's what gives it its use. This has zero relation to the labor time that went into making the microwave.
Enter exchange value, which is quantitative, and can change depending on time and place. Exchange value is the commonality mode of expression of something within the commodity that is distinguishable from it. This is where use value and exchange value contradict each other, as they can't both be realized within the same instance. That said, both do play a general role in the overall value of a commodity, which is different as well. In order for something to have exchange value, or to be exchangeable, it has to have some kind of use. Nobody would exchange something of use for something of no use. For example, you would not exchange a pack of cigarettes for a bag of trash.
What is the point of knowing the difference between these modes of values? Workers are interested in the use value of something. What can they get out of it? How can it be used in their life? Capitalists, on the other hand, are more interested in the exchange value. What can they get in exchange for the product produced by a worker's labor? This is where the labor aspect of value itself enters. Use value alone isn't connected to labor value, but the value of the commodity itself can be expressed in the form of another commodity, what it exchanges for. Here is where wealth is realized, appearing in the form of commodities, which are a product of human labor. The usefulness doesn't care about how much labor power went into it, but the commodity itself exists because of the human labor power, which is where the commodity's value itself is realized aside from its usefulness. That very value is what the capitalist is interested in exchanging. One person has no need for five hundred microwaves, for example. But if they can exchange five hundred microwaves, then they have the value of five hundred microwaves made from the labor of each one, because they are of use to five hundred people.
So how is the labor value in a commodity measured within itself, then? A couple points on this are brought up. The first one is the aforementioned expression of a commodity value in another commodity. This goes back to the linen and coat example that Marx uses. You can't measure the value of linen in linen. That would be like saying "one dollar is equal to one dollar"; it holds no meaning. Instead, it's expressed in the value of another commodity, the coat. In Marx's example, one coat equals twenty yards of linen. This is considered a social relation, since value isn't just a natural part of the commodity. The value comes from the concrete labor, which is a productive activity of a definite kind exercised with definite aim. Or in other words, a specific type of work that has an end goal in mind. The linen and coat example show two of these, one of them being tailoring, the other being weaving. Both of these are different from one another, but are also alike in being expenditures of human brains, nerves, and muscles.
This is what makes value a social concept. Marx defines this measurement of value as the necessary labor time under normal conditions of production using the average degree of skill necessary. In other words, it isn't as simple as how long it takes to make something. Example? Suppose it takes two hours to manufacture an engine for a car. If the conditions or skillsets involved don't change, but the time suddenly doubles, the value does not double with it. But let's say somebody quits, or a machine breaks. Now the skill level and the conditions have changed, and the value goes up. It's not physically possible for as many to be made, thus there is a higher demand, thus the value of these things move up. This is on a small scale, just for brevity's sake. Notice how the use value of the engine doesn't change, the engine serves the same purpose. But the exchange value of it did change, thus the capitalist can charge more for it, based off of harder labor being used by his workers. As the socially necessary time (read: conditions and skill) go up, the value goes up. If they go down, so does the value.
But where does the use value in this come into play? Human labor in motion in itself is not value unless if it is being channeled into something useful. In this situation, the engine is useful, it makes the car run. Couple that with the exchange value that is the product of concrete labor, and you've got the full measurement of a commodity's value. To the inverse point, use value can exist without a commodity having value at all. Air, soil, and land are certainly useful, but they don't contain value without the labor step as discussed earlier. Compare that to a machine shop. There's loads of use value in the machines, as there is in owning land or soil, but until those things produce something useful, they aren't of value in the social sense.
But what about use value in something that isn't a commodity? You can certainly put labor into something that doesn't have an exchange value, and thus isn't a commodity. Say you make a nice frame, put a picture of family that you took in it, and gift it to a relative. This has no value that could be exchanged for something else. Instead, its use value is only going to satisfy the needs of one particular person (or a few people) in mind. But there is no social use value, and it can't be exchanged. You could argue that the frame alone has value, but that's changing the conditions of the situation, and again, this is for brevity.
The last point of this is where money comes into play. This is only touched on lightly, as price is an entirely different entity of its own discussed in chapter 3. Money is a universal equivalent of how all commodities are exchangeable, through a single representation of value in general. Gold is the money form used throughout the book, which enters the position of monopoly. It works across the entire board for different exchange value of different commodities.
Chapter one of Capital serves the purposes of showing the relationships between human labor, the different types of value, how a commodity gets its value, and how wealth is gained by controlling all of these factors. Marx refers to this as the fetishization of commodities, and ends by showing an ideal restructuring of how this would all work under communism, where individual laborers control their own production in common, and the labor power is consciously implied as the full labor value of the community. One person isn't able to control every one of these factors, and force the population to sell their labor power in order for survival, all for the sake of a capitalist's profit.
Chapter 2: Exchange
Working as a bit of a transition, chapter two is a very short bit on the exchange process itself. Chapter three heavily focuses on the contradictions of capital and labor, as the former works to increase the rate of exploitation (lower wages, worse working conditions), and the latter works to decrease the rate of exploitation (higher wages, better working conditions). This would become the basis for dialectical materialism, something to touch on at a different time. Because of this contradicting relationship, it's dealt with in a very systemic manner. To understand why, Marx goes on to describe the exchange process first.
Two consenting owners of commodities exchange by recognizing each other as owners of the commodities being exchanged. The owner that wants to exchange commodity A has no use for it, so for it to be useful to someone else, it must have a use value. If the owner of commodity B sees the use value, it's then realized through the exchange. It really is as straightforward as it sounds.
This short section is wrapped up with the concept of crises. If a mass amount of commodities are produced that have no use in a market, that's called a market crises. Often times, this happens when commodities are produced without knowing if it has a value or not. The need may have never been there in the first place, or a different commodity was released that made it useless. For example, if you mass produced flip-phones and Ipods in the age of the smartphone, the result would be crises, as the smartphone renders the other two useless.
Chapter 3: Money
Money was defined as the representation of value in the chapter one breakdown, but we'll look at it a little deeper here in chapter three. It bridges the products of labor of different forms together, and we return to the aforementioned contradictions. The contradictions of the qualitative value in use, and quantitative in exchange are realized with money. Exchange with money goes back to the necessity of trading with different communities, due to the material conditions of each community. The differing material conditions produce different surpluses, and thus render a use for community A that doesn't apply to community B.
Right about here is where gold and silver enter the picture. They each have two use values. One is the inherent physical property of each as a mineral, the other being their function as money. In the U.S., money was tied to gold up until 1971. After that relation was broken, the U.S. dollar became what we call fiat money, which has no physical material base. It's still a representation of value, showing labor time and material. The issue, however, is that this allows for far broader manipulation of the currency. As it becomes the more desirable form of money, sanctioning another country by cutting off their access to the U.S. dollar proves to give those with money far more control. This specific example isn't in the book, but is more of an extrapolation to show why Marx's point applies even today. Money being attached to gold also gave it a material basis. If there was a shortage of gold, the value of the dollar could go up, and if new gold was discovered (such as in the California Gold Rush), it then went down. Without this material basis, inflation has much more room to move, and those who own can control those who work by controlling what money can buy.
Enter price. As you can't physically see value in a commodity, a price is used to depict it by one who owns a large amount of exchangeable commodities. It's purely mental and ideal, because the price of something does not always correspond to the market value of something. Price can change without the fundamental value of something due to material conditions, as noted in the last paragraph. Marx summarizes this by saying that price and value will always be different. Value is social (As the necessary labor time), where price is individual (varying on a case-by-case basis). This contradiction becomes crucial for commodity circulation under capitalism. It can also lead to another form of crises, which would be an extreme difference in value and price. If price gets too out of sync with value, the price no longer even remotely expresses value. A great example of this would be the stock market crash in 1929.
The back half of this chapter focuses on a money circuit, in a way. It's expressed as commodity - money - commodity, or C-M-C for short. One commodity is sold for money, which is then used to buy another commodity, bringing together the concepts of money and exchange in the value-commodity relationship. Expanding on this, it becomes easy to understand that this cycle is continuous. Marx uses the example of selling the linen in order to purchase a Bible. But following this, it's shown that this circuit works as an endless cycle. Continuing from the same example, the purchaser of the Bible then sells it to buy brandy, showing that under capitalism, almost everything can be commodified, even those that could be held as sacred.
A contradiction exists within this, however. Going from the C to M phase is tougher than going from the M back to C phase, as there's no promise that the value of the commodity exchanged will be the same. In other words, it's easier to buy something than to sell it. Money is good to purchase anything, whereas not all commodities are going to have a constant value. Some may argue that this shows no sign for crises, as every purchase is also a sale, but then we bring on the concept of hoarding. This is when someone constantly sells, but does not buy, because while money is good for virtually anything, it's also far easier to hold onto if you're a producer of commodities, and aren't relying on selling labor power for survival.
Hoarding is what allows for the possibility of private property (different from personal property, which gets touched on at a different time). Money is now realizing its power over others, and while value is social, the money is held privately and takes command over the circulation. With social power becoming private property in the hands of few, it gives those few a lot of control over others. You can hoard any amount of money (assuming you aren't laboring for survival), but there's only so much you can spend it on.
Credit is mentioned near the end, which gets its own section later on, but it is worth knowing in this stage that it's a representation or claim on future value. Banks can use it as a universal medium to settle international relations. They can also keep the appearance of growth and circulation, by reducing the amount of available money to lend. This can also lead to crises, as the inability to pay back money lent out becomes a rampant part of society.
Conclusion:
To sum up the entire first part of Capital Vol. 1, it lays out the relationships between the major players of the capitalist system: commodity, value, use value, exchange value, exchange, money, price, owner, and labor. A commodity's values and how they differ is shown in all of chapter one, as well as its relationship to labor time. Chapter two and three go on to discuss the exchange process itself, its contradictions, and how money has been used to control even the social relations of these terms. Although it's very dry, wordy, and confusing at times, this is all necessary info for understanding the very groundwork of capital, and thus, capitalism.
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