Our second episode covers the first chapter on “commodities,” where Marx begins laying the conceptual building blocks for his investigation. We cover use-value, exchange-value, and value, the two-fold character of labor and its correspondence with different forms of value, and the fetishism of commodities. Throughout, we emphasize the social relations embedded in commodities (relations that, in turn, commodity exchange helps proliferate), as well as how the reality of these relations differ markedly from bourgeois notions of independence, autonomy, and individual choice. In the last part of the episode, we spend time on the first brief sketch of communism Marx gives at the end of the chapter.

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We begin our study of Capital, vol. 1 by discussing what it means to read, study, and apply the book as comrades in the struggle for socialism in the U.S. today. We situate our reading within the struggle to not only popularize and give definition to socialism, but to establish Marxism as the guiding theory of struggles. Next, we cover some of the history and context of the book and finally examine the Prefaces and Afterwords by Marx and Engels, we introduce the form, content, methodology, and context of Capital, vol. 1, paying particular attention to Marx’s method of abstraction.

Articles mentioned in the episode:

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