Marx's Capital Vol. 1 For Dummies

An HTML version of the eight-fold zine I just put on Itch, summarizing Volume I of Marx's Capital for our generation's brainrotted minds. I also previously posted a longer summary (lol).

1. Commodities

Capitalism is understood as a society where commodities are produced and exchanged on a vast scale to support that society. A commodity could be a physical good, or it could be a service performed for money.

We typically view each commodity in terms of how it is used and how much one is generally worth. A commodity’s usage, however, does not tell us about how much that commodity is worth.

Since a commodity’s ‘exchange-value’ is measured using money, and money helps us compare exchange-values of different commodities, we can surmise that money measures a quantity of an essence that commodities apparently share in various amounts.

2. Value & Labor

There is obviously no physical essence that all commodities have in common. You cannot view a commodity’s value underneath a microscope, and there is no chemical that creates value.

Value is a “fetish”, or a social illusion, constructed by our capitalist society. What all does every commodity have in common, really? The answer is labor which is measured in time.

However, labor is not valuable per se, and the time to produce a commodity differs between individuals. A mud-pie is not valuable just because time was spent making it. Society must desire a commodity in order to value the time spent making it, and society can only discern such time in general.

3. Circulation of Value

So, a commodity’s value corresponds to its “socially necessary labor time”: the average time for society to create a commodity, taking into account how much collective time society wants to invest in that commodity’s production. Think of supply and demand.

This clues us into another problem, of equal exchange. We understand that commodities are exchanged for other commodities of equal value.

However, if this were really the case, no new value would ever be created, and existing value would only ever be consumed. This makes no sense at all, theoretically and practically. Capitalist society relies upon commodities, and we must create them to use and live.

4. Creation of Value

The only exception to equal exchange is labor time. It is like a loophole: since the cost of living and the cost of labor are distinct, and since an act of labor costs time and so creates new value, by producing a commodity you create new value.

A product’s total value includes both the costs of wages and raw materials (variable versus constant capital) plus the surplus value created from labor. The product is thus worth more than what was invested in its production, generating a surplus.

The surplus value falls straight into the capitalist’s wallet. A capitalist will not hoard the surplus value, but reinvest it to expand their business.

5. Exploitation

Exploitation is not a moral term but an economic one. It refers how to capital tries to squeeze value out of labor to increase its returns.

One way is by increasing the duration of the working day. Remember that a part of a commodity's total value goes to how much was spent to produce it. By forcing workers to labor for longer, they produce more value.

The other way is by improving labor’s efficacy: not spending more time, but making wages spent more productive. This can be by lowering wages (so the cost of labor time is less expensive), improving living costs (so wages are worth more), or using machines which automate the labor process.

6. Automation

Machines are not paid wages but pose a constant cost, like raw materials do. “Means of production” such as these do not create new value, but transfer their own value—which is the product of labor performed in the past.

As industry catches up with a singular, efficient firm, the commodity it makes is revalued because it takes less labor. The more that production relies upon automation, the less labor is involved, and the less value is created.

This poses a social problem for capital because we need not work as hard to produce things we need, but capitalist society relies on workers selling time. As society needs less labor time, more people become unemployed.

7. Critique of Economy

Marx is often misperceived as arguing for a labor theory of value: that labor is inherently valuable, and capital just appropriates labor’s value.

In actuality, Marx criticizes value: that value is a social illusion (or “fetish”). Commodities do not have value per se but value is the result of abstraction imposed on labor by quantifying it in terms of time and money.

Capital is superficially an investment in a commodity’s production, but on a deeper level it is the process which translates labor into countable value. The more capital optimizes labor, the less valuable all commodities become, and the fewer people society employs. This is the contradiction of capital.