Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.- Leonardo da Vinki
Marx's Capital is a great book. It really is. Just one problem: it is very headache-inducing, in no small part because Marx's language is quite old and simply expects too much from the reader. If the reader is to be someone actually from the working class, some changes need to be made. At the very least, the offending parts that need to be altered are the first three parts, commonly said to be the hardest part of the text even by Marx himself. I believe in the pareto principle: 80% of the result is often done by 20% of the work.
Has this been done before? Probably, I don't know. I haven't looked. If so, then this is just one more heap of slop to add to the pile and no harm is done.
Is this revisionism? Modernization? All kinds of insults can be thrown at this text. My answer: It is what it is. This originally started as a way to clarify Marx's writing to myself via the drudgery of summary. In writing this text, the person in my mind who plays the reader is not some detached academic, nor is it your average ultra-left bookworm. The person in my mind is the kind of person you actually meet outside, and not on the cold pewter streams of the internet.
Like it or not, your average evening-TV-watching prole is turned away from the almost hostile snobbish attitude carried by your average leftist. If the book is too hard to read, and leftists too toxic to converse with, then class consciousness truly is a utopian dream.
Lastly: lest I be accused of the same snobbish behavior I so dislike, I am open to actual critique of this text. If such critique is based on this or that interpretation of Capital, no matter the source, then please keep it to yourself. This text itself is but one interpretation of Capital, and the choice to read it is your own. If it counts for anything: I aimed to preserve the theoretical message of these chapters, but using language more familiar to the average Joe or Jane, nothing more.
If we want to understand what capital is, we need to understand how wealth appears to us in capitalism. You may think the answer to this is money, but if you think about it: money is mostly just paper, gold, silver, precious things. But such things sitting in a warehouse doesn't do anything for anybody. The only reason we like money, gold, and silver is because these things can get us a large amount of other things that are not paper, gold, or silver; like cars, houses, and the like. In capitalism, wealth isn't money, but commodities: a large and growing heap of commodities, with the single being a commodity. This is where we have to start: the commodity.
A commodity is a physical thing, which by its physical traits is something that people desire. Whether this desire comes from need (food, water) or from simple want (jewelry, designer bags) doesn't matter to us. The reason is because commodities that satisfy needs behave identically to commodities that satisfy wants, in that they are produced and then consumed. The baker produces the bread, which is eventually eaten, and the jeweler produces the diamond ring, which is worn and tarnishes over time. We also don't care about how a commodity is consumed, whether as sustenance (like eating the bread) or as something you use to make a different kind of commodity (a bar of iron turned into a pile of paperclips).
Every useful thing can be looked at in two ways: as amounts and as types. Such useful things are a collection of many physical features, and can be used in many ways. Finding out how useful things can be used is the work of history (before we learned to work metal, metal ores were useless to our ancestors). History also decides how we measure the amounts of useful things in a group (carats of diamond, yards of string, etc). There are many kinds of these measures, all belonging to many types of useful objects, but the measures themselves come partly from convention (yards or meters) and partly from the nature of the useful object (you cannot measure weights of metal in inches).
The usefulness of such objects makes them valuable because they are useful: usefulness makes such objects into utilities. Such usefulness doesn't come from our imagination, it is something that comes from the object itself by its nature. Without the object, there can be no usefulness. Without food, men go hungry no matter how hard they dream that they are full.
A commodity (iron, corn, diamonds) is, as a physical object, a utility: something useful. The usefulness of a commodity has nothing to do with the work needed to make use of it. When looking at utilities, we always assume to be working with amounts (ounces of gold, carats of diamonds, pounds of cotton). The utility of a commodity prepares for us a new kind of study: how commodities behave in trade.
Utilities only become real to us when we use and consume them (gas stored in a jerry can in a basement only becomes useful to us when we burn it in a car. Until we do that, it is just liquid in a metal can). Utilities also make up the stuff of all wealth in a society, even if we don't treat it like that (for example, seeing a box of pencils as a 'thing worth money'). In capitalism, utilites are also the storages for something else: trade value.
When we first look at trade value, it seems to be as a relation of amounts, where an amount of some kind of utility can be traded for an amount of some other utility (five gallons of gas in exchange for thirty gallons of fresh water). It also seems like the trade value of a utility is something that is always changing. In a place where water is scarce, five gallons of gas might only buy you twenty gallons of water. If it rains in that thirsty place, five gallons of gas would now buy you fifty gallons of water. This tells us that the trade value of a utility is something decided on accident: had it never rained, five gallons of gas would buy you twenty gallons of water. After raining, that same five gallons now gets you fifty gallons of water. However, trade value also seems like something that is inside the utility, and not just something we decide for it. If you had no gallons of gas, you could buy no fresh water at all. So which is it? Is trade value inside the utility, or is it something we give to the utility from the outside? To solve this mystery, we have to look a little closer.
In our example, five gallons of gas would buy you twenty gallons of water. But lets say that you can also trade it for two jackets, three bottles of whiskey, or six cans of coffee. In all these trades, an amount of some utility can be traded for many different amounts of many different kinds of utilities. So our five gallons of gas doesn't seem to have only one trade value, but many trade values. It seems like we can use the five gallons of gas as a yardstick for all the other commodities. If five gallons of gas can either by you twenty gallons of water or two jackets, then we should be able to say that two jackets can buy you twenty gallons of water.
Another way would be to see that six cans of coffee would buy you three bottles of whiskey. Using the gas as a yardstick, we can discover many other trades that have nothing to do with the gas. Listing them out:
Five gallons gas = two jackets = twenty gallons of water = six cans of coffee = three bottles of whiskey.
Use your finger to cover any one of these commodities and the trade would still make sense. Got no gas but only six cans of coffee? Well, you can buy five gallons of gas with it.
Looking at the above trades, it seems like there is something shared by all of these commodities. In other words, if you have five gallons of gas and you trade it for twenty gallons of water, then there must be something within both, and that something must exist in equal amounts within the gas and water. Five gallons of gas for twenty gallons of water means there is "1 gallon of something" within the gas, and "1 gallon of something" within the water. This gallon-of-something is what makes the trade possible in the first place. Since the gas can also be traded for things that are not usually measured in gallons, like the two jackets, then it doesn't seem right for us to measure this "something" in gallons either. We are left with two stinging questions: what is this something, and how do we measure it?
This "something" common to all the commodities is not decided by the physical nature of the commodity. Look as hard as you want at the two jackets, and you will never find this "something", only seams, stitches, buttons, and threads. After all, remember that the physical body of a commodity only tells us that it is useful: that it is a utility. It doesn't say anything about trades or relations with other commodities. The exact opposite of this is trade value, which doesn't tell us anything about the usefulness of the commodity. It only tells you that five of 'X' can be traded for twenty of 'Y'. These two ideas are seperate and have nothing to do with one another. As utilities, commodities are only of different types (gas is burned, water is drunk, jackets worn). As trade values, commodities are only of different amounts (five of X and twenty of Y).
If we ignore the utility part of a commodity, then we find that the only thing shared by all the commodities is that they are products of human work.
Notice how when we say that all commodities are products of human work, we blind ourselves to the type of work that makes a specific type of commodity. We no longer see the jackets as being the work of the tailor, the whiskey as the work of the distiller, or the coffee as the work of the farmer. We only see them all as "work". If we do the same thing to the commodities, we no longer see them as jackets, whiskey, or coffee, but as simple products of human work. Human work was spent to make these things, these commodities.
When we look at commodities this way, we see them as blobs of human work. In this view, commodities are these things called 'values'. This 'value', this blob of human work, is our missing "something" that we were looking for in the gas and the water, and also exists in the jackets, coffee, and whiskey.
Now for our second question: how do you measure the size of each blob of human work? Well, the only way you can: when you clock into work, you are measured by how much time you spent working. In the same way, the size of these blobs of human work is measured in minutes, hours, and days of human work.
You might ask: well, if John takes five hours to make a basket, and Tracy only takes four, then does that mean John's basket is worth more than Tracy's? The answer is no. Why? Because for us, work is something you measure from all the work done in a group. In our example, John takes five hours, and Tracy takes four, the average between five and four is four-and-a-half, which gives us the value of a basket produced by the group: 4.5 hours of work. Of course, society has more than two working people, but the idea stays the same. If you take the work performance of every living worker in a group, then the average products-produced-per-hour is our yardstick for what an "hour" of work is.
Let's take a look at a simple example of a mining town: such a town produces in a month the following goods:
In this town, the mining team produces the coal and the sulfur. Though there are many people in this team, with some producing more coal and sulfur than others, the miner in the middle who doesn't do too much work nor too little produces on his own 7 tons of coal and 2 tons of sulfur. If we ignore weekends, then in a month, our middle-miner works for about 22 days per month.
Now let's look at our rancher team: in 22 days of work, they produce all together 5 tons of meat and 1 ton of eggs. If we ignore all the Workaholic Wallaces and Lazy Larrys, then Average Alex produces 2 tons of meat and a quarter-ton of eggs in 22 days of work.
See how we reduced everything into days of work? Even though the work is all different and produces completey different goods, we can build a trade relation like we did for the gas, water, jackets, whiskey, and coffee:
7 tons of coal = 2 tons of sulfur = 2 tons of meat = 0.25 tons of eggs, all = 22 days of work.