ComradeRat

Page numbers from Fowkes penguin translation, emphasis is mine

Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. *As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values - commodity values. *(128)

We have seen that when commodities are in the relation of exchange, their exchange-value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract from their use-value, there remains their value, as it has just been defined. The common factor in the exchange relation, or in the exchange-value of the commodity, is therefore its value. The progress of the investigation will lead us back to exchange-value as the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearance, of value. For the present, however, we must consider the nature of value independently of its form of appearance. (128)

A commodity is a use-value or object of utility, and a 'value'. It appears as the twofold thing it really is as soon as its value possesses its own particular form of manifestation, which is distinct from its natural form. This form of manifestation is exchange-value, and the commodity never has this form when looked at in isolation, but only when it is in a value-relation or an exchange relation with a second commodity of a different kind. Once we know this, our manner of speaking does no harm; it serves, rather, as an abbreviation. (152)

But although price, being the exponent of the magnitude of a commodity's value, is the exponent of its exchange-ratio with money, it does not follow that the exponent of this exchange-ratio is necessarily the exponent of the magnitude of the commodity's value. ... The possibility, therefore, of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, i.e. the possibility that the price may diverge from the magnitude of value, is inherent in the price-form itself. *This is not a defect, but, on the contrary, it makes this form the adequate one for a mode of production whose laws can only assert themselves as blindly operating averages between constant irregularities. *(197)

It isn't a duality, it's a series of reflections (commodity-value -> exchange-value -> price). Commodity-value is the socially necessary labour in a commodity, exchange-value is it's reflection in another commodity and price is that exchange value in money. All three of them can differ from each other to some extent (particularly 'commodity-value/value', which can never be actually observed or measured except as seen in its reflection/likeness, exchange-value and the ). All three of these things' ability to diverge from each other is necessary for the capitalist system to function on its laws of averages. Exchange-value is the equivalent of a commodity's commodity-value in another commodity (e.g. the value of a shoe in ounces of gold). Price is a representation of the ratio in which a commodity can be exchanged for money.

Also very important to note (for feminism/ecological/ableism/etc critique) that Marx is laying out the standards of capitalist value, which doesn't necessarily represent the actual work/labour exerted on a given thing, e.g. doesn't represent the labour required to produce a forest cut down.

It'll get even easier as the book goes on, generally. Part one is especially dense because Marx wanted to make sure basically* everything in the book is deducible from the (extremely abstract) principles lain down in part 1. I can't remember offhand who in these threads pointed it out, but he even smuggles the labour-power / labour differentiation into part 1. Stuff becomes increasingly concrete from here on (especially in ch10 and ch15) as Marx shows how all the abstract principles of part 1 play out in real life.

*part 8 is something of an exception, but this is intentional on Marx's part (he's very explicit that primitive accumulation takes place outside the regular laws of capitalist production and so does not follow from the laws of part 1-7)

Qualitatively or formally considered, money is independent of all limits, that is it is the universal representative of material wealth because it is directly convertible into any other commodity. But at the same time every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and therefore has only a limited efficacy as a means of purchase. This contradiction between the quantitative limitation and the qualitative lack of limitation of money keeps driving the hoader back to his Sisyphean task: accumulation. He is in the same situation as a world conqueror, who discovers a new boundary with each country he annexes.

And so it begins

Aveling/Moore TL was not checked by Katl or any other Marx to the best of my knowledge. It was published 4 years after Marx died, translation by Engels' friend Samuel Moore (who was a lawyer in South Africa iirc) and Eleanor Marx's future commonlaw husband who would go on to cheat on her, gaslight her and possibly kill her (the circumstances of her 'suicide' were sus, the only reason her friends didnt press charges or investigate is Aveling died shortly after Eleanor). It is possible, likely even, that Eleanor Marx checked some of the translations, but I have found no hard proof.

Found a neat quote about money from Marx's doctoral dissertation (in MECW vol1 p104) (Marx's italics):

In this sense [that people believe in them] all gods, the Pagan as well as the Christian ones, have possessed a real existence. Did not the ancient Moloch reign? Was not the Delphic Apollo a real power in the life of the Greeks?...

If somebody imagines he has a hundred talers, if this concept is not for him an arbitrary, subjective one, if he believes in it, than these hundres talers have for him the same value as a hundred real ones. For instance, he will incur debts on the strength of his imagination, his imagination will *work, in the same way as all humanity has incurred debts on its gods...

Real talers have the same existence that the imagined gods have...Bring paper money into a country where that use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination. Come with your gods into a country where other gods are worshipped, and you will be shown to suffer from fantasies and abstractions. And justly so. He who would have brought a Wendic god to the Ancient Greeks would have found proof of this god's non-existence. Indeed, for the Greeks he did not exist.

markets develop independently of coinage

I will assume by coinage you mean money. (Making this assumption because Marx explicitly doesnt care if the money is coins or yards of linen). Marx himself argues markets develop independently from money, and money develops from markets. This feels like either a misrepresentation of Graeber, or Graeber misrepresenting Marx.

among social outliers

Like, for instance, nomadic peoples in the interstices between settled society? Note that historically mercenary work is a very common field of work for nomads.

Small point: land is fundamental to all societies including nomadic ones. 'Nomadic' people generally stay in the same broad area, but move about throughout the year e.g. to different pastures. The whole of the land is similarly viewed as inalienable, even if a certain person may have use-rights over a certain portion for a certain period.

Your point about the desperate labourer vs. desperate farmer is an excellent one, but also applies to landownership after the collective ownership is legally dissolved by the state. In for example the Scottish highlands, the clanchiefs were legally given this sorta ownership over their clans' land in the 1500s/1600s, but this only had effects on the ground gradually as chiefs were co-opted and turned into landlords. Because this new definition of land-ownership had state backing and the old form did not, it was very common for state violence to be used to dispose of such social resistance.

This can be seen especially evidently in its more rapid form in native reservations in the US and Canada, where around 1900 landownership started being forcibly turned to "each individual owns their own plot and can sell it" by the government, allowing for piecemeal dissolution of reserves and sale of the land to whites.

The dissolution of Church land (and protestant reformation) are very importantly economically for capitalism as you say though, both for the addition of lands to bourgeois/state coffers and for the destruction of the church as a social-welfare institution (lazy peasants would rather have church dinners than go to the workhouse if they lose their land

Marx doesn't care about the gold-standard specifically (as he has repeatedly said). Modern fiat money is the USD which is a de-facto oil standard since the USD was until recently all that was used to buy and sell oil. Modern money is still money because of its association with a material use-value. This fetishism of the gold-standard is not theoretically sound. The whole point of Marx introducing money through linen, and only changing it to gold with this chapter, is to show that while metals have some qualities that lend themselves to being money, many other things can, have and will serve as a money-commodity.

Very hard to respond to this without more information about what you mean.

If you're referring to Marx's "assumption" of why gold can be money, i.e. the main theoretical point here, afaik anthropology (who I am assuming you are using Graeber as shorthand for) hasn't produced anything invalidating that.

If you're referring to Marx's "assumption" of the historical process of gold becoming money, anthropology, archaeology and history have complicated the matter slightly on a global scale by introducing alternative money-commodities (e.g. seashells in parts of West Africa and Japan). However in the specific areas Marx is concerned with (and had the ability to study) this holds true afaik, especially since Marx tends to qualify his broad statements (e.g. footnote 7: " In any case, [the process of copper -> silver -> gold]'s historical validity is not entirely universal.").

If by assumptions about gold you mean assumptions about the invention and development of the money-commodity through trade, anthropology has complicated the matter a bit more, particularly as regards long distance trading through gift economies (e.g. in precolonial North America). In terms of Marx's ability to study: he did not have the ability to study the gift economy except e.g. through Henry Lewis-Morgan after the final major edits to Capital had been made (i.e. post-1875). However imo this doesn't do more than change Marx's point from 'nomads always invent money bc they trade' to 'nomads associated with stratified city-dwellers develop money-forms bc they trade in alienated goods' (such nomads are basically the only ones Marx would be aware of at the time; when Marx writes 'nomads' he is thinking of e.g. steppe nomads and pastorialists in the near east)

Yes, Marx is referring to the buying and selling of land.

Theoretically he's correct; the buying and selling of land results from some of the highest degrees of development of the money-form. Generally it is the last thing to be commodified because the idea of 'owning' it in the liberal sense (where things are the possession of one person and that one person has sole authority over its use, sale, etc) is so completely absurd.

Generally land is considered to either own the people or is considered to be some form of collective property (e.g. of a peasant village or family among whom the land is redistributed periodically) or the property of god on whose behalf the king and his nobles manages things and hence none of them have unlimited rights over it.

Historically, Marx is a bit off. The development of bourgeois society in Europe began much earlier than he thought, particularly in England (where, by 1200, this sorta land ownership was being practiced in some areas, by 1400 it was widespread and a large class of agricultural wage-labourers had arisen). I haven't done enough investigation myself yet, but I get the impression from what I have read that Rome's property-laws were closer to bourgeois absolute property, which makes sense because it too had a very developed money-form (as Marx alludes to with his Apocalypse quote).

In terms of his point about nomadic peoples, I think he's correct, but only in cases where the nomadic peoples exist alongside settled city people. Marx's big issue (and the thing that makes anthropologists think they're proved him wrong on e.g. origin of money) is that his historical research is restricted to the last ~3000 years, and doesn't have much in the way of archaeology or history to go on. So the examples of nomadic peoples Marx has at hand are 1. pastoral peoples between egypt and mesopotamia 2. steppe/pastoral nomads around europe and maybe china 3. biased accounts of fur-trading natives in north america. In all cases these sorta nomadic people do seem to create money systems, but without impulse from the cities this doesn't happen. Trade still occurs, but it becomes ritualised, focused on use-values, turns into gift-economies, etc.

US dollar is linked to oil (oil being bought/sold in USD), it is strongly linked to a commodity. Fiat money having value bc the state wills it is an illusion.

All good points, but it should also be noted that (at least as I understand it) the US dollar is a commodity because it is the only thing used to buy/sell oil internationally (until recently).