Thread by @adnanahusain

#WeeklyMarx Instalment 4, #GoodMorningMarx Day 35 of Capital v. 1,, pgs. 209-236, Chp 3, sec 2b-part 3b. Now we delve into chp 3, the start of which we skipped last week, so we start from p. 188, the beginning of Chp 3: Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. A day late, sorry!

Will try to catch up to #GoodMorningMarx reading schedule by next week! Sec 1 "the Measure of Values" establishes that gold, as the standard money commodity, acts as a material for equating values as different magnitudes of the same substance, as a universal measure of

value. That is what transforms gold as a commodity into money. Money "as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labour-time." The money form or price is the expression of the value of a commodity in

gold. Price is an ideal or notional form--what the seller hopes to receive--prior to actual material exchange. It is a real or material measure after the exchange. Money has two functions, measure of value and standard of price. Marx explores how price and value can diverge

as they are not the same and are based on separate functions and qualities of money and 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." This can lead to a contradiction with the result that "price ceases altogether to express value despite the fact that money is nothing but the value form of commodities." So immaterial social qualities like honour and repute

can be assigned a price as commodities or land undeveloped by human labor. Although not analyzed further, brand value and the exchange or price of intangibles of our late capitalism economy could be theorized here. He concludes that "The price-form therefore implies both the

exchangeability of commodities for money and the necessity of exchanges." Sec. 2 "The Means of Circulation" examines these exchanges and the "social metabolism" involved that transforms the form of the appearance or expression of value from commodity to money & money to commodity

C-M-C. In tracing and analyzing these operations, he explores the tensions and contradictions involved in buying and selling, such that each sale is a purchase and each purchase a sale: C-M becomes M-C. These individual transactions are however dependent upon a larger circuit:

"Hence the circuit made by one commodity in the course of its metamorphoses is inextricably entwined with the circuits of other commodities. This whole process constitutes the circulation of commodities." But money does not disappear from the circulation C-M-C. "Circulation

sweats money from every pore" and does not necessarily imply an equilibrium. P. 209 "there is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular

concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour, between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things..." Wow--in one passage sums up the trajectory of his argument and why he starts his analysis with the

commodity. Apologies for a #WeeklyMarx summary that is a day late and more than a dollar short (so to speak)! I'll discuss coins and "world money" at the end of chp 3 next week along with the start of Chp 4 "The General Formula for Capital" next Sunday. Keep reading, comrades!