Capital, Commodity Fetishism, and Labor in Capitalist Society – Lecture Notes (Overview, Key Concepts, and Discussion Points)

Course Setup and Readings

• The instructor confirms registration status: all who want to register are in; no more wait list.
• Discussion sections are assigned; if anyone wanted a different section, resolution achieved. If issues persist, must be sorted by Friday; a longer drop window exists.
• Students should remain enrolled in the lecture and also enroll in a discussion section to receive credit for the lecture.
• Next class: Thursday, a more detailed assignment description for the first essay will be introduced; related material is already in the syllabus and will be expanded upon. Documents will be uploaded to the section coursework page.
• Discussion posts are being prepared; follow-up by email for a few students who contacted the instructor. If you were on a waitlist and have already enrolled, upload your material to the relevant folder to confirm on-time submission.
• For readings this week: same as today. If you want a hard copy, Penguin edition translated by Fowkes of Marx’s Capital Volume I is available; PDF is on CourseWorks; three-week reading window ahead.
• Any lingering enrollment questions should be addressed today; otherwise, the instructor will cover the lecture content.
• Reminder to revisit key readings: preface, commodity fetishism passage, and Chapter 7; the next two weeks will focus on these and how they relate to the larger project of Capital Volume I.
• Reading strategy: the beginning of Chapter 1 is very abstract; the part on commodity fetishism is especially influential in social sciences and humanities. Chapter 7 contains more concrete plotting and is still important for the full argument.
• The instructor emphasizes grasping the whole chapter-by-chapter and not getting stuck on early pages; read through to the end of Chapter 7 before returning to difficult passages.
• The class will also include a short film in Thursday’s session and a discussion about the idea of America as embodied in inaugural speeches (later in the transcript). This will connect to broader discussions about culture and values.
• On Thursday, there will be a close reading of three or four inaugural speeches to compare visions of America, with attention to genre conventions, rhetoric, and what they reveal about values.
• The instructor uses two concrete teaching moments: (1) revisiting the concept of the social product and its relation to abstract labor, and (2) examining how social values materialize in texts and practices (e.g., inaugural speeches).
• The transcript ends with an aside about American exceptionalism and other cultural expressions through historical events and speeches.

Key Concepts from Capital (Chapter 1) and Preface

• Marx’s preface (to the first edition) and the broader project: Capital Volume I is just one piece of a larger project; Volumes II and III were published after Marx’s death; there is even discussion of a Volume IV (Theories of Surplus Value).
• The aim of Capital: reveal the economic law of motion of modern capitalist society; individuals are treated as bearers of class relations and interests, i.e., as personifications of economic categories, rather than as fully autonomous agents.
• Capitalist society is described as an organism with a metabolism and a circulatory system; components transform and interrelate, but Marx is not a pure functionalist who claims the system is eternally self-reproducing.
• The commodity as the fundamental unit of capitalist society: wealth and social organization under capitalism appear in terms of commodities and their relations; the “economic cell form” is the commodity form.
• The social science method: Marx uses abstraction to study the forms of the economy; microscopes or chemistry won’t help here—abstraction is the tool to understand the capital-form and its laws of motion.
• The analysis is systemic: focuses on the capitalist mode of production, the relations of production, and the forms of interest that correspond to it; individuals are studied insofar as they represent economic categories or class relations.
• The concept of an organism and potential breakdown: capitalism can change or decay; Marx’s stress on historical and transformative dynamics rather than a guaranteed perpetual renewal.
• The commodity form is the economic cell form of bourgeois society; exchange-value and use-value are two essential aspects bound up in every commodity; money serves as a medium to express exchange-value.
• The distinction between concrete labor and abstract labor (the latter being central to exchange-value):
  • Concrete labor: the actual physical activities involved in a specific task (e.g., lecturing, factory work).
  • Abstract labor: the socially necessary labor time that underpins value and commensurability across different kinds of concrete labor.
• Labor time vs. labor power:
  • Labor time: the amount of time spent in a concrete act of labor.
  • Labor power: the capacity to work; a commodity that workers sell to capitalists in exchange for wages; both use-value (as a capacity to work) and exchange-value (its price or wage) exist for labor-power.
• Socially necessary labor time (SNLT): the average amount of time required to produce a given good in a given social context; it determines exchange-value rather than the actual time spent by a single worker on a single unit.
• Two components of production in capitalist society:
  • Objects of labor: raw materials or materials used in the production process.
  • Instruments of labor: tools, machinery, and other means used to carry out labor.
  • Living labor: the actual labor power and labor performed by workers; together with dead labor (past labor embedded in instruments and materials), these constitute the means of production.
• Means of production: the combination of objects of labor and instruments of labor used to produce goods.
• The labor process: the transformation that converts raw materials and instruments into finished goods via living labor; living labor acts on dead labor (means of production) to produce use-values and exchange-values.
• The dual nature of commodities:
  • Use value: usefulness of a commodity in satisfying need (e.g., chair for sitting).
  • Exchange value: the value of a commodity in exchange, determined by socially necessary labor time and expressed on the market (money as the medium).
• Past labor congealed into commodities: the value of a given commodity is tied to the amount of past labor embedded in it; the price tag () expresses an exchange value linked to social labor time, not just the physical attributes of the item.
• The role of money: money represents a congealed quantity of value and exchange value; it converts commodities into tradable forms and abstracts labor into a common metric.
• How exchange-value is established across different commodities: through commensuration via abstract labor; one commodity can be equalized with another by expressing their values in a common unit of value (money).
• The example of the coat and the shirt:
  • A coat can be exchanged for a certain number of shirts (e.g., 1 coat = 10 shirts) purely in terms of exchange-value, not use-value.
  • The actual time spent producing each may differ; social average (SNLT) governs value rather than the concrete time spent by a single worker.
• “Commodities are produced because they congeal past labor and can be exchanged for more value than went into their production.” Exchange-value drives production more than use-value; goods are produced for their ability to circulate and realize value, not merely to fulfill direct use.
• Labor-power as a commodity:
  • Workers sell their capacity to work to capitalists; this capacity is a commodity with use-value and exchange-value.
  • The wages paid reflect the exchange-value of labor power, which is determined by SNLT of labor-power in society, not by the specific skill or efficiency of a worker.
• The historical emergence of wage labor:
  • The generalization of wage labor is a relatively recent development tied to enclosure and the transformation of common lands into private property; this historical process pushes people to sell their labor-power to survive.
• Abstract labor, value, and the limit of simple quantitative accounting:
  • Marx emphasizes abstraction; the precise calculation of all past labor hours is not the aim; instead, the critical insight is the social and historical construction of value and its extraction.
• The discussion of “IKEA” and other modern examples:
  • In ready-to-assemble or kit products, the consumer contributes to finishing the product; the value associated with assembly time is often not included in the purchase price; the product is an unfinished commodity reflecting past labor up to the point of sale.
  • The assembler or installer’s contribution is sometimes external to the purchase price; the buyer’s own labor is a form of future living labor that contributes to use-value but not necessarily to the initial exchange-value captured by the price at sale.
• Key terms for the labor process (as used in the session):
  • Object of labor: a thing that labor acts upon (e.g., wood, metal, fabric).
  • Instrument of labor: the tools used to perform labor (e.g., saw, lathe).
  • Means of production: the combination of objects of labor and instruments of labor used in production.
  • Living labor: the actual labor power of workers; the “yeast” that activates dead labor to generate value.
  • Dead labor: past labor embedded in material objects and machinery.
• The “labor process” and the production of value:
  • Value is created when living labor acts on dead labor within the production process; the living labor adds value beyond the value of inputs, which leads to surplus value (profit) for the capitalist.
  • The speech introduces the idea of the “valorization process”: capital’s drive to expand value over time through ongoing production and accumulation.
• Chapter structure and future focus:
  • Chapter 1 introduces key categories and the fetishism debate; Chapter 7 is suggested as a later, more comprehensive discussion of the labor process, including human relations to nature and the social reproduction of labor power.
  • The instructor notes that there will be a focus on the independent chapters in subsequent sessions to broaden understanding of labor, value, and social organization under capitalism.

Deep Dive: Use Value, Exchange Value, and Fetishism (Details)

• Use value (nonspecific):
  • What is the use that could be made of something? A chair is useful for sitting; a pen for writing; a computer for multiple functions.
  • Use value is context-specific and tied to the actual usefulness of the commodity.
• Exchange value (socially mediated):
  • All commodities have exchange value, which is the value in the marketplace; it is tied to the commodity’s ability to exchange for other commodities and for money.
  • Exchange value is not determined by the actual use, but by social conventions and the average social labor time embedded in the commodity across society (SNLT).
• Commodities are defined by their simultaneous possession of use value and exchange value; the price tag on a commodity communicates its exchange value to potential buyers.
• Autonomy of commodities and fetishism:
  • Commodities appear to have a life of their own and seem to dominate social relations; this is the fetishism of the commodity.
  • The social relations among people (who does what kind of labor, who gets paid what) are displaced into relations between things (commodities) with their own powers and life-like attributes.
• The social world behind the price:
  • The value of a garment (or any commodity) is rooted in socially necessary labor time, not in the actual time spent on production by a single worker on a single unit.
  • The abstraction of labor time enables cross-commodity comparability, creating a common metric for exchange.

Concrete vs Abstract Labor; Labor Time and Labor Power

• Concrete labor vs abstract labor:
  • Concrete labor refers to the actual, particular activities involved in producing a given good (specific tasks, techniques, and materials).
  • Abstract labor refers to the general, averaged labor time that, when aggregated across society, yields value; it’s the social form of labor that enables commensuration across different kinds of concrete labor.
• Labor time:
  • The duration of labor engagement in a given process; however, the value of a finished commodity is not determined by the actual time spent by a single worker, but by SNLT.
• Labor power as a commodity:
  • Labor power is bought and sold; it has use value (capacity to work) for the capitalist and exchange value (wage) for the worker.
  • The price of labor power is tied to the socially necessary labor time to reproduce the worker (household maintenance, subsistence, etc.) in society.
• Socially necessary labor time (SNLT):
  • The average amount of time required to produce a commodity under prevailing social conditions and the current state of technology and organization.
  • It anchors exchange value across different products; if a worker slows production, the overall market dynamics would punish the producer through lower profitability or failure, due to competition and market forces.
• The living vs dead labor distinction clarifies where new value comes from:
  • Dead labor is the past labor embedded in the means of production and raw materials.
  • Living labor is the current, productive labor performed by workers; it is the source of new value and surplus value.
• The hierarchy of value and the role of abstract labor:
  • Abstract labor provides a common measure by which different concrete labors can be compared and exchanged; it is essential to the concept of value in a capitalist system.
• The “valorization” process:
  • Capitalist producers seek to realize more value than the inputs invested; this ongoing process of extracting more value over time defines the capitalist mode of production.

Means of Production and the Labor Process

• Means of production comprise two elements:
  • Objects of labor: raw materials and things being worked on (these can also be commodity inputs like timber, metal, etc.).
  • Instruments of labor: tools, machines, and equipment used to perform labor (e.g., saws, lathes).
• The combination of living labor with the means of production yields products; the products then become commodities with exchange-value.
• The concept of raw material:
  • Raw materials are not neutral; they already embody prior labor; their value partly reflects past labor embedded in them.
• The distinction between living labor and dead labor:
  • Living labor is the active creative force in production; dead labor is the material and tool-based value that is transferred and transformed in the process.
• The role of the global division of labor:
  • In contemporary capitalism, components of a single product often originate in various locations, reflecting a global system of dead labor embedded in inputs sourced internationally.
• The discussion about the “yeast” metaphor:
  • Living labor is the yeast that activates dead labor; without living labor, dead labor would not be converted into new value.

Practical Examples and Class Discussions

• The coat example:
  • Exchange value of a coat can be related to the exchange value of shirts; one coat may be equivalent to multiple shirts in monetary terms, illustrating commensurability via abstract labor.
  • Actual production time by one worker does not determine exchange value; SNLT determines it across the society.
• The IKEA example:
  • IKEA products are sold as unfinished or partially finished goods; assembly at home represents additional labor not included in the initial price, illustrating the division between embodied past labor and consumer-provided future labor.
  • The value of assembled products includes past labor embedded in the materials and pre-assembled components, but not necessarily the final assembly labor performed by the consumer.
• The mass production and inter-national division of labor underscore the global nature of dead labor embedded in goods produced for the world market.

Reading Strategy and Next Steps (Class Planning)

• Re-read the commodity fetishism passages and Chapter 7 to deepen understanding of the labor process and the social form of the economy.
• Read through to the end of Chapter 7 before revisiting specific passages; this helps grasp the overall argument rather than getting stuck early.
• Prepare questions for the next class based on passages that seemed difficult or controversial; bring specific lines for discussion.
• Thursday’s plan: a detailed essay brief, followed by a screening of a related film; then a discussion of how cultural texts and practices reflect and shape economic structures.
• Additional task: a close reading of three or four inaugural speeches to analyze how each speaker constructs an idea of America, with attention to genre conventions, rhetoric, and the social values implied.
• The broader goal: understand how formal documents and public discourse model or challenge the social relations and power structures inherent in capitalist society.

Connections to Previous Lectures, Foundational Principles, and Real-World Relevance

• Wendy Brown’s reading of the preface and the emphasis on the need for theory to understand history, including the transformation of commodities into social forms.
• The notion that theory helps us grasp how material conditions (commodities) and social relations (labor, class) are organized and how they can change over time.
• Real-world relevance: the discussion of a worldwide division of labor, enclosures (common lands becoming private property), and wage labor maps onto contemporary debates about globalization, labor rights, and the precarity of work.
• Ethical and practical implications: how value is extracted from labor, the invisibility of exploitation in everyday prices, and the potential vulnerability of capitalist systems to breakdown or crisis.

Terminology Quick Reference (Glossary)

• Use value: The usefulness of a commodity.
• Exchange value: The value of a commodity in the market, determined by社会ly necessary labor time; expressed in money.
• Abstract labor: The social, average labor time used to compare and value different concrete labors; underpins exchange value.
• Concrete labor: The actual, particular productive activity in making a good.
• Labor power: The capacity to work; a commodity bought and sold in the labor market; has use value and exchange value.
• Socially necessary labor time (SNLT): The average labor time required to produce a commodity under current social conditions.
• Means of production: The tools, machinery, and materials used in production (Objects of labor + Instruments of labor).
• Living labor: The actual labor performed by workers during production.
• Dead labor: Past labor embedded in tools and materials used in production.
• Commodity fetishism: The social perception that social relations between people take the form of value relations between things; commodities appear to have life of their own.
• Valorization: The process of creating value and surplus value through production and accumulation in capitalism.
• Economic cell form: The commodity form as the fundamental unit organizing capitalist society.
• Commodity: A thing with both use value and exchange value; it is produced for exchange in a market.
• Fetishism of the commodity vs the social relations of production: The appearance that commodities control or determine social relations, while the real relations are between people.

Instructor Questions and Student Interactions (Notable Points)

• Clarifications asked about: the relation between concrete and abstract labor; whether dead labor and living labor can be abstract; how labor time translates into exchange value; the role of labor power as a commodity and how its value is determined.
• Addressed common questions about: the practicalities of measuring SNLT; the meaning of raw materials as past labor; how the finished product contains the value of dead labor; and the way consumer activities (like IKEA assembly) factor into value.
• Emphasis on discussing the entire chapter (not just openings); pushing through to the end helps reveal the full argument; questions about social product will be revisited in later lectures.

Preparation for Thursday and Assessment Activities

• Revisit and annotate the preface, Chapter 1 (commodity and fetishism sections), and Chapter 7; ensure you understand how the whole argument fits together.
• Be prepared to discuss: how the commodity form functions as the economic cell form; how use value and exchange value co-exist in every commodity; how abstract labor structures value across different concrete labors.
• Expect to engage with a film and then a discussion about American identity and inaugural speeches; consider how cultural discourse reflects or challenges economic structures.
• Think about ethical questions: how capitalism allocates value, the invisibility of labor exploitation, and what it means to see social relations as relations between things.

Summary of Formulas and Key Relations (LaTeX)

• Commodity structure:
  ext{Commodity} = (UV, EV)
  where UV = Use Value, EV = Exchange Value.
• Exchange value and social labor:
  EV \propto SNLT
  where SNLT = ext{Socially Necessary Labor Time}.
• Labor power as a commodity:
  ext{Labor Power}: ext{Use Value}
  ightarrow ext{Capacity to work}, \ ext{Exchange Value}
  ightarrow ext{Wage}
• Abstract vs concrete labor:
  • Concrete labor is the actual productive activity.
  • Abstract labor is the socially averaged labor that underpins value; it provides the common measure for exchange-value.
• Means of production:
  ext{Means of Production} = ( ext{Objects of Labor}, ext{Instruments of Labor})
• Living vs dead labor in the labor process:
  ext{Living Labor} + ext{Dead Labor}
  ightarrow ext{Product (Commodity)}
• Valorization principle (conceptual):
  ext{Value of Outputs} \geq ext{Value of Inputs}$$
  with surplus value arising from living labor beyond wages.