Havenāt started yet but listened to the first David Harvey lecture and going to try see if I can find a hard copy in my local socialist bookshop tomorrow
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Iāll post questions that are more specifically about this part of the text next week but had some more general questions that might be worth addressing too:
- What is āpolitical economyā? Is it the same as āeconomicsā? Does it mean the same as it did ~150 years ago? What exactly is Marx critiquing?
- Marx says āEngland is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas.ā What do you think about the choice of England here? Was/is it simply the future of other industrialised countries?
- What is Marxās dialectic/ dialectical method? How is it different from Hegelās thought?
- What does it mean to be a Marxist?
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A small point about LTV thatās perhaps not mentioned above, I think we have to be quite careful in distinguishing the value as defined by Marx of a commodity and itās price. The value does have some correlation to the eventual price of a commodity but the two, even as theyāre written about in capital are not equivalent due to numerous factors including, but not limited to, the interaction of competing capitals/market exchange.
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Also full disclosure I am a marxist who has read capital but promise to be well behaved and not annoyingly dogmatic 
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Yeah I was thinking about this too - talking about value rather than price becomes a much more philosophical / metaphyscial conversation, which I think is interesting although really slippery and difficult / impossible to ever really resolve. Anyway, I donāt think I would agree with the notion that a commodityās value (separate from price) is defined by the quantity of human labour (individually or as part of a social process / network) embedded in it either.
I need to give these some thought! 
For me I think actually whatās kind of interesting is that, even in neoclassical economics itās hard to escape human labour as more or less an essential input into the value of commodity and this becomes more difficult particularly if human labour, is not seen purely in terms of physical exertion, which interestingly Marx doesnāt do.
There are some cop-outs that I think Marx makes here, āsocially necessary labourā, elides the requirement to talk about how exactly other differences in value are realized because essentially the subjective requirement for a commodity has already been determined in that conception.
So you donāt for example get into arguments about how much value is realized in digging and filling several holes vs building a house. But this all said itsā quite interesting that modern day capitalists make very similar arguments not to veer too far off topic but I noticed in this interview Elon Musk makes the point that the foundation of the economy is human labour and that capital is essentially distilled labour.
I donāt think it is possible to establish an objective measure of value, of a commodity or of anything for that matter, so it all seems fairly futile and straying into naval gazing. Saying things like capital is essentially distilled labour just seems like a glib remark to me, there is no real substance to it.
Iāve never read Capital before by the way. Of course I have a bunch of conscious and subconscious preconceptions, associations and biases regarding what Marx / Marxism is, most of which are probably way off the mark.
So I have some ideas about why Marx is outlining / exploring this concept of value and its relation to human labour, and how he will then build on that, but we will see. I come to the text, like many, with the view that capitalism is bad and that human society needs to be organised in a radically different way. However, Iām always pretty wary of the suggestion of objectivity or universal truth in trying to diagnose problems / prescribe solutions.
Not sure Iām going to be clever enough to engage with any of this but I have the book and am going to try and read the chapterā¦
To some extent Iād agree that I donāt think itās possible to precisely quantify the amount of value a particular commodity contains, which is why Iād be somewhat wary of a concept like labour tokens but neither do I think these things are entirely subjective.
This is because to realize profits in a commodity market a business owner ultimately has to take into account the levels of human labour expended and costs sustaining and reproducing that labour which is to some extent functionally similar for capital particularly fixed capital so railways, machinery etc.
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For anyone not sure about their own knowledge and comprehension
We will be taking it slowly and breaking it all down 
I donāt think thereās any need to understand it all fully.
It is obvs also actually extremely helpful (for collective learning purposes) for people to highlight what they found confusing or unclear. So if there is anything you donāt follow from the text or from other peopleās posts, asking about it or throwing it out as a question would be extremely welcome!
Iāve read parts of Capital before (and secondary literature) but this is the first time Iāve sat down and read it cover to cover. I struggle to understand a lot of it despite being myself a social scientist who has taken (and taught 
) courses with a heavy political economy element.
Hope everyone feels they can approach this without feeling the need to demonstrate their understanding. The best learning happens when everyone is puzzled and works it out together imo.
As an aid, this book on How to read Marxās Capital by Stephen Shapiro might be helpful.
And of course Reading Marxās Capital Volume 1 with David Harvey - 2019 Edition - Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey
There are thousands of other resources - I suggest finding whatever is clearest and most helpful for you.
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Surely the realisation of profits is purely driven by pricing rather than any attempt to measure objective value? I assume that the definition of a commodity as something with a value and a use value still applies outside of a market-driven economy / in a communist society?
Seeing references to 1848 in the prefaces. The significance of which is new to me.
And, as it happens, I listened to this earlier today:
The ep description ^there has some good summary notes, questions and links. Has set the scene nicely.
Absolutely no idea if Iāll be able to keep up with the reading or the conversation but Iām giving it a shot.
So going back briefly to this idea of socially necessary labour in Marxian economics weāre sort of presupposing a market or a need for a particular commodity so in such a case weāre not so much looking at the final price realized during the interaction of competing capitals but the price of raw commodities, labour power etc used during the process of production and the price of the finished commodity.
To be a bit crude because Marx spends a lot of time going over this and I kind of want to summarise it slightly more briefly. One constant Marx points to during the process of production is a discrepancy between the value of labour that goes into the production and the value of the commodities or services produced. The general idea being that labour unlike essentially any other input can produce value above and beyond the value required for its own reproduction. This difference is what Marx refers to as surplus value.
While I dislike the straight comparison of value to price itās sometimes a useful guide as if we look at say a restaurant in order to turn a profit there has to essentially be a way of producing and selling food/services above the value of the raw imputs that are consumed during the process of production for Marx and I guess Ricardo, this was labour.
I assume that the definition of a commodity as something with a value and a use value still applies outside of a market-driven economy / in a communist society?
So for Marx he divided a commodity into two aspects use value or what neoclassical economists would call utility and exchange value essentially what someone is willing to pay for it. At its core communist society is the realisation of a society geared towards the production of only use values or rather direct production for use.
Commodities in the usual sense wouldnāt exist partly because of the final disappearance of exchange value but also because rather than the raw inputs used in production being controlled by a specific class of individuals whether thatās the state or private companies they would be regulated by the community as a whole.
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Iām still really struggling to see how it is possible to objectively quantify somethingsās utility / use value, or see how the exchange value isnāt actually just pricing, which is completely subjective. In the restaurant example it all just comes down to the market price for the ingredients, the labour, other overheads and the meal.
Obviously I can see that if the restaurant owner is able to make a profit then they are inevitably exploiting human labour to achieve this (as well as potentially exploiting natural resources - I guess environmentalism wasnāt a thing in Marxās time though?). Think I need to watch some of the accompanying material that has been suggested.
OK I watched the first David Harvey lecture and it was a huge help. I should have bothered to read the prefaces too!
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- What is āpolitical economyā? Is it the same as āeconomicsā? Does it mean the same as it did ~150 years ago? What exactly is Marx critiquing?
When we talk about political economy now, we mean something more like the politics of the economics. Itās not the same as economics, and I wouldnāt say it even was at the time of Marx. At the time he was writing, they didnāt think of the āobjectā of economics in the same way (see this fascinating talk "The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World" with Kaushik Basu and Timothy Mitchell - YouTube)
- Marx says āEngland is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas.ā What do you think about the choice of England here? Was/is it simply the future of other industrialised countries?
Marx has been (quite rightly in my opinion) widely critiqued, or at least elaborated on, for this. There is a really widespread assumption in a lot of histories of capitalism (not just in Marx) that the capitalist mode of production expands uniformly and endogenously from Europe. This really underplays, amongst other things, the role of colonialism. See āColonial global economy: towards a theoretical reorientation of political economyā (Bhambra, 2021 in Review of International Political Economy; open access).
- What is Marxās dialectic/ dialectical method? How is it different from Hegelās thought?
Marx actually never got round to properly explaining this. As I understand it, Hegel thought that contradiction was really central to all social and political life, and to the progression of history. But unlike Hegel, who made claims about contradictions in ideas Marx sees contradictions as constitutive of social reality itself (idealism v materialism). To me, it is a historicisation of social reality itself. Iām really not well versed in Marxist philosophy though so open to being challenged on that.
- What does it mean to be a Marxist?
It matters very little to me whether people describe themselves as Marxists, and I generally donāt go in for doctrinaire approaches to things. I think some people often wrongly conceive of Marxism as coterminous with or as underpinning all radical thought.
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I thought Marx said his dialectic method was the opposite of Hegelās in that he uncovers ideas by examining real life rather than proposing ideas and then testing them against real life
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One thing I was thinking was that in the modern economy there are loads of types of commodities that wouldnāt have existed in Marxās time but which can still be considered as per his definition. Loads of digital stuff for example, but also various art forms (which probably worked more on a patronage model previously?) and intellectual property (at least in some cases) potentially.
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I donāt think either of these are quite right for various reasons (although of course I donāt claim expertise in marx or hegel), this is just to say I will try to write something this evening saying why