Part One — Commodities and Money Chapters 1–3. The commodity and its two factors, the value-form, the fetish, and the genesis of money.

Part One is the analytic opening of Capital, and it is the part Marx himself flags as the hardest and the most consequential. Three chapters take the commodity apart down to its cell and rebuild the whole apparatus of value, exchange, and money out of what is found inside it. Nothing in the rest of the volume — labour-power, surplus-value, the working day, accumulation — can be stated until the categories built here are standing. Chapter 1 dissects the commodity into use-value and value, tracks value back to the double character of the labour that produces it, derives the value-form through four stages up to the money-form, and then, in the fetishism section, explains why this whole structure presents itself to the people living inside it as a property of things rather than a relation between them. Chapter 2 stages the derivation a second time from the side of the commodity-owners, as an act they perform without grasping. Chapter 3 unfolds money into its functions: measure of value, means of circulation, and money as money — hoard, means of payment, world money.

The situation the Part enters is the critique of political economy. Classical political economy had already found that the magnitude of a commodity's value is governed by labour-time. What it had never asked is why the product of labour takes the value-form at all — why human labour should express itself as the objective value of a thing, and why that value should have to appear as exchange-value and finally as money. Marx's target across Part One is the form, not merely the magnitude, and the analysis is immanent: no external standard is imported, the commodity is made to yield its own contradictions, and each category is forced out of the insufficiency of the one before it. That is the through-line the reconstruction below follows — from the two factors of the commodity, through the dual character of labour, through the four forms of value to the money-form, and out into the fetish.

Marx sets the stakes in the Preface, and the brief takes his warning as its orientation. The difficulty is concentrated exactly where the payoff is.

Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences. The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulty.

Marx, Preface to the First Edition, page 89.

The reason the difficulty pays is that what is under the microscope in Chapter 1 is not a minor category but the germ-cell of the entire mode of production. The famous image is Marx's own, and it is the best statement of why Part One is load-bearing out of all proportion to its length.

Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells. Moreover, in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both. But for bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form.

Marx, Preface to the First Edition, page 90.

The reconstruction runs Chapter 1 section by section, at full quotation density, because Chapter 1 is the anchor of the volume; Chapters 2 and 3 follow. What the brief does not do — weigh the derivation against later theories of value, or measure the value-form analysis for what it may occlude — is left to the researcher who has the reconstruction in hand.

1 · The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value

The volume opens not with capital, labour, or class but with the commodity, and the first sentence states why. Capitalist wealth does not present itself as a stock of use-values or as a sum of activity; it presents itself as a heap of saleable things, and the single commodity is the unit that heap is built from. The analysis therefore begins where the wealth first appears.

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.

Marx, Capital I, page 125.

The commodity is taken apart into two factors. The first is use-value. A commodity is before anything else a thing outside us that satisfies a need, and the character of the need is irrelevant to the analysis.

The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man’s need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production.

Marx, Capital I, page 125.

Use-value is bound to the physical body of the thing and to its consumption; it is not a relation but a property. Marx pins it down so it can be set aside, and in doing so drops the phrase — material bearers of exchange-value — that names the whole problem the chapter will work on: the useful thing is also the carrier of something else.

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When examining use-values, we always assume we are dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use-values of commodities provide the material for a special branch of knowledge, namely the commercial knowledge of commodities. Use-values are only realized [verwirklicht] in use or in consumption. They constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be. In the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers [Träger] of … exchange-value.

Marx, Capital I, page 126.