The reader who is new to Capital might well wonder why Marx chose to begin his study of the capitalist mode of production with a detailed account of commodity production – of the lowly commodity of all things? In a book entitled Capital, why not start with a definition of the concept of capital itself – something which in fact we do not get until nearly five hundred pages later (Capital, Vol. I, Part VII, Ch. 24) – or at the very least start with the concept of capital in its money form as Marx does in the Grundrisse, the notebook he wrote in 1857–8 in preparation for writing Capital itself ? What have commodities got to do with anything, we might ask, and why apparently are they quite so important to this question? In fact, the reason Marx begins Capital with a discussion of commodities is fairly clear: he wished to take seriously one of the most fundamental claims of vulgar and classical political economy; namely, the belief that, even when they are paid only a minimum or subsistence wage, labourers are in fact paid the full value of their labour-power when they exchange this as a commodity.
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