Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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A commodity has use value in so far as it can be used by a human being to do something. Without humans it is just a chunk of matter. But the ways in which a human can use it is particular to it’s matter.
These commodities are all made by human labor. The act of producing a commodity which is useful means that the labor is useful because it produces a useful commodity.
I think it’s pretty interesting how much Marx probes each object with different lenses in his work. Like you said, a thing can be a natural-form (chunk of matter) or value-form (how humans see it), labor is abstract or concrete etc.
I have read about dialectics before but seeing how Marx does it and how his German is translated, it confused me quite a bit, hence the question. Still, commodity is a pretty cool thing to study.
Also, I liked your last sentence. Pretty great summary.
Yes, a key part of reading Marx is understanding which set of abstractions he is using at a given moment. He operates on different levels of abstaction at different points and writes as if he is just testing them out to see if they work, so you need to think about which one applies at a given time.