Reading Marx’s Capital is notoriously challenging, although I think some of that difficulty is manufactured in the build-up rather than the actual task. There are many guides on how to prepare, but I think at some point you just have to jump in and start reading. This is not to suggest that it will be easier than you initially think, and this applies especially to Section 1, which even Marx acknowledged was difficult.1 Louis Althusser also told newcomers to skip Part One, read most of the rest of the book, and return to the opening chapters later.2 Instead of skipping ahead, I will use this series to work slowly through the text and lean on secondary literature to build clear summaries that I hope will be helpful if you’re tackling Marx’s work. My goal is to make the process feel a bit less isolating and also to strengthen my own understanding along the way.
I might cover a full chapter per piece at times, or just a single section (as I do here), and I hope to work through all of Volume 1. Excellent guides to Capital already exist from far more qualified individuals than myself, so I will lean on their work rather than reinvent the wheel, but where I hope to differentiate my approach is by focusing on Marx’s ecological insights because the standard chapter-by-chapter companions don't focus on ecology, and the ecological literature isn't organized as a read-along. I am hoping this series will fill that gap and demonstrate that a concern with nature is a core part of Marx’s method. He lacked modern terminology, but the thread remains clear and even in Section 1 that foundation exists.
Chapter 1, Section 1, The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value (Substance of Value, Magnitude of Value: pp. 125-131)
I am working from the Penguin translation by Ben Fowkes.
Why Marx starts with the commodity
The real concrete is simply the world in which we live, in all its complexity. The thought concrete is Marx’s reconstruction of that world in the theories of what has come to be called Marxism. The royal road to understanding is said to pass from the one to the other through the process of abstraction.
Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic, p. 60.
Unlike a physical specimen which a natural scientist can place under a microscope, the social world is a complex web of interaction which doesn’t lend itself to the same method of analysis. Given this, the social scientist must develop other tools in order to grasp the ever-changing social world and as Marx noted in his preface, in the analysis of economic forms “neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both.”3 Abstraction is a mental activity we all perform every day by drawing boundaries within a continuous whole so that manageable parts come into focus and can be understood.
Marx did not invent the process of abstraction, but Bertell Ollman argues that he did have a distinct approach in terms of where his boundaries are drawn and what he places inside of them.4 Where mainstream social science isolates objects by viewing its relationships and history as external factors that happen after the fact, Marx defines his concepts so that movement and relationships are built into the unit from the start. This way, when Marx isolates a part of the system, the dynamics of the whole remain with it. This is challenging for most of us; Ollman uses Heraclitus’s observation that we can never enter the same river more than once to show how our common sense tends to remove process from our understanding of the thing in front of us. The river, because the constant movement of water and the speed of that movement, is never the same. But once we step in and claim that we are standing in the ‘Muskoka River’, we have now conceptually halted the process and “our naming practice reflects this view.”5 Our common sense thinking tends to reify processual realities in order to understand them, and in doing so, we can miss the truth of the matter. This is fine for some everyday purposes (like the river example), but not so effective when the goal of our analysis is to develop an understanding of a dynamic system.
The above makes Marx’s starting point less arbitrary. Starting with the commodity, the simplest unit of capitalist wealth, which he calls the economic cell-form. Marx claims that “the complete body is easier to study than its cells,” and likens his method to microscopic anatomy.6 A cell contains the whole and carries the logic of the larger piece within it. Looking closely at the commodity does not mean setting the rest of capitalism aside; it means finding the whole system folded into its smallest part, contradictions and all.
“Appears as”
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.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 125.
Marx starts by describing a very specific historical condition: societies where the capitalist mode of productions prevails. Other societies have produced commodities, but only under the logic of capital does wealth take the shape of a massive heap of goods. The focus of Capital is established immediately and the purpose is to develop an understanding of these specific societies. Michael Heinrich stresses that this refusal to treat capitalism as timeless is made clear right here in the book’s first sentence.7
Now, as both David Harvey and Michael Heinrich point out, the word “appears” plays an important role in the opening passage. Appearing as something is not necessarily the same as being it: a thing can display a certain form without that form being all it is. Looking at the German erscheint, Heinrich highlights that: “is” classifies, “appears as” (erscheinen) indicates taking a specific form, leaving room for other forms, and “seems” (scheinen) implies deception (a word Marx does not use here).8 In the societies Marx examines, wealth taking on the commodity-form is not a trick, but in a different social structure, wealth could manifest differently.
Marx’s ability to anticipate modern life shows itself when looking at today’s society and the reach of the commodity form, where most of life is understood through monetary worth; the commodity logic shapes many of our interactions and even our relationship with time. As David Harvey points out, the “commodity form is a universal presence within a capitalist mode of production.”9 A fact that has only intensified since Marx’s time.
Use-value: where nature enters the analysis
Marx continues exploring the commodity form: a commodity is primarily an independent and distinct thing whose qualities satisfy human needs “of whatever kind.” Marx is indifferent to whether these needs spring from the “stomach or the imagination,” he doesn’t rank “true” / “false” needs, and is also unconcerned whether they are consumed directly or indirectly in production as a raw material.10 Either way, the thing must serve a purpose for someone or some process and that practical utility is its use-value.
Nature enters Capital when Marx claims that this usefulness “does not dangle in mid-air.”11 Use-value is shaped by the physical properties of the thing itself and has no existence separate from it. The usefulness exists in what the commodity physically is and its actual relation to human need. In a few paragraphs, Marx is going to set nature aside, so it is important to remember here that nature was grounded in the material body first.
Another reading of Marx's definition of the commodity in terms of use-value comes from Michael Lebowitz in Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class. Lebowitz notes that needs of the "imagination" imply that the essence of a use-value is "found in human beings rather than in things" — and he is careful that those needs are themselves social, quoting Marx that "the consumer is no freer than the producer." This does not contradict the idea that usefulness exists in the physical body of the commodity; rather, it suggests that use-value is where a socially shaped need meets natural material.12
Marx then adds two clarifications: first, the usefulness of an object is independent of the labour required to acquire it;13 a diamond is equally useful whether you stumbled upon it on the ground or spent months digging it out of a mine; second, use-values are always realized as specific quantities (not abstract “wheat,” but twenty bushels of it) and they are only actualized through direct use or consumption.14
In David Harvey’s Companion, he asks the reader to:
Notice how quickly [Marx] abstracts from the incredible diversity of human wants, needs and desires, as well as from the immense variety of commodities and their weights and measures, in order to focus on the unitary concept of a use-value.
Companion, p. 18.
Harvey is pointing out a clear example of Marx’s method of abstraction and we can go back to Ollman to see how it works; specifically, what Ollman calls “the abstraction of level of generality.” Ollman identifies seven levels of generality at which Marx’s abstractions can be located. The “diversity of human wants, needs, and desires” sit on level one, and Marx rarely abstracts at that level. Section 1 is pitched almost completely at level three (capitalism). Marx is not denying the diversity of individual needs and Ollman is explicit that the qualities at every level remain "equally real," but they are simply not the object of study. Marx is analyzing the commodity as a social form, and that analysis lives at the third level of generality.15
There is another take, focused on the structure of Marx’s project, on the setting aside of the “diversity of human wants, needs and desires,” and that comes again from again Michael Lebowitz. The thesis of Beyond Capital is that Marx’s Capital was one side of the story (that of capital), and that an un-written book on wage-labour would have developed the analysis from the side of the worker. On this reading, the level of workers' needs is held fixed in Capital because their development belongs to the other side of that analysis. Marx says as much in his 1861–63 manuscripts: questions of changes in the level of needs "belong to the investigation of wage labour in particular."16
Michael Heinrich also makes a good point noting that the distinction between use-value and value was not Marx’s original idea. The distinction goes back through classical political economists like Adam Smith, and even all the way back to Aristotle. The level of the analysis Marx builds on this foundation, though, is where his originality is demonstrated.17
Material Content and Social Form
They constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be.
Marx, Capital Vol 1, p. 126.
This one sentence in Section 1 sets up the distinction that organizes everything that’s to come: the material content of wealth versus its social form.
On one side is the material content: use-values and the physical stuff of life that every society in human history has had to produce because human beings must eat and build shelter to survive. In this sense, use-value is not specific only to capitalist societies. On the other side is the exact social form that content assumes under generalized commodity production: the commodity form, or as we will come to call it, the form of value (I’ll cover both value and exchange-value in the next two sections. For now just note which side of the divide they sit on). Value and exchange-value are historically specific shapes that material content takes within capitalist societies.18
Nature lives completely on the content side of this divide because use-values represent real matter and energy drawn from and returned to the earth, but the social form of value is indifferent to that physical reality. Value does not care if a good was produced by exhausting soil or through a sustainable method that renews it; it measures only abstract labour (we will also get to this soon) and exchange ratios. The ecological contradiction is that wealth as material content is natural and metabolic, while wealth as a social form is blind to nature. The foundation of the metabolic rift is already visible, and Marx hasn’t even mentioned soil or the split between town and country yet.19
Marx, at this point, has separated form from content, but he has not shown how the form comes to dominate content. The argument that capitalism prioritizes the social form (value) over material content (use-values) by organizing production around expanding value rather than meeting human needs is a thesis that develops across the entire work; that thesis hasn’t been developed quite yet though.
Marx then concludes the section by noting that use-values serve as the “bearers” of exchange-value;20 that is, they are the material vehicle through which the social form is revealed. To reveal that social form we must “look at actual exchange processes in the market.”21
Exchange-value and the hunt for a common element
The notion that Marx’s labor theory of value might provide an important ecological perspective might seem strange, given the popular view that this theory excludes or downgrades nature’s importance as a condition of and limiting factor in human production. Even among eco-Marxists, the dominant position seems to be that insofar as Marx achieved any ecological insights, this was despite—not because of—his value theory. But the germ of capitalism’s tendency to degrade the natural condition of human existence is arguably revealed by Marx’s basic analysis of exchange values.
Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective, p. 79.
Unlike a use-value, which is inherent and discoverable in a commodity, finding the exchange-value will not reveal itself under such dissection. Exchange-value will only become visible through the process of exchange itself and David Harvey makes a good point here about how movement and process are so crucial to keep in mind when reading Marx.22 For Marx, things often reveal themselves and are defined by their interaction with something else.
Exchange-value is what one commodity trades for in relation to another, for example, the quantity in which a certain amount of wheat exchanges for a certain amount of iron. We can see how different from use-value this is because use-value is fixed in the object itself; exchange-value, Marx says, seems “something accidental and purely relative.”23 That earlier translation note is relevant here again because you'll notice that Fowkes has exchange-value “appears to be” something accidental and purely relative. But Heinrich, working from the German, points out that Marx switches verbs here: erscheint two sentences earlier and scheint in this one, whereas Fowkes turned both into “appears.”24 The difference matters because “seems” is Marx moving away from what he is about to upend. Exchange-value may look accidental and relative on the surface, but the rest of the section shows that beneath exchange lies a common content expressed by those various ratios.
Marx shows his argument through the observation that a single commodity has many exchange-values. A quarter of wheat trades for a specific amount of boot polish, or silk, or iron.25 If all of these are valid exchange-values of that same wheat, then they must be equal to one another in those exact proportions. The commodities, in those quantities, are fully interchangeable. However, you cannot set two things equal to each other without a shared comparison so there must be a third element present in each of them that can be equally measured.
It follows from this that, firstly, the valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance’, of a content distinguishable from it.
Marx, Capital Vol 1, p. 127.
If all those exchange-values express the same thing, then exchange-value itself can’t be that third thing; it is just the “form of appearance” for a content underneath it. “Mode of expression” and “form of appearance” both mean the same thing and exchange-value is how a deeper content is expressed and that matters because the content is genuinely different from how it appears even if it can only show itself through that form. Value can only show up as exchange-value in relation to some other commodity, but it isn’t identical to any of those specific appearances. Exchange-value is also only visible through the act of exchange; it is only tangible through movement.
Value: what’s left when you subtract nature
So, what is the “something equal”?
As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.
Marx, Capital, Vol 1, p. 128.
The common element cannot be a natural property of the commodity because those properties are what make things use-values, and “the exchange relation of commodities is characterized by its abstraction from their use-values.”26 In exchange, any use-value can replace any other, provided the quantity is right so no specific physical property can be what makes them comparable, and once you strip the physical away, you also strip away the specific, useful character of the labour that produced it (e.g. the tailoring that made the coat) because that concrete labour was what produced the specific use-value we have to set aside. A mistake readers sometimes make here is thinking if we abstracted away use-value, and concrete labour creates use-value, then we must have abstracted away labour completely. That would mean value isn’t created by labour at all, but somehow appears “in the market.”
What gets abstracted away is the unique, concrete character of that labour. Marx says:
With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.
Marx, Capital, Vol 1, p. 128.
What remains then is general human effort, and that non-specific abstract human labour is the common element Marx has been searching for, which means that abstract labour is the substance of value, and commodities have value because they are congealed quantities of it.27
Therefore, the market is just where value is expressed and measured against other commodities through exchange-value, which is its form of appearance. The actual substance of value is abstract labour, which doesn’t live in exchange (it exists in production). Confusing where value shows itself with where it is generated breaks the content and form distinction Marx constructed earlier. (Whether value is created in production or through exchange is an ongoing debate.28 The idea that the market invents value out of thin air is not a position many take in that debate).
So, Marx arrived at value by abstracting away every physical and sensuous property of the commodity that tied it to nature and human need. Marx removed the natural body in order to reach value, which is what remains once nature has been stripped away. Marx even describes what remains as a “phantom-like objectivity” (Heinrich prefers spectral objectivity29), something objective and real, but not graspable by the senses, because anything sensuous would drag us right back to the use-value we just set aside.
Value’s indifference to nature is built directly into the mechanism that creates value and this is the operation that ecological Marxists work through. Paul Burkett does it most rigorously, arguing that “the social roots of capitalism’s environmental crisis tendencies are only fully revealed […] when one considers the tensions with nature built into the value form of commodities, money, and capital.”30 Use-value and concrete labour disappear together; value and abstract labour stay, and on both sides nature is lost. A society that organizes production around value is running its entire metabolism with nature according to a logic that cannot see nature. The implications of this indifference are very real. As David Harvey puts it:
If you think you can solve a serious environmental question like global warming without actually confronting the question of by whom and how the foundational value structure of our society is being determined, then you are kidding yourself.
Harvey, Companion, p. 23.
Marx’s demonstration of the mechanism of value creation inherent in capitalism also works to counter a common criticism that Marx himself was anti-ecological and that he devalued nature as a “free gift.” It is clear here that this is not the case, it is the logic of capital, which Marx was revealing, that devalues nature. In his 2026 The Story of Capital, David Harvey hammers this point home:
Neither nature nor social reproduction are productive of value as far as capital is concerned, and Marx reflects that in his formulations. Capital treats such phenomena as free gifts of nature and human nature. They are critically important in the theory of capital but not sources of value or surplus value.
David Harvey, The Story of Capital, p. 46.
Magnitude: socially necessary labour-time
Now, it is tempting to conclude that if the substance of value is abstract labour, then the magnitude of a commodity’s value depends on how much of that labour it contains, measured in time (e.g. hours, weeks), but Marx immediately complicates the most obvious version of that idea. It cannot simply be the labour-time a particular producer happens to spend because if it were, then the slower the worker, the more valuable the product. What counts is socially necessary labour-time, which is the time required to produce a commodity under normal social conditions of production, with the average skill and intensity available at the time.31 Two factors set this standard: the typical state of technology and productive conditions, and the average skill and effort of labour. Therefore, according to Marx, value is determined by the social average, not the individual hours of concrete labour. Value is also not fixed, “but is subject to perpetual revolutionary transformations.”32
Air, Virgin Soil, Forests
A thing can be a use-value without being a value… Air, virgin soil, natural meadows, unplanted forests, etc. fall into this category.
Marx, Capital Vol 1, p. 131.
The form and content dynamic is relevant here when we consider that air, virgin soil, and forests are nature that has not passed through human labour, which means value cannot account for them. These elements are material content with no social form and contain no value because they embody no human labour (land, of course, still gets bought and sold, which means it commands a price without having value. How that works is a question Marx takes up in Volume 3).
Marx wraps up the section by sorting out how use-value, value, and the commodity relate to each other, and the three cases he gives are not symmetrical. A thing can be a use-value without being a value (air, virgin soil). A thing can also be a useful product of labour without being a commodity, because a commodity has to be a use-value for others and reach them through exchange. But nothing can be a value without being a use-value: "If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value."33 So use-value adds nothing to how much value a thing has, but value cannot exist without it. The content side can stand on its own; the form side cannot. Value is indifferent to which nature it depends on, not to whether it depends on any.
What this section proves (and what it doesn’t)
I want to make two comments on how what I have attempted to summarize fits into the broader argument before wrapping up Section 1.
First, it is tempting to read Section 1 and conclude that Marx is attempting to prove that labour creates value; Michael Heinrich argues that this is not what Marx is doing at all, and that treating it this way is a misunderstanding. Marx never used the phrase “labour theory of value.” In his era, the idea that labour produces value was the common view taken from Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx’s real interest is where he departed from those classical economists and Heinrich lists four such departures: the first is the distinction between material content and social form, which classical political economy largely ignored. The second is that it is not labour as such but abstract human labour that creates value. The third and fourth point: the substance of value is possessed only through exchange, and that value-objectivity is “spectral.”34 Reducing Section 1 to the claim that “labour creates value” actually restates the classical position Marx was arguing against.
The second point is that a foundational distinction between material content and social form, the establishing of value by abstracting away the natural body, and a handful of comments are actually present in Section 1 regarding the ecological reading. You will not find a fully worked-out ecological theory though because that framework has been reconstructed by scholars like Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster, Kohei Saito (Saito’s reconstruction has been criticized by other Marxist scholars35), etc. out of various passages across all of Marx’s writings.36 My claim, which I think is pretty modest, is that an ecological perspective is implicit in Marx's method and explicit in a few key passages. Marx's materialism is metabolic in its very logic
We can end Section 1 with the understanding that the commodity has split into two (it has a dual-character): use-value and value. And value has turned out to be a social, spectral thing reached by abstracting away the physical body of the commodity. The ecological argument of this series is going to exist mostly in that space between material content and social form.
Happy reading!
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin, 1976), p. 89 (Preface to the First Edition).
Louis Althusser, “Preface to Capital Volume One” (1969), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 52.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 90 (Preface to the First Edition).
Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method (University of Illinois Press, 2003), ch. 5, "Putting Dialectics to Work: The Process of Abstraction in Marx's Method."
Ollman, Dance, p. 64.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 90 (Preface to the First Edition).
Michael Heinrich, How to Read Marx's Capital: Commentary and Explanations on the Beginning Chapters, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021), p. 48.
Heinrich, How to Read, p. 48.
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital (London: Verso, 2010), p. 17.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 125.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 126.
Michael Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, 2nd ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 33.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 126.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 126.
Ollman, Dance, pp. 86-89.
Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, p. 48; the Marx quotation is cited there as Marx 1988: 45–6 (MECW vol. 30)
Herinrich, How to Read, p. 48.
Heinrich, How to Read, p. 52.
John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp. 155-63 on the metabolic rift; Liebig and soil chemistry runs through pp. 147-77, and his discussion of Stoffwechsel (metabolism) as Marx's term is at p. 157.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 126.
Harvey, Companion, p. 18.
Harvey, Companion, p. 19.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 126.
Heinrich, How to Read, p. 56. The passage in Fowkes is at Capital, Vol. I, p. 126.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 127.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 127.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 128.
Heinrich, How to Read, pp. 67-68.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 128. Heinrich, How to Read, pp. 63-65.
Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), p. 79.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 129.
Harvey, Companion, p. 24.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 131 and Heinrich, How to Read, pp. 73-74.
Heinrich, How to Read, pp. 78-80.
See David Harvey’s The Story of Capital, pp. 196-197 for his critique of Saito.
Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective; John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Kohei Saito, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
Haven’t read this whole post yet but just wanted to say I’m excited to find this because I just started reading Capital from scratch (on chapter 5 right now) and I have been curious if anyone had tracked the way he talks about land, ecology, stuff like that! Looking forward to reading more
Always good to have Dennis back for a Friday night read