Feet of Clay: Chapter I of Capital

For a non-Marxist (and non-Marxian) economist to comment on Marx there are certain disadvantages including the obvious one that unfamiliarity with much of the corpus of criticism of Marx may mean that nothing new is being said. There is, however, the advantage that one approaches Marx a little like the child viewing the Emperor's new clothes and may, thus, offer a fresh point of view. In any event, this brief essay has only a modest aim and confines its examination of Marx to Volume, I, Part I, Chapter I of Capital. This chapter, entitled "Commodities," would seem to warrant careful attention. Certainly it is the product of Marx's considered thought. As Marx tells us in the preface to the first German edition (1867) of Capital, the first three chapters of Volume I summarize "the substance" of his A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy (published 1859, Marx, p. 7). In addition, "The presentation of the subject matter is improved" (Marx, p. 7). Six years later, in 1873, Marx tells us in the "Afterword" to the second German edition that in Chapter I, Section 1, "the derivation of value from an analysis of the equations by which every exchange value is expressed has been carried out with greater scientific strictness" (Marx, p. 12). Also, we are advised that Chapter I, Section 3, "has been completely revised." Finally, Engels tells us that the alterations and additions that he made in the third German edition (1883) of Volume I were confined, with few exceptions, to the latter part of the book (Marx, p. 23). In light of the above history, it seems fair to say that Chapter I of Capital's first volume gives us as mature and as considered a statement as any we are likely to have from Marx. Yet, Marx, himself, said "To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore, present the greatest difficulty" (Marx, p. 7). What attention have writers of general histories of economic thought paid to this chapter—surely one which we would suppose was foundational to the immense edifice that is Capital? They have virtually ignored it if Blaug, Oser, Pribram, Roll, Schumpeter, Spiegel and Taylor can be taken as a representative sample of the group.