I’ve been wrestling with chapter one for longer than I would like to admit. For value form I found the value form appendix to the first edition was great for its more systematic layout

I agree with most of your interpretation but think you have made one small error in para 7: “Most simply the substance of value is labour-time …”

By my reading Value is:
a) a social form (a capacity for a commodity to be exchanged as an equal)
b) AND a substance or content which is embedded abstract, social labour
c) AND a magnitude (labour time)

Actually I first got onto this from Rubin, ch 12, whose book focuses mainly on the value form.

Roger,

Yes, we are indeed utopian. When Marx himself spoke of communism it was always in a ‘utopian’ sense (at least from the standpoint of capital) – a world in which classes and states would cease to exist and human creativity would be allowed to run free. It is the role of revolutionaries today to paint our utopian dreams onto an otherwise uninspiring, if not dowright barbaric, present. And no, we will keep the word ‘communism’, it is the name of the ‘idea’ which has inspired radicals since the beginnings of class society, and we shall vindicate their struggles both now and into the future.

Jon

Well I don’t know whay your site is all about then.

From what you say you have some sort of utopian dream.

Its possible that you should find another label for your dreams, I think that real communists might take exception to you stealing their name.

Cheers

Roger

Um Roger, part of being critical is understanding that labels and reality don’t always combine. I don’t consider North Korea democratic just because it says it is. Nor do I consider capitalist parliamentary societies like Australia democratic because they say they are. If the states of ‘real existing socialism’ were state-capitalist I am going to call it as I see it despite the fact they were ruled by Communist Parties and built statues of Marx everywhere.

Communism for us is a classless and stateless society: which obviously the PRC wasn’t and isn’t. As they used to say in the streets in the 1960s: “The ‘Free’ world isn’t free, and the ‘Communist’ world isn’t communist.”

But also what you haven’t addressed is that at no time did the Chinese Communist Party (which to be clear I oppose) ever declare that the PRC was communist. They thought they were moving towards communism as a long term project but didn’t see it existing. So I guess the pope isn’t Catholic.

cheers
Dave

I have relatives who went through the communist era in China and I have also studied it in length.

If China wasn’t communist then the pope is not catholic.

I suggest you do some serious unbiased research on the subject before you comment again. I warn you though that it might seriously challenge your current beliefs.

Cheers

Roger

In the meantime, check out my blog about global warming, Itsdefinitely not communist though.

https://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com

And they were “communist” in name only before ’78. Actually I don’t think even the most staunch Maoists claimed that China was ever communist. After 1949 they named their system ‘New Democracy’ which they believed to be something even less than socialism. Personally ( in that I am not writing on behalf of other participants of the Red Thread) I would name the system built by the party-state to be state-capitalist. Just like any other form of capitalism the overall desire of the system was the accumulation of capital. Indeed in many ways the horrors of the Great Leap Forward mirror other moments of ‘enclosure’ such as the Great Dying in Mexico, the Potato Famine, the wave of starvation in 1876-1879 and so on and so on. The main contradiction is that many who resisted the party state did so also under the flag of Maoism: particularly in the first two years of the Cultural Revolution. The Shanghai Commune is the prime example.

One again I recommend the China Study Group as it contains writings of many currently in China, both Western writers and Chinese writers who are part of the ‘New Left’ – many of them veterans of Tiananmen who have developed critiques of both the party-state and the current neo-liberal direction it was taken.

By the way I am relatively familiar with Chinese history.
cheers
Dave

Not surprising as China since about ’78 is communist in name only.
They learnt a very bitter hard lesson. Maybe you should do a little study of what happened there yourself.

Cheers

Roger