The difficult part is getting people to grasp the nature of value. Especially among Marxists, value tends to be reified into an eternal feature of human productive activity. I have even heard such an argument made by a poster on this list. But Marx is concerned with the forms that certain relationships between humans take in capitalism. The Value form is at the core of what makes capitalism. To see value as an anthropological constant is to succumb to and reproduce the fetish.
^^^^^ CB: I agree basically, although the value form is explained pretty clearly at the beginning of _Capital_. For Marx, commodity exchange does not start with the beginning of the human species, but it does start long before capitalism. He says in one of the Prefaces to Capital that the human mind has been trying to understand it for 2000 years. ( writing originates in commodity exchange). In the text of _Capital_ he says that commodity exchange existed on the edges and between societies in which the main mode of production was not commodity exchange. Capitalism is _defined_ by labor power becoming a commodity.
The law of value operated in the ancient commodity exchanges. Engels has a famous essay on this. ^^^^^^^^^
Too long the left has seens capitalism as being defined by the domination of a particular social class, or an inegalitarian distribution of property. But Marx himself notes that social classes as they appear in the account of Capital are character masks. I don't think this is an idiosyncrasy of Marx's account. If classes as they appear in Capital are merely character masks, it is because for Marx the imperatives of the value form are central.
^^^^^ CB: Marx's thinking is not just in _Capital_ . You have to read _Capital_ in combination with _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_, etc. There Marx clarifies the non-mask role of exploiting and exploited classes, etc. The nature of exploitation is specified in _Capital_.
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And how do we get that wider movement for communism?
^^^^^^ CB: Marx's ideas on this are in _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_, and in his practice,as in working to form The International. See also, Lenin's practice and writings, which very much developed a wider movement for communism.
Of course, that's all kind of old, and the bourgeoisie are hip to it. May have to be creative. Today we have the Bolivarian revolution , which may have suggestions for many colonial nations. How we get a movement in the imperialist centers, such as the U.S. is the 64 trillion dollar question.