We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. This will repeat yearly until communism is achieved. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included, but comrades are welcome to set up other bookclubs.) This works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested.

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Use any translation/edition you like. Marxists.org has the Moore and Aveling translation in various file formats including epub and PDF: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

Ben Fowkes translation, PDF: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D

AernaLingus says: I noticed that the linked copy of the Fowkes translation doesn't have bookmarks, so I took the liberty of adding them myself. You can either download my version with the bookmarks added, or if you're a bit paranoid (can't blame ya) and don't mind some light command line work you can use the same simple script that I did with my formatted plaintext bookmarks to take the PDF from libgen and add the bookmarks yourself.

Resources

(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)

  • Harvey's guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf

  • A University of Warwick guide to reading it: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/worldlitworldsystems/hotr.marxs_capital.untilp72.pdf

  • Engels' Synopsis of Capital or PDF

  • Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/

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  • keepcarrot [she/her]
    ·
    10 months ago

    But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterized by a total abstraction from use-value.

    Does this get expounded on later? I realise that use-value gets abstracted as "demand" in liberal economics (the driver of everything, apparently, but obviously a shortage of food means prices go up and people are still hungry), but I feel like it can't be discarded so early.

    The labour-time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.

    He's obviously talking about mass society here, can the total labour across society for yards of linen constitute a portion of total possible yards of linen across society? Is that a worthwhile line of thinking? (e.g. We produce, idk, a million yards of linen a year. We could produce 2 million yards of linen if we dismantled all our other exports and started putting people unsuited to linen weaving in there. If all of society didn't care about food, bathing, etc... we could produce 2.5 million yards of linen. This scaling of commodity production across society and how technology interacts with it is our "socially necessary" labour time for a single yard of linen)

    I should keep reading, trying to take it all in.

    • Maoo [none/use name]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Does this get expounded on later?

      Yes! Not limited to but including linen coats.

      can the total labour across society for yards of linen constitute a portion of total possible yards of linen across society?

      I think so but that would be a hell of a calculation to even think about. You'd have to imagine what a perfectly efficient linen-producing society would be, since there would of course be diminishing returns as we began to sacrifice more and more of subsistence/reproduction in favor of linen.

      • keepcarrot [she/her]
        ·
        10 months ago

        You'd have to imagine what a perfectly efficient linen-producing society would be, since there would of course be diminishing returns as we began to sacrifice more and more of subsistence/reproduction in favor of linen

        I guess that's what I imagine "socially necessary" means, in relation to the best or worst linen producers in the land. At some point you're going to be recruiting people and resources that are better bakers (I guess) than linen producers etc etc. Or something, idk

        • Stoatmilk [he/him]
          ·
          10 months ago

          "Socially necessary" also includes the aspect of how much consumption there is, if something is produced so much that it can't be consumed, part of the labor that went into the production would be not socially necessary. So your linenmaxxing society would also need to be really big linen consumers.

          • NoLeftLeftWhereILive [none/use name, she/her]
            ·
            10 months ago

            Ah this makes me think of our current service industries, the bs jobs, commodification and the way this necessity feels like it can be manufactured. Sometimes with "real necessity", but maybe sometimes as "necessity for capital". Not sure if this is where this might lead to.

            • NoLeftLeftWhereILive [none/use name, she/her]
              ·
              10 months ago

              A bit of a side thought from this, but from this follows that if we think that in any given society a certain number of people cannot thrive in certain types of labor, but we decide to only have linen factories for the capitalists, isn't this how we birth outgroups?

              Who gets to define what is socially necessary? If the people who are better bakers are no longer needed as bakers, but forced to labor in places where they can never be effective laborers is this one mechanism to unemployed people/surplus labor?

              And buying our bread cheaper via international markets so we can keep making only linen (assuming it has high exchange value) and selling out linen that we cannot consume from our linen producing society = stepping into globalism.

              A linenmaxxing society also seems highly vulnerable to crisis.