Good work so far, crew. We are about a quarter of the way through Volume 1 and about 10% of the way through the whole thing. Having said that, we're also about 10% of the way through 2024, so don't get too comfortable, keep pedalling.
Having set up the idea of surplus-labour as the source of profit, Marx looked at how this plays out in practice, how it affects people's lives.
I think we have a minimum of 8 people reading; it could even be 12 or 13.
Let's use this shared activity as an excuse to also build camaraderie by thinking out loud in the comments.
The overall plan is to read Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week.
I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.
Just joining us? It'll take you about 10½ hours to catch up to where the group is.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5
Week 6, Feb 5-11, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 10 Sections 4, 5, 6, and 7.
In other words, read from the heading '4. Day Work and Night Work. The Shift System' to the end of the chapter
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.
Audiobook of Ben Fowkes translation, American accent, male, links are to alternative invidious instances: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9
Resources
(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)
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Harvey's guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
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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
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Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/
The fact that value is created at a constant rate regardless of material productivity is astounding. 1 day’s labor is produced in 1 day, no matter in how many use-values it is embodied.
Therefore, technological advancement does not and cannot affect the rate of value production, nor can it save us from capitalism.
We are far more productive today than we were during the Industrial Revolution, yet the working class is still dominated by capital.
There is no Andrew Yang-style solution here, hoping that technology will make mankind so productive that we don’t have to work as much. Profit comes from surplus value i.e. unpaid labor, not from surplus use-value.
Chapter 8, while perhaps a bit tedious with the drawn out distinction between value preserved and value created, is quite interesting due to finding the origin in the dual character of labor. It is also necessary for justifying a separation between constant capital and variable capital.
I'm not reading capital right now, but I'm enjoying these threads and can't wait to get to capital after I get through some other stuff.
In any case, I like your little distillation here.
It really gets at the idea I've recently been reading about in the Grundrisse, that under capitalism we're working to generate profit, not to meet needs. The implication, I suppose, is that you're never liberated. Even if all needs are or could be met, the cycle of capital still needs another round of profit.
This is a bit ahead of our reading, but Chapter 16 is one of the rewarding chapters of Capital, like reaching a summit and looking out from a new vantage point.
Here Marx says (emphasis mine):
Also, thanks for the nice comment and I'm glad you are enjoying the discussion threads!
I'm reminded of Keynes's prediction that, due to technological advances, within a couple generations we would only be working 15 hours work weeks. This is such a common idea, that technology will increase the productivity of labor, and so we will soon be producing more commodities for the same amount of labor, and so the amount of labor hours will decline. And that indeed might be what happens under a communist system, where capital is commanded by labor. But that's not the system we have, and Marx's insight about where profit actually comes from explains the cold logic of why we just end up running on a hamster wheel of endless commodity creation. Capitalists don't care about the actual lived experience of workers, they just care about the mechanism whereby they can extract profits. And in fact, they can't care about it, because if they do, they will soon find themselves without capital, and so no-longer capitalists.