Sorry for the late posting: there's a lot of work this time of the year and I'm not often near computers. Next week I might be late again; if so simply continue from where we were. Week 17 I should be able to pay more attention.
I may have also messed up (I'm a real disaster) by overestimating the progress-bar last week: the progress bars above are right.
Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (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? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14
Week 15, April 8-14. We are reading Vol.1, Chapter 25, parts 4 and 5
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/
I've been thinking a lot over the last couple chapters about how some of the ideas we've learned could help explain just how things got so out of hand with the neoliberal turn of the backend of the last century. Here's a couple thoughts I had as maybe contributing factors:
World War II put a serious dent in the world population - google seems to be saying about 3% of the population was killed. In addition, it caused huge infrastructural destruction that needed to be addressed. And finally, the Allied victory represented a major peak of liberal world order - but this means a geographical limitation on areas you can turn to for cheap labor and raw materials, and indeed much of the history of the immediate postwar era is defined by struggles with decolonization movements (India, Algeria, the Suez...) and with the Red menace - in short, barriers to any further expansion of the hegemony of Western capital. So you then have a situation where right after the war, capital has to do a lot of reinvestment just to rebuild itself, and at the same time, there’s not a lot of able-bodied dudes around to do that work (especially Europe, where the Trente Glorieuses particularly strongly felt), nor are there many good opportunities to send capital outside the imperial core. So now capital has to address the labour market imbalance by raising wages, and this is maybe even a bit of a virtuous cycle because raising wages in real terms means also investing in industries to provide the goods those wages get spent on. But these labor market dynamics are a special period rather than a new norm, because eventually the boomers start entering the workforce, China opens up to capital investment, and the Eastern bloc liberalizes after the Soviet Union collapses.