Welcome to baby Marxist rehabilitation camp.
We are reading 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 until communism is achieved.
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.
We currently have 58 members!!! I expect a certain drop-off rate, but I'll be thrilled if a dozen or couple dozen read it.
If you've made it this far, you've already read ¹⁄₁₈ of Volume I. The first three weeks are the hardest, after that it'll be quite easy, and only requires 20 minutes a day (endurance is key).
Just joining us? It'll take you about 2-3 hours to catch up to where the group is. You can do that on one long bus ride.
Archives: Week 1
Week 2, Jan 8-14, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 2 'The Process of Exchange', PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 1 'The Measure of Values' PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 2 'The Means of Circulation'
In other words, aim to get up to the heading '3. Money' by Jan 14
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)
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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/
So, with fiat money, money is unlinked to any commodity (e.g. gold) how does this work with Marx’s analysis? It itself has no use value, other than to satisfy the legal requirements of one’s government to use said currency and pay taxes in the currency. It is also not limited in supply or tied to labour in any meaningful way, especially in digital form. Consequently it seems to fall outside of the commodity value system we have explored so far. Do we get to fiat money later?
There is definitely a disconnect between Marx's view on fiat money and the modern view. That is mainly because Marx was writing in the mid-1800s, and up to that point, almost all fiat currencies had been horrible failures. They led to economic problems in revolutionary America and revolutionary France. Even the Confederacy tried to make its own fiat currency in Marx's own lifetime, which hyper-inflated to worthlessness in less than three years. So, if it seems like Marx does not spend a lot of time talking about money disconnected from the gold/silver standard, that's because it was a pretty rare and mostly unimportant novelty at the time he was writing. The USA did not fully abandon the gold standard until 1973. So, "modern monetary theory" definitely goes beyond Marx's ideas of fiat currency, because Marx was more focused on production, wealth accumulation, and the capitalist system as a whole than the money which mediated it. To put it another way, there wasn't a lot of "data" at the time about what a fiat currency behaved like in the long-term. And without that data, Marx couldn't speculate or draw meaningful conclusions.
Marx doesn't care about the gold-standard specifically (as he has repeatedly said). Modern fiat money is the USD which is a de-facto oil standard since the USD was until recently all that was used to buy and sell oil. Modern money is still money because of its association with a material use-value. This fetishism of the gold-standard is not theoretically sound. The whole point of Marx introducing money through linen, and only changing it to gold with this chapter, is to show that while metals have some qualities that lend themselves to being money, many other things can, have and will serve as a money-commodity.
I think there's a couple things worth keeping in mind:
At this point every economy he was aware of worked this way, it would be difficult to anticipate the kinds of insane financial developments that have happened since. So it's possible that we won't get there because the conditions of the time weren't sufficient to get to an analysis of a phenomenon like this.
I don't have the book in front of me so I'm not sure if it's part of this week's reading but he gets into credit money in this chapter, which I think more superficially resembles fiat currency, although I think the discussion of silver and copper already hints at the possibility that a government's fiat can force the market to separate money from embodied value in gold. I think this might suggest that it's possible through enough force to enforce a symbolic currency, although that might break the theory in a way I don't understand so I stand ready to be corrected.
I'm taking this from snippets of the Capital w/ Comrades pod and Graeber's Debt book so grain of salt with my syncretism, but I have this half finished idea in my head that the dollar could be like, a commodity made out of state violence and its capacity to extort labor value by force. The money supply, as I understand it, is controlled by credit in the government that is given to banks, and backed by the guarantee that violence will be employed to return the money by extracting taxes, global south resources, and forcing the world to let us change the value of our obligations to them when we change the value of our currency. It's the promise of labor value to be extorted essentially.
Or maybe that's silly, but it's the idea I've had bumping around this week while I read.
Edit: sorry for the screed, feel free to ignore, but working ideas out like this is really helpful for me to learn so I appreciate your indulging me.
Well, "salary" comes from when the Roman Empire used to pay their soldiers in salt. And the word "soldier" derives from the Latin coin called the solidus.
There's also a really nifty graph here showing how the value of Confederate currency plummeted in value right after the Battle of Gettysburg, which links fiat currency to the ability of the state to have a monopoly on violence very directly: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/
I was playing with the idea that Fiat money is congealed human labour in that it requires a state with many institutions to secure the money, so people can trust in the value of it. It also needs a central bank and real work to manage the financial processes. So it itself has socially necessary labour time. Also borrowing from Modern Monetary Theory, the use value would be the social/legal need to pay taxes to the government. But I’m not sure if I’m barking up the wrong tree as the difference between making a billion dollars of fiat currency and 2 billion dollars, is not 2x the labour, so my suggested theory on the labour input seems to die a death, though I guess that could tie into inflation etc.
US dollar is linked to oil (oil being bought/sold in USD), it is strongly linked to a commodity. Fiat money having value bc the state wills it is an illusion.