Good work so far, crew. We are approaching being ⅓ of the way through Vol.1 and ⅛ of the way through the 3-volume work; we'll cross those marks this week.
Last week we looked at the political struggle between labour and capital, how it played out in real life. We saw how abstract principles of economics lead to lung problems in children.
Don't forget that this is a club: it is a shared activity, it's not only reading, it's something we do together to also build camaraderie. So engage 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 13 hours to catch up to where the group is. Use the archives below to help you.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6
Week 7, Feb 12-18, we are reading from Volume 1: all of Chapters 11, 12, and 13, and then the first 2 sections of Chapter 14
In other words, aim to reach the heading 'The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture: Heterogeneous Manufacture, Serial Manufacture' by Sunday
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 guess I’m still having trouble translating Marx’s vocabulary into “Econ 101” terms. Like in some situations “profit” is equivalent to surplus-value, and exchange-value is equivalent to equilibrium price?
I think mapping exchange-value (of a good or service expressed in terms of money) to equilibrium price is probably fair. Translating surplus-value to profit can lead you astray in that, because we're talking in particular about labour-capital relations when we discuss surplus value, the rate of surplus value is not the same as the rate of profit, because the former is calculated against the living labour costs of the capitalist while the latter is calculated against all input costs including the means of production. But the mass of surplus value is effectively the same as the mass of profit, if I'm not mistaken.
In footnotes where Marx quotes an economist, the economist may use words like value and profit slightly differently.
In volume 1, profit and surplus value are quantitatively the same although they have different meanings. Marx acknowledges this contradiction (I commented on it here) and does return to it in volumes 2 and 3. For now just understand that profit and surplus value are only coincidentally the same magnitudes at this early level of analysis.
Exchange-value being equilibrium price is a pretty good way to think about it too.
I wouldn’t try too hard to correspond Marx’s terms to Econ 101. Modern economics does not understand value or surplus value, it is entirely drowned in commodity fetishism. For example, by exchange-value Marx is really talking about how much a commodity owner can use their commodities as leverage to access the pool of social products. Economists don’t think about social labor in this way, they think about prices as given natural phenomena which benefit commodity owners as isolated individuals, not as part of a social whole.