Ok comrades, we have quite a bit done, we are well into our stride. Look at those fat juicy progress bars: while there is still a long way to go, remember how recently they were just a flimsy few pixels. Last week we left behind Dickensian factories and looked at the liminal space between master crasftsmen's workshops and the drone-work on assembly lines. Now we are going to get into more detail on how that change happens, and how factory-work takes hold of society.
Don't forget that this is a club: it is a shared activity. We engage with Karl Marx, and we also engage with each other in the comments and build camaraderie.
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 15-16 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
Week 8, Feb 19-25, we are reading from Volume 1: what remains of Chapter 14 (i.e. sections 3,4 and 5), plus section 1 of Chapter 15
In other words, aim to reach the heading 'The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product' 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/
Something I've been kicking around in my head a bit is the bourgeois notion of economic "efficiency," which I feel like must mean efficiency at producing to meet the aggregate demands of society, which in turn are warped by the social inequities inherent in that society. We might then expect that as wealth inequality rises, an efficient free-market society will increasingly focus on producing luxury goods. (Which maybe can result in absolute immiseration if productivity increases in industries that meet basic needs do not offset their declining share of the economy? Idk I'd have to think more about this.) Anyway thought I'd throw this thought out there since Marx kinda touches on forces shaping the social division of labor in 14.4.
The way bourgeois economists talk about efficiency is annoyingly vague. It reminds me of how religious folks repeat empty phrases like "God is love" — it means whatever one wants it to think. It is a blank canvas for one's own preconceptions.
Efficiency is a relative term, it is a comparison of the size of an output to the size of an input. But depending on which input/output one is talking about, it can be a different kind of efficiency. A Rube Goldberg machine is efficient in terms of human actions: simply pressing a button to start the machine is all the human must do in order to get the intended result. But it is obviously inefficient in terms of the complexity, materials, volume, noise, etc. Likewise, a car may be efficient in terms of CO2 per passenger, but inefficient in terms of volume per passenger.
When the bourgeois speak of efficiency, I think they most often mean efficiency in terms of capital. If the same absolute profit can be gained from a reduced capital advance, then that is an "efficiency gain."
This talk of efficiency obfuscates the entire process of value production and reduces it to capital magnitudes alone. But it is the natural way for a bourgeois to think.
This kind of efficiency may be derived variously from reduction in waste (e.g. less sawdust, more saleable wood), a reduction in constant capital (e.g. cheaper machinery), or a reduction in living labor costs (e.g. layoffs + increased intensity of labor). Obviously this last point has a social element which is important to Marx.
Generalizing this idea of efficiency to the whole economy, the bourgeois would say: That economy is efficient which maximizes surplus value while minimizing the necessary capital advanced. The logical extreme of this would be an economy which can produce surplus value out of nothing, without even producing. The ideal economy is one which directly enriches the bourgeoisie and maintains their privilege to live off the labor of others.