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, March 25-31, from Volume 1 we are reading Chapter 22, Chapter 23, and Parts 1,2,and 3 of Chapter 24
In other words, aim to get up to the ridiculously long section-heading by Sunday. (The Circumstances which, Independently of the Proportional Division of Surplus-Value into Capital and Revenue, Determine the Extent of Accumulation, namely, the Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power, the Productivity of Labour, the Growing Difference in Amount between Capital Employed and Capital Consumed, and the Magnitude of the Capital Advanced)
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/
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Hope everyone is doing well, I know last week's thread was a bit slow. Health and happiness to the whole book club!
That said, this reading has been the most conceptually horrifying to me so far. I knew the terms we throw around, I knew roughly what alienation meant and surplus value and all that. But seeing the system broken down and revealed to be entirely surplus value, to be entirely stolen and then given back piecemeal so that part of the machinery can keep itself lubricated to come back tomorrow... Not a great feeling.
not a great feeling
Just wait until part 8
I'm hoping I'll be more active then (school currently murdering me)
I had the same feeling to when getting around to this. It also really changes the meaning to of what is said by dead labor as well. It reminded me of like one of the very earlier chapters, I think chapter 6? of working being like credit to the capitalist, but taking on another new meaning now. also like with the part of alienation, that surplus value from one worker being used to hire another worker from another worker labor. It' was also pretty gross how open some of those capitalists or political economists were open about seeing workers as machinery and such, like with Potters and that manufacturers’ manifesto
It also really changes the meaning to of what is said by dead labor as well.
Reading summaries of Marx makes you think "oh, it's a metaphor"
Then you actually read it and it's like "um, this is less metaphorical than I thought"
yea! for sure! It reminded me of earlier chapters when Marx started to talk about the labor market
So from this footnote in chapter 24, isn't this one of main things in dialectics? negation? I'm assuming so because of that last part "“Determinatio est Negatio.”
He is as much at home in absurd contradictions, as he feels at sea in the Hegelian contradiction, the source of all dialectic. It has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make the simple reflexion, that every human action may be viewed, as “abstinence” from its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking, abstinence from standing still, working, abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence from working, &c. These gentlemen would do well, to ponder, once in a while, over Spinoza’s: “Determinatio est Negatio.”
I'm a casual philosophy learner, but afaik Hegel was significantly influenced by Spinoza especially regarding the topic of negation. Here's a paper by Yitzhak Y. Melamed on Spinoza's famous line et determinatio negatio est and its relation to the systems of Kant and Hegel. Again, I'm a casual learner myself, but I found it to be accessible. If there are any philosophers here then I'd be interested to hear more on this.
Spinoza's view is that an object is not determined (defined) by what it is in the positive sense, but by what it is not or negates. This idea underlies the truism that there is no light without dark and vice versa. Spinoza was trying to answer the question, why does the world present itself as a collection of innumerable and heterogeneous objects? What causes this differentiation? If this mechanism can be understood, then we might be able to work in reverse to discover a single underlying essence or idea for everything. I believe Spinoza understood this single thing to be God; and so did Hegel, in his own way.
As Melamed writes, "while Hegel does credit Spinoza with the discovery of this most fundamental insight, he believes Spinoza failed to appreciate the importance of his discovery."
I believe Marx writes somewhere (perhaps in German Ideology or Grundrisse?) that the historical origin of human contemplation (consciousness) lies in the recognition of the self, distinct from everything else or other, as opposed to an unconscious perception of the world as one undifferentiated whole.
This discussion might give some new insight into Marx's afterword to the second German edition of Capital vol 1:
Afterword
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre ‘Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
Hegel's system recognized and placed principal importance on negation. Marx accepted the way in which Hegel's system works, but he rejected the object to which Hegel applied his system. Instead of investigating the determination of concepts, Marx investigated the determination of material things and processes, e.g. capital. The task in Capital is to understand how the manifold forms of capitalist society (value, price, profit, surplus value, etc) are determined.
I'm still playing catch-up, but currently on chapter 20.
I love chapters 18 and 19. They seem to be the essence of volume 1 to me, just line after line of epiphany. This is where Marx ties together what he's been building up in the preceding chapters. While in many places before Marx would dig at the classical political economists or hint at things he knew to be true, here he says with full confidence and justification that capitalist production is essentially a new form of slavery; that so far as society is still divided into classes, no substantial progress has occurred with the advent of capitalism, except that the particular form of exploitation and the exploiters have changed.
These chapters were a lot to process and to take in, but it's really good. It also felt like at the end of section 3 of chapter 24 Marx was mad? I def was, but I really liking Marx getting getting snarky at the end of sec three. Marx talking about capitalist and abstinence reminded me of one idiom, to make money you got to make money. Except it leaves out like the whole, exploitation of buying another person labor power and then taking their unpaid portion and etc. But that idiom in a way feels like a modern day version of like that "abstinence" from the capitalist? Don't spend money for yourself or anything, use to reproduce and accumulate more money.
Also I really enjoyed the footnote from Martin Luther and Marx applying to capitalists. It's very fitting. It was also fitting when Marx mentioned tribute as well.
The never ending flow of accumulation, and reproduction, reminds me of monopolization and a few other things. Like how some capitalists like Musk whine about birth rates. Especially when Marx mention how like capital needs new labor. And the part of capital concerning itself about the necessities of life, reminded me of how people are owning lesser of things?
Also this part
Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.
reminded me of this quote from Stalin from his interview with Roy Howard
It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
Yeah moreso than any of the previous readings this one feels like all the ideas being brought together so you can see what they mean in motion.
Marx talking about capitalist and abstinence reminded me of one idiom, to make money you got to make money. Except it leaves out like the whole, exploitation of buying another person labor power and then taking their unpaid portion and etc. But that idiom in a way feels like a modern day version of like that "abstinence" from the capitalist? Don't spend money for yourself or anything, use to reproduce and accumulate more money.
It's objectively true that you need money (capital) to become wealthy in capitalist society. Capital grows exponentially, through exploitation of an increasing amount of others' labor, instead of linearly through one's personal labor. So I don't find anything wrong with the idiom as such, since it is true within certain bounds.
On the other hand, the notion that abstinence is the reason money grows is completely false. This false justification is due to the fetish character of commodities and the various forms which result from fetishism. For example in chapter 19, the wage form is shown to produce an inverted consciousness of the wage relation, such that it appears that the capitalist and the laborer transact living labor, not labor-power.
Oh yea, I'm not like saying the idiom wrong. The reason why that idiom came up or like, why I was reminded of it due to abstinence. Is just mainly like. That distortion, that disguising or concealing of stuff? Like the hiding of relations in a way? Except like maybe not the best? Since that abstinence theory is wrong while that one idiom is right in some ways.
