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 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20

Week 21, May 20-26. From Volume 2, we are reading Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, and Part 1 ('Distinctions of Form') of Chapter 8

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

  • 666PeaceKeepaGirl [any, she/her]
    ·
    6 months ago

    I work in manufacturing as well, and what strikes me is about this is that Marx seems to have talked to actual, real business owners about how they think about and account of the running costs of doing business. Marx is of course presenting as a model built from first principles, but it's clear that it does actually fit with the way capitalists actually do capitalism.

    Yeah, it really struck me in volume 1 that the notion of socially necessary labor time maps really well onto the Lean manufacturing notions of value-added and non-value added labor (Marx's explanation is of course more flexible and has more explanatory power, thus clearing up some of the misconceptions that are likely to arise, but there is clearly a common idea-seed.) Similarly many of the principles of the social productive powers of labor arising from co-operation. Here in the beginning of Volume II we even begin to understand the Lean obsession with inventory minimization and just-in-time manufacturing, which initially appears to many of us on the left as ridiculous if not outright delusional, as stemming from capital's drive towards constant, unimpeded progress of its various forms through the circuit as the means of generating as much return on investment as quickly as possible.