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 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27
Week 28, July 8-14. From Volume 2, we are reading Parts 10-13 of Chapter 20, Simple Reproduction.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/index.htm
Discuss the week's reading in the comments.
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reporting back in to the theory trenches
i've sorta reached the end, but i've mostly just been skimming the last two chapters. i think i'm just gonna say i'm finished with vol 2 for now and maybe revisit mandel's introduction
I'm still here, just busy with a bunch of visitors and such so I'll likely be quieter for the next few weeks. Still trucking though, thanks as always for hosting the sessions for us.
I had some trouble understanding this chapter, and I watched David Harvey video on this chapter as he covers the next one to, and it's really interesting, esp. when he links this chapter to planned economies and talks more about like planned economies later on in the video like around an hour in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rSZo_aeuak
it's just interesting to see him link this chapter and Marx's schemas/illustrations to planned economies and that.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
So under simple reproduction, I(v) and I(s) (variable capital and surplus value department I) are cycling with II(c) (fixed capital of department II).
In Chapter 11(a), if I read this right, Marx is setting up another crisis.
Because I(v) and I(s) remain stagnant while II(c) by the nature of wear-and-tear on equipment and buildings needs to regularly grow.
Yeah it's been pretty neat to see the implications of the theory start rearing up from the fog like that.
yea, esp. this part that also interesting.
Once the capitalist form of reproduction is abolished, it is only a matter of the volume of the expiring portion — expiring and therefore to be reproduced in kind — of fixed capital (the capital which in our illustration functions in the production of articles of consumption) varying in various successive years. If it is very large in a certain year (in excess of the average mortality, as is the case with human beings), then it is certainly so much smaller in the next year. The quantity of raw materials, semi-finished products, and auxiliary materials required for the annual production of the articles of consumption — provided other things remain equal — does not decrease in consequence. Hence the aggregate production of means of production would have to increase in the one case and decrease in the other. This can be remedied only by a continuous relative over-production. There must be on the one hand a certain quantity of fixed capital produced in excess of that which is directly required; on the other hand, and particularly, there must be a supply of raw materials, etc., in excess of the direct annual requirements (this applies especially to means of subsistence). This sort of over-production is tantamount to control by society over the material means of its own reproduction. But within capitalist society it is an element of anarchy.
I found this part really interesting, mainly contradictions being transferred to a wider sphere
Foreign trade could help out in either case: in the first case in order to convert commodities I held in the form of money into articles of consumption, and in the second case to dispose of the commodity surplus. But since foreign trade does not merely replace certain elements (also with regard to value), it only transfers the contradictions to a wider sphere and gives them greater latitude.
Foreign trade is just adding an extension onto the circuit, like adding an extra extension onto a raceway. It changes the dynamics, but not the fundamentals - capital is still racing around the racetrack (in this tortured analogy). Capitalism today is much more globalized; foreign trade is the norm on a lot of basic goods. And yet, we see all the same contradictions and failures of Marx's time, where much more economic activity stayed circulating within a region.
I was going to say something about how it's all a closed system, but that's not really accurate (this is the chapter on reproduction, after all).