Good work so far, crew. We are about a quarter of the way through Volume 1 and about 10% of the way through the whole thing. Having said that, we’re also about 10% of the way through 2024, so don’t get too comfortable, keep pedalling.
Having set up the idea of surplus-labour as the source of profit, Marx looked at how this plays out in practice, how it affects people’s lives.
I think we have a minimum of 8 people reading; it could even be 12 or 13.
Let’s use this shared activity as an excuse to also build camaraderie by thinking out loud 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 10½ hours to catch up to where the group is.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5
Week 6, Feb 5-11, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 10 Sections 4, 5, 6, and 7.
In other words, read from the heading ‘4. Day Work and Night Work. The Shift System’ to the end of the chapter
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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week 6!Let’s go comrades, we can catch up and hold pace! I made it through 3 weeks this week and now almost back at pace
skipping ahead a bit, but i’m currently on the chapter ‘machinery and large-scale industry,’ and i’m just amazed by how little the discourse and rethoric surrounding automation has changed since marx’s time
After preaching a long sermon to show how adventagous the rapid development of machinery is to the workers, [Ure] warns them that by their obstinacy and their strikes they hasten that development (p. 564, end of section 5)
What would be your counter-response in an argument to that, if I can ask? (In good faith, of course)
Personally, my counter would be “who would operate, repair et replace the machines again?”…
The question betrays an unspoken fact about capitalism: technological development is only invested in when it lowers the cost of wages (eliminates workers.) Capitalists don’t invest in tech advancement for the sake of advancement. If a technology already existed that could be invested in to replace workers, it would already be known about in the trades and chances are the capitalist would already have invested to stay competitive. If not, the cost of r&d to develop a solution, especially when capitalists make exorbitant sums off of the surplus labor of workers, is going to cost more than what it would to pay the workers a little more.
Large businesses with existing investments in capital, this is probably more true in a modern setting, since new technical advancements capable of replacing a vast swath of workers would require replacing that capital with new, bespoke, experimental machinery. This just isn’t that common for existing large production operations. This is where smaller “interruptor” start ups enter the market, which brings me back to my first point. There’s always the possibility of it happening but if it does it was going to happen anyway. Capitalists aren’t paying workers out of the goodness of their heart, and striking will make them decide to invest in new tech. It’s market competition that forces investment in new tech. I would say that most of the time those are just empty threats.
Thanks for your response!
The fact that value is created at a constant rate regardless of material productivity is astounding. 1 day’s labor is produced in 1 day, no matter in how many use-values it is embodied.
Therefore, technological advancement does not and cannot affect the rate of value production, nor can it save us from capitalism.
We are far more productive today than we were during the Industrial Revolution, yet the working class is still dominated by capital.
There is no Andrew Yang-style solution here, hoping that technology will make mankind so productive that we don’t have to work as much. Profit comes from surplus value i.e. unpaid labor, not from surplus use-value.
Chapter 8, while perhaps a bit tedious with the drawn out distinction between value preserved and value created, is quite interesting due to finding the origin in the dual character of labor. It is also necessary for justifying a separation between constant capital and variable capital.
I’m not reading capital right now, but I’m enjoying these threads and can’t wait to get to capital after I get through some other stuff.
In any case, I like your little distillation here.
Profit comes from surplus value i.e. unpaid labor, not from surplus use-value.
It really gets at the idea I’ve recently been reading about in the Grundrisse, that under capitalism we’re working to generate profit, not to meet needs. The implication, I suppose, is that you’re never liberated. Even if all needs are or could be met, the cycle of capital still needs another round of profit.
This is a bit ahead of our reading, but Chapter 16 is one of the rewarding chapters of Capital, like reaching a summit and looking out from a new vantage point.
Here Marx says (emphasis mine):
Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value.
Also, thanks for the nice comment and I’m glad you are enjoying the discussion threads!
There is no Andrew Yang-style solution here, hoping that technology will make mankind so productive that we don’t have to work as much. Profit comes from surplus value i.e. unpaid labor, not from surplus use-value.
I’m reminded of Keynes’s prediction that, due to technological advances, within a couple generations we would only be working 15 hours work weeks. This is such a common idea, that technology will increase the productivity of labor, and so we will soon be producing more commodities for the same amount of labor, and so the amount of labor hours will decline. And that indeed might be what happens under a communist system, where capital is commanded by labor. But that’s not the system we have, and Marx’s insight about where profit actually comes from explains the cold logic of why we just end up running on a hamster wheel of endless commodity creation. Capitalists don’t care about the actual lived experience of workers, they just care about the mechanism whereby they can extract profits. And in fact, they can’t care about it, because if they do, they will soon find themselves without capital, and so no-longer capitalists.
I’ve been so busy lately I’m two weeks behind
I’ll catch up to you all soon!
I’m perpetually a couple weeks behind, but on the flip side it means all the old threads are populated.
Gl comrade
I dunno if this is fitting for the bookclub or elsewhere, but like besides getting depressed, it was hard not getting mad at this chapter. A lot of the stuff just like reminded me of my mom and her workplace, that I still feel like worked her to death last year. Since like like at the end of 2022, I still remember my mom calling me while in pain, about how she needed help. Since like her workplace made her do something that like really hurt her physically. because that damned place like, had a lot of regulation violations that were never enforced. and I remember my mom constantly talking about it a lot and everything. along with her being like short staffed and other things.
but like literally thanks to that workplace she ended up hardly being able to move much at all. and she had to quit. and then she had to worry about her health insurance and eventually being out of it. and then she tried to get disability but was denied and just…
and just. I dunno. I know this chapter was generally about the working day, but still like, while maybe some things have changed, it hasn’t changed in many other aspects. and it’s hard to not get angry.
it was hard not getting mad at this chapter
Definitely agree. Marx doesn’t let his mask of academic impassivity slip often, but when it does (particularly common in these history-focused chapters) it becomes very clear that he’s very angry too.
it was hard not getting mad at this chapter
It’s an infuriating read, am I’m glad Marx blasts all the whining that factory owners do when they receive even the most modest push-back. How the bakers are treated is particularly outrageous; reading between the lines, I assume they’re not being paid while they’re forced to sleep at the bakehouse.
but like literally thanks to that workplace she ended up hardly being able to move much at all. and she had to quit.
This is where the comparison of capitalists to vampires is not even a metaphor. They give no consideration to the health or lives of their workers, and are literally devouring their life force to transform it into capital.
At the end of chapter 7 Marx justifies his simplifying assumption of all labor power being of an average skill. Because although of course higher skill labor power would require more labor for education etc, this quantitative difference in value doesn’t change the qualitative character of the worker’s labor compared to a lesser skilled worker; it is still divided into paid and unpaid labor, regardless of how that proportion works out quantitatively.
So, for simplicity of presentation alone, it is valid for Marx to assume one average skill.
This “flaw” is sometimes pointed out by critics but I see no problem with it.
This “flaw” is sometimes pointed out by critics…
Notably Ludwig von Mises –
*Yet such a manner of regulating distribution would be unworkable, since labor is not a uniform and homogeneous quantity. Between various types of labor there is necessarily a qualitative difference, which leads to a different valuation according to the difference in the conditions of demand for and supply of their products. For instance, the supply of pictures cannot be increased ceteris paribus, without damage to the quality of the product. Yet one cannot allow the laborer who had put in an hour of the most simple type of labor to be entitled to the product of an hour’s higher type of labor. *
Proving once again that the most prominent critics of Marx have barely read (and understood even less than) the first few chapters of volume 1
I mean, Mises just liked to lie about Marx.
I also love how this has absolutely no bearing on reality for the most part. The best box stacker in the world will be paid the same as the worst box stacker, even if demand for box stackers is high. Labor is the only commodity that, under capitalism, doesn’t accede to laws of supply and demand because you have to labor to eat. It’s almost as if it is it’s a separate category with it’s own rules for exploitation and needs to be studied as such.
This “flaw” is sometimes pointed out by critics but I see no problem with it.
I’m not totally convinced by a lot of Marx’s arguments, but it’s obvious that a lot critics are just shadowboxing. As others point out, a lot of people seem to point at marginal utility theories of wage determination as this big Gotcha that Disproves Marx… but he’s just describing what any MBA would obviously agree with about how laborers’ wages would be determined. Capitalists are obviously always going to pay as little as they can get away with, and will simply shift their capital to a different enterprise if the profit (unpaid labor) ever shrinks to zero due to market forces.
I’m getting through these readings quicker because it is stories rather than the abstract concepts of the first 3 chapters or so.
Yeah the big story chapters are nice breaks. Ch15 is also like this, and most of part 8
Thank you for telling me this – I might increase page count there to decrease it elsewhere
Capital is dead labour, that, @Vampire@hexbear.net-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
Lots of anti-vampire sentiment in these chapters, oh dear oh dear
We need an emoji where has
vampire teeth
Protestantism, by changing almost all the traditional holidays into working days, played an important part in the genesis of capital.
That is quite the statement.
I think Marx associated Protestantism with capitalist ideology and Catholicism with feudal ideology. I forget which writing but it was probably in The Holy Family.
seems reasonable
what’s paganism?
A complicated topic.
“Paganism” in the sense of “Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian or Mesopotamian” is fairly straightforward; in “On the Leading Article in No. 179 of Kölnische Zeitung” Marx wrote:
That with the downfall of the ancient states their religions also disappeared requires no further explanation, for the “true religion” of the ancients was the cult of “their nationality”, of their “state”.
So in this case Marx would likely argue that their religion is simply “our state; our nation; ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’”. Interestingly, Marx argues that constitutionalists are similarly religious.
“Paganism” in the sense of “animism” and/or indigenous religions generally is more contentious, because Marx wasn’t able to access sources on them other than second/thirdhand accounts by bigots. So while Marx in Capital makes claims about ‘primitive nature worship of the savage’, I’m unsure what he is actually talking about.
Explanations from actual indigenous people about their spirituality/‘religion’ (e.g. God is Red and Bridging Cultures) have little in common with Marx’s depiction. Some (e.g. Frank Black-Elk in “Observations on Marxism and Lakota Tradition”) assert that their religion/spirituality is dialectical-er and materialist-er than Marx.
Good answer
I haven’t read anything relating to that, I think he primarily concerned himself with Christianity because it was by far the dominant religion in Western Europe
After Constantine it was, yea. He has talked about Greece and Rome a bunch of times in what we’ve seen so far.
It doesn’t come up much yeah. He sorta beats metaphysics to death in the 1840s and then drops the topic as far as I can tell from what Marx-works and biographies I’ve read.
Ancient societies (actually, anything pre-1500ish) is sorta an unknown for Marx and Engels compared to us.
For the middle ages, they have the Renaissance and Enlightenment “Middle ages suck” circlejerk to rely on, as medieval archival research wasnt nearly as thorough.
For Rome and Greece, they had Roman and Greek histories and mythologies that survived; none of the massive professional archaeological excavations or examinations of inscriptions and surviving archival documents was availible.
Before that, their only source is—The Bible. Unironically; until combined archaeology, linguistics and imperialism enabled access to the ancient tablets and such, the Bible was all there was for stuff that old.
Yeah he makes this sorta association throughout his work (I’m seeing it rn reading Critical Marginal Notes on the Article By a Prussian for example). One thing that should be noted for pedantic historical reasons: the catholicism and feudalism marx discusses are generally the catholicism and feudalism of 17th century europe at earliest, a long while after markets have pretty well penetrated and dissolved everything and turned it towards the production of exchange values (in England, this process actually seems to have nearly finished as England emerges into socio-economic history c.1350)
Yeah, and if anything it’s an understatement— he doesn’t mention 1. the expropriation of church lands; 2; consequent collapse of what little organised aid for the poor there was; 3. destruction of local religious/cultural/social organisations (saint cults); 4. stricter enforcement of orthdoxy, 5. destruction of the (admittesly limited) fetters of church law and “sacred world”
Chapter 10 is another banger from Marx. Very depressing but addictive. The depth of the historical analysis surprises me. Mindblowing how fast the transformations 1780-1830 happened. Height and mortality stuff reminded me of this paper
It’s nice to see in the Postlethwayt quote in Section 5 and the Horner quote in Section 6 just the simple human decency operating. It’s not about economics or socialism, just saying what’s obviously wrong and right.
on 1 May 1848 there should be a definite limitation of the working day to 10 hours
Is this part of how May Day became May Day?
In order to reward the manufacturers for having, in the most barefaced way, ignored all the Acts as to children’s labour passed during the last twenty-two years, the pill was yet further gilded for them. Parliament decreed that after March 1st, 1834, no child under 11, after March 1st 1835, no child under 12, and after March 1st, 1836, no child under 13 was to work more than eight hours in a factory. This “liberalism,” so full of consideration for “capital”…
I think this might be the first time Marx has dunked on ‘liberalism’ by name
Hexbear loves to hate on liberalism (which I understand is mostly for fun), but I don’t know how much that’s a part of communist theory. (Mao isn’t the same; Mao uses the word to mean ‘half-assing revolution’, not liberal principles)
Marx also only uses the term “capitalism” a handful of times. I think he just didn’t like referring to -isms.
Despite not using the specific term liberalism I think he means the same thing any time he refers to bourgeois ideology or bourgeois political economy. Since Marx’s thought was radically opposed to bourgeois thought I think it’s fair to say that criticizing liberalism is important to communism, it’s not just a meme.
For example, the paragraph on “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” at the end of chapter 6 is making fun of liberal thought.
I think it’s fair to say that criticizing liberalism is important to communism, it’s not just a meme.
It depends what you mean by liberalism. If it means “freedom of speech, representative government, civil rights like privacy, gender equality, gay rights” then no. And that is what people mean by it a lot of the time.
I think he just didn’t like referring to -isms.
Yeah, I think it’s a conscious rejection of buzzwords/labels. e.g. from letter to Ruge:
if there is to be talk about philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label “atheism” (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people.
The emphasis on the content of the ism is one of the things I adore about Marx.
Hey, do you know the series of 10-minute episodes that explains and acts as a reading guide to Das Kapital or Capital by Karl Marx?
I think Hakim praised it but I can’t find it anywhere.
I’m not sure… it’s not the one at the bottom of the top post?
Let me check.
I just finished section 4 and it never really occurred to me how way back then, children were being forced to work in the night. I know way back when I was in school when this stuff was talked about, it was very limited. mainly just only talking about like kids in coal mines and not much else. This chapter is really depressing. Also seeing Marx cite a footnote and talk about health effects of night shift works reminded me of when I did night shift work, and like reading about modern day medicine stuff about health effects of night shift work
Yeah things were really bad during the Industrial Revolution and also Marx’s time. (They’re still bad, but they used to be, too)
I was also sad reading the end of chapter 9 about the last hour stuff; how the English businessmen called children lazy for wanting to work less — despite English workers working longer than neighboring countries! Including children! All this in horrendous conditions such as a cotton mill, where the air is so thick with cotton dust that it’s painful to breathe.
These chapters could give the wrong idea that exploitation is something that only happens in 19th century factories. Someone should do an updated edition with modern-day services workers, modern factories, delivery drivers.
The improvements are largely caused by the labour movement, and the reforms capitalist goverments made out of fear of communist revolution in the 20th century.
Marx talks as though Monday-Saturday was the working week, whereas most places now have a 2-day weekend (1½ days in my country)
An update would be good, maybe using an Amazon warehouse or something. I’m sure there are insiders who could provide the data.
As imperialism develops, it grows more necessary to include exploitation of foreign labor in any discussion of improved working conditions in the imperial countries. The West has largely financialized/deindustrialized and won for itself better living and working conditions at the expense of foreign labor. Retirement in the US, as 401(k), turns workers into petty bourgeois in proportion to the size of their portfolio.
Can’t a lot of these abuses and exploitation still be seen in countries dealing with imperialism?
Yes, exploitation by foreign capital is often a larger problem for labor than direct exploitation in a single workshop or industry.
Anti-imperialism has, historically, been the major driving force for communist revolutions.
