Hop in, comrades, we are reading Capital Volumes I-III this year, and we will every year until Communism is achieved. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included, but comrades are welcome to set up other bookclubs.) This works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46 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.
Week 1, January 4 - January 11, Volume 1 Chapter 1 ‘The Commodity’
This is the very first bookclub post, so get to know each other, ask questions about the basic premise, just keep mostly on-topic. This didn’t start on January 1st because I want it to start and end on the weekend. @'ing everyone mid-Thursday probably wouldn’t have gotten very many readers.
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.
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. Also, please let me know if you spot any errors with the bookmarks so I can fix them!
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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Harvey’s lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWvnUfModHP9Ci8M1g39l4AZgK6YLCXd0
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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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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.
N/A
In 2. The dual character of the labor embodied in commodies, Marx says that the value of a commodity represents human labor power.
He later adds to this that an increase in productivity that results in less labor time to produce more use values (commodities), will result in the reduction of the value of that increased amount of commodities because it reduced the amount of labor power that went into them.
I think
I didnt fully understand how labor performed for the same amount of time always produces the same amount of value regardless of variations in productivity though
@Cowbee@hexbear.net did I interpret the text correctly?
And could you please explain how productivity doesnt change the amount of value
Mostly! And if value comes from labor-hours, then being able to add more commodities increases the use-values produced while not increasing the value created. Does that make sense?
I think so!
Is it like, you can have more products produced per hour but cant have more (labor) hours per hour?
Bingo!
Marx’s central thesis here is that all value comes from labor and natural resources. Think of it this way, if it took society 1 hour to make a bracelet one day, and then overnight a new technique came out that made it take 30 minutes, twice as many bracelets would be made, but each would be half as valuable. Does that make sense? When we factor in tooling, it gets more complicated, but this is the general process.
So in this example raw materials dont matter? Or is it that you cant actually change the raw materials needed, you can only change how long it takes to turn them into something?
They actually do matter! I was trying to keep it simple, but let’s say the cost of tooling used up and raw materials was 15 minutes. Those would not change, but the new technique turns the 45 minutes to make it down to 15, it would go from 1 hour of socially necessary labor time to 30 minutes. Living and dead labor, current labor-power and formerly crystalized labor.