Very proud of us all who have kept it going. We’ve gotten into a nice groove now. We looked at the labour theory of value, and how all commodities are commensurable by measuring the labour time. We saw that money is a commodity (gold) used to measure value. We learned that surplus value isn’t generated by trade, because that would cancel out over the economy. We saw that surplus value comes from the variation between the value of the food etc. required to MAKE a day’s labour, and the value of the work done in that day. We have learned the general formula of capital, and how capital differs from money. Not only am I proud of you, Stalin would be proud of you.

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 8½ or 9 hours to catch up to where the group is.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4

Week 5, Jan 29-Feb 4, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 9, and from Chapter 10 we are reading section 1 ‘The Limits of the Working Day’, PLUS section 2 ‘The Greed for Surplus-Labour’, PLUS section 3 ‘Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation’

In other words, aim to get to the heading ‘4. Day Work and Night Work. The Shift System’ by Sunday

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.

Resources

(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)

  • Kolibri [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    Thanks and I think a lot of that helped clicked some things in place? In a way it sounds like money/value seems like a middle-man? just getting in the way of things in terms of social labor. Also going to private property, at what point does a socialist state decide to take one form of private property and seizes it under the state and abolishing it? A country that comes to mind about this is China

    and I ask about private property because of this from Engels

    “Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke? No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.”

    • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      In a way it sounds like money/value seems like a middle-man

      Yep, a necessary middle-man that can’t be done away with within capitalism.

      Engels quote

      Sounds right to me. There is not one single way it happens though, which is why he uses phrases like “in all probability.”

      Later in volume 1, Marx will talk about concentration and centralization of capital. We see this occurring in huge corporations like Amazon and Walmart. This tendency makes revolution more and more possible as it would only take the nationalization of a few corporations, not countless small businesses.

      I’m not an expert on China, but from what I understand, it is following the socialist path about as well as one could expect. It is building its industry and making itself independent of Western capitalist nations. It has nationalized major industries or kept them within narrow bounds.

      • Kolibri [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        oh right yea, I wasn’t thinking about the like, concentration and centralization of capital with this stuff with like nationalization. and yea for sure, China really amazing with like everything so far what they have done. It would be neat to see what China is like I dunno, 50 years from now. I can’t really imagine.