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
maybe i’ll come back to this in a few days and feel totally stupid but is socially-necessary labor time not already embodied in the exchange-value of a commodity? in other words, the amount of abstract human labor represented as exchange-value can only ever be the amount of labor that is on average necessary to make the use-value contained in the commodity (absent confounding factors ofc)
You’re absolutely right, yes I think with all things held constant (intensity of labor, technology, stable environment, etc) then the socially-necessary labor time should be constant. I was thinking it’d be cool if, in this code implementation, the SNLT could be calculated for a given commodity using its entire supply chain. So each commodity keeps track of its inputs and the labor added when converting the inputs into the commodity. The SNLT for a commodity would be calculated recursively by summing the added labor plus the SNLT of all of its inputs.
Commodity: 1 apple pie
Commodity: 100g sugar
Commodity: 250g flour
and so on. As I write this, I’m realizing this would lead to some chicken-and-egg problems, similar to how the process of making yogurt involves taking some yogurt, adding milk and heat to get more yogurt. I’ll have to think about this.[1]
But with this model, it would be possible to interrogate the data and maybe build some graphs.
But I’m not just interested to build graphs, I was also hoping it’d help me better understand what is “simple average labor.” Marx says that human labor in all its particular kinds is abstracted into abstract labor of an average intensity and skill. Are we able to more precisely define what that means? I feel like a formalization could help give precision on things like that. For example, can “skill” be quantified? Could we tell if the average skill increases or decreases over time? That could have relevance in later chapters when Marx talks about de-skilling, maybe this would be a neat connection.
edit: I think this can be solved if I don’t calculate SNLT recursively like this. If all the inputs can be assumed paid with money, the universal equivalent, which is also a form of value. The inputs are from a previous production process, and the labor time of the inputs is “forwarded” as dead labor to the next production process. Looks like I need to refresh myself on Kliman and also Chapter 8 of volume 1. ↩︎