Wow this is going great. The hard part is over, and now we have hit a stride. We have learned Karl Marx’s theory of money, and of trade. We have learned what capital is and how it differs from money.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve done the hardest part. Several people noticed it is getting easy and fun now. All the same, don’t let up til we reach our destination.
Please be chatty in the comments. Let us know you’re here.
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 seven hours to catch up to where the group is.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3
Week 4, Jan 22-28, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, and Chapter 8
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)
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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/
I just finished chapter 6 as well and had the same takeaway.
The points he makes about the only difference between a free worker and a slave is the free worker only exchanges a portion of their labor-power is I think very important.
It exposes the goal and endgame of the buyer of labor-power. To own a persons labor-power in its totality is to own them, and by extension own the process of producing labor-power. This includes all the commodities involved in housing, subsistence, education, and medical care.
The value of labor-power is dictated currently by the collective actions of the proletariat in the commody market. However it you had full control over a persons labor-power, you can control what kind of housing, food, medical care, and education they get.
In the absence of totally owning their labor-power, capitalists attempted to instead attack this problem externally by owning the towns the workers lived in. This is WHY company towns existed, becuase slavery was generally outlawed.
Its why we have for profit prison systems. They are effectively the peak of capitalist external intervention in the process of owning labor-power in its totality.
At its core the struggle has always been pure freedom against pure slavery.
yea! and I feel like this is very relevant from Marx to what you said, from chapter 9.
Ha! Naturally, if anyone is to extract the surplus, it should be the worker, so that they can decide how best to apply this surplus. You can see how this analysis leads us to collectivism.