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/
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This talk gets me thinking of economic complexity. These output>input chains gets longer through the centuries: in the Stone Age, Grug made use-values out of virgin materials, and in Shenzhen, factories assemble components that come from other factories that use components that came from refineries. The complexity of the web grows.
That said, the complexity of modern industry is not byzantine. Comrade Haerdin says here – https://www.haerdin.se/files/videos/marx22_360p.webm – at around 51:30 that there can be around 160 inputs to one workplace; not myriads.
Your points are good, I just wanna further complicate it (particularly wrt stone age, virgin materials and labour)
Should very much note that the "output>input chains" that get longer through the centuries are human production chains, production chains under human management, control and understanding. The chains are predicated on the existence of the 'natural world' (the uncaught fish in ch7fn7) which is the result of millions of years of evolutions and developments and ecological relationships which even today we do not fully understand.
The supply chains' operation also destroys this 'natural world' on which it's premised; oil is limited, ore veins dry up, forests are cleared, soil is exhausted, etc. This destruction can be shifted/alleviated (e.g. from the 70s, pollution reduction in the north was aided by sending the dirtier production south; the ever increasing use of fertilizer to maintain crop yields), but is as Marx notes intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production.
One reason it is intrinsic in my opinion is that capitalism does not view 'nature' as producing value.(1) Hence, value, material generally, extracted from nature require no compensation. As Marx says in ch2, if commodities "are unwilling, [man] can use force; in other words he can take possession of them".(178) It doesn't matter if it's a rock, plant, wild donkey or anything else: if a commodity has no owner, it's "free game". Marx alludes to the fact that, women, for instance, may be commodities in ch2fn1, but the point isn't developed further here (or anywhere else in Capital, tbh. Marx dropped the ball on feminism.)
In ch2 Marx further points to the fact that, for owners of commodities to deal with each other as commodity owners, to interact through their commodities; "their guardians must...not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent. The guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property."(178) Because, e.g. a tree, is not recognized as the owner of private property, as a commodity owner, a member of civil society, in a word a legal person it is therefore itself a commodity. In chapter 2, brief allusion to women-as-commodities aside, the question of what is and is not a commodity seems simply to be "is it a human or not".
In chapter 3 and 6 this is further complicated by mention of slaves, humans who are commodities. In the inverse of the conditions for the sale of labour-power we see the conditions for the sale of human beings:
A person can thus be enslaved when they are not the legal equals. This can mean, as in e.g. absolutist France, "The Rights of Man" just don't exist, no one is equal, or it can mean, as in Yankland, that black people and natives don't count as "real" humans. Such people are, rather than being commodity-owning members of civil society, part of civilization, uncivilized. They and their property are treated as natural resources; gangs of whites can and did go about with guns in Yankland abducting black people for sale, robbing and massacring native villages and looting graves and ceremonial sites, digging up and farming medicine and hunting places, etc. This is the whole basis of primitive accumulation, which will be the focus of part 8 of the book.
The supply chains thus appear to begin (and Marx begins his analysis presuming) with extraction, but they begin earlier and endlessly circulate in and out of the sphere of 'social production' which is Marx's focus.
(1) Marx seems to sometimes think abstract human labour is physiologically and intrinsically different from animal labour (e.g. page 284 where he creates a metaphysical justification for this). I disagree, and think it weakens his argument to have such metaphysical ideas (and such metaphysical ideas obscure how capital-patriarchy labels e.g. housework as not-work and expropriates the products (reproduced labour-powers) as a natural resources.)
This is a great comment btw, saving to re-read later
I think that's an Engels thing, he develops that somewhere else
Edit:
I'm reading in another language with a lot of prefaces and such, so the pages are all different. What chapter is this? I'd like to read his original reasoning
I can say with some confidence (happy to be shown incorrect) Engels doesnt pick up the ball Marx dropped. Origin of the Family does not represent picking this ball back up, bc the balls both dropped were
1."did not realise that the exploitation and subjugation of women intensifies under capitalist mode of production"
"did not point out the devaluing of female labour-powers and the systemic dismantling of gender equality in the lower classes going on at the time they were writing"
"placed reproductive labour outside of their analysis at a time when capital itself was increasingly concerned with controlling women's reproductive labour".
Origins of the Family is also notably based on the same books Marx read, but Engels' positions are often less nuanced than Marx's in his excerpt notes. As far as I remember, it does not touch on the above three points.
Federici's essay in Musto's Capital 150th anniversary book (cant remember the title) gives a good summary of how Capital!Marx messes up.
Marx's metaphysical justification is at the beginning of chapter 7 (the paragraph about bees and spiders vs. architects and weavers).
His differentiation is already mushy and metaphysical (and false; spiders, bees, arcitects and weavers all start with plans, but will change the plan if the conditions change), but it particularly collapses later given his discussion of labour-powers' deformation under division of labour in manufacture and machinery. All the points he notes about human labour power's uniqueness stop being true in manufacture and machine production.
Marx will also point to instances of human, horse and ox labour being interchangeable in manufacture and machine production, further eroding the justification presented here
Thank you for taking the time to answer me, comrade.
Yeah, I agree with you. Maybe he didn't consider animals as being able to plan the results of their actions and learn from them? But, as you said, that wouldn't fit with "human, horse and ox labour being interchangeable in manufacture and machine production."
But, in this case, couldn't he be speaking about commodified labor? I can see the argument of how human labor getting commodified turned creative human labor into a sort of 'animal labor'.
tangential rambling
In the examples of oxen used for human labor, their work seems as merely a tool for a human activity. Maybe this distinction of animal labor in nature and human social labor is a problem with considering nature as a collection of individuals (either individual animals or individual species) instead of a single Whole with multiple perceivable manifestations. In that way, animal labor (without any relation to human activities) could be seen as social, too, I think.But I'm just rambling and going on tangents now, this is my favorite part of theory 😄 and there's still a lot to learn
About the commodification of women, I'll for sure read more into it, thanks!
Tangential rambling is very interesting /genuine, but not quite what I'm talking about wrt "human and animal labour being interchangeable". What I mean is e.g. when the human is turned only into the prime mover (the power source) of a machine, they are replaceable with an animal entirely, to the point that many early machines were operable by man or animal. Similar, coal power can replace human power, and many early machines were operable by burning coal, or by manually turning a wheel. And then as we move further into manufacture and production, we find humans turned into beings that instinctively repeat the same task endlessly without knowledge of the task's goal, any will beyond "avoid being beaten or starving", etc, and this whole ideal-intellectual distinction Marx sets up here becomes much more nonsensical, for example:
(ch14 section 5, Fawkes edition, p483)