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At the end of chapter 11: Look at this dumbass who thinks his equipment gets devalued by shortening the workday. First of all, there’s less wear and tear. Second of all, if the workers are more rested and prepared, they’ll make fewer mistakes and fewer time-loss accidents.

Finally, if you’re able to cut your use low enough, you could rent out time on the equipment to other contractors, and you’d only need to do minor upkeep and not purchase raw materials. Capitalism really does give you brain worms.

Whenever an individual capitalist cheapens shirts, for instance, by increasing the productiveness of labour he by no means necessarily aims at reducing the value of labour-power and shortening, pro tanto the necessary labour-time. But it is only in so far as he ultimately contributes to this result, that he assists in raising the general rate of surplus-value. The general and necessary tendencies of capital must be distinguished from their forms of manifestation.

In one of the earlier threads, someone asked why capitalists would ever try to increase productivity when that would just make them work harder for the same profit. I bolded the last line to show that Marx perceived a difference between general law versus particular manifestations of that law. Or, that the individual capitalist need not attempt or even be aware of the general law, so long as material factors nudge them in line with the law.

Something almost imperceptible happened in chapter 12 — did anyone else notice it?

We started in chapter 1 with the assumption of the law of value, that commodities exchange at their values. But now, with the coercive law of competition resulting from relative surplus value, we have found that this assumption can be dropped. The law of value, which we at first had to assume, now stands on its own feet as competition compels producers to adopt new techniques because prices fall. So it is by this mechanism of competition that prices tend toward value, not in every individual case, but statistically through the anarchy of competition.

@[email protected]

Here we go. Here in chapter 12 is the answer as to why Capitalists make better technology.

"it costs less labour to build one workshop for twenty persons than to build ten to accommodate two weavers each; thus the value of the means of production concentrated for use in common on a large scale does not increase in direct proportion to their extent and useful effect."

We now call this economies of scale.

oh I like almost forgot, but that footnote with like Charles Darwin reminded me, that Darwin and Marx were both alive at the same time

i've now finished reading vol 1 please clap for me

i'm sure large chunks of it went right over my head, but i feel like i got a lot more out of my reading than i expected? like prior to our reading group, i had imagined capital to be this almost impenetrable text; something you'd need a whole arsenal of reading guides, podcasts etc to get through. but like... it really wasn't that bad? the feeling i'm left with is that, even if i didn't understand all of it on this first reading (which i didn't expect to either), i'm definitely capable of comprehending it if i put the work in

anyway, i'll try to re-read along with the reading group now!

Get in here nerds

The minimum sum of value the individual possessor of money or commodities must command in order to metamorphose himself into a capitalist changes with the different stages of development of capitalist production, and is at given stages different in different spheres of production, according to their special technical conditions

This is what moderns call "barrier to entry"

to get some discussion going..

what's the difference between absolute surplus-value, and relative surplus-value?

This law clearly contradicts all experience based on appearance. Everyone knows that a cotton spinner, who, reckoning the percentage on the whole of his applied capital, employs much constant and little variable capital, does not, on account of this, pocket less profit or surplus-value than a baker, who relatively sets in motion much variable and little constant capital.

So we have a contradiction. On the one hand, the law of value requires that surplus value be in proportion to variable capital. But everyday practice shows that profit is a fraction of the total capital advanced, including constant capital… seems like a huge problem if we stopped right here.

How profits are equalized, between industries that have different ratios of variable to constant capitals, turns out to be important only a long while later, in Volume 3.

Does anyone have thoughts about how this contradiction is resolved?

Of course he can, like his labourer, take to work himself, participate directly in the process of production, but he is then only a hybrid between capitalist and labourer, a “small master.”

Isn't that like, the petite bourgeoise?

From the standpoint of these, capitalistic co-operation does not manifest itself as a particular historical form of co-operation, but co-operation itself appears to be a historical form peculiar to, and specifically distinguishing, the capitalist process of production.

Marx kind of like confused me on this, I'm not exactly sure what he's trying to say? Was he trying to say like, it's not like a historical form of cooperation, but more like, in capitalism, cooperation plays a different role?

also this is really cool

This power is due to co-operation itself. When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species

I really like chapter 13, it like made a lot more things make sense or for things to click more. Like the means of production in common, or social relations or like social labor or social working day? I dunno it just, made it less abstract? Like I can see now what is more meant by social labor? esp. when Marx said this

Being independent of each other, the labourers are isolated persons, who enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with one another.

Moreover, this character of being necessary conditions of social labour, a character that distinguishes them from the dispersed and relatively more costly means of production of isolated, independent labourers, or small masters, is acquired even when the numerous workmen assembled together do not assist one another, but merely work side by side. A portion of the instruments of labour acquires this social character before the labour-process itself does so.

But it feels like in a way like, chapter 13 kind of like touches upon alienation? like right here

Their union into one single productive body and the establishment of a connexion between their individual functions, are matters foreign and external to them, are not their own act, but the act of the capital that brings and keeps them together.

also this was kind of funny

Strictly, Aristotle’s definition is that man is by nature a town-citizen. This is quite as characteristic of ancient classical society as Franklin’s definition of man, as a tool-making animal, is characteristic of Yankeedom.

There do exist exceptional cases in which the surplus-value produced does not increase in proportion to the number of workers being exploited, but then the value of the labour-power does not remain constant.

What do you think Granddad is talking about here?

Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.

Interesting to see Marx directly discussing Hegel here. This quantity-quality relation is discussed by Mao in On Contradiction

If, therefore, the capitalist who applies the new method sells his commodity at its social value of one shilling, he sells it for 3d. above its individual value, and thus he realizes an extra surplus-value of 3d.

Reminder to pronounce this 'thruppence' when reading in your mind

I guess I’m still having trouble translating Marx’s vocabulary into “Econ 101” terms. Like in some situations “profit” is equivalent to surplus-value, and exchange-value is equivalent to equilibrium price?

I don’t understand why chapter 15 is so long but I’m going to try to slog through it next week. I have skipped it in the past because it doesn’t seem that important for the theory.

Looking ahead at my audiobook, it’s over 7 hours of historiography and rebuttals of obscure bourgeois arguments.

The math in chapter 12 gets a little hard to follow. Here's my go at working through it.

All quotes henceforth from Fowkes/Penguin ed., p. 435-6.

Recall that Marx’s baseline scenario, before innovation, is as follows:

A worker works 12 hours a day, producing 6s. of value (of which 5s. remunerates 10 hr of necessary labor time, and 1s. is surplus-value representing 2 hr. of surplus labor). This labor-value produces 12 products, so each product gets (6/12)s., or 6d, each of newly produced value, plus a further 6d preserved from expense of the means of production, for a total value of 1s.

Now, when the capitalist introduces an innovation, the 6s. of value added by the worker produces instead 24 articles, so each gets (6/24)s. or 3d. of new value, for a total value of 9d. But the social value is still at 1s. or 12d., so the innovating capitalist undercuts the market at 10d. and still gets an extra 1d. surplus. And this is where Marx starts doing some algebra behind the scenes and expecting you to follow along.

[T]he capitalist now produces 24 articles, which he sells at 10d. each, making 20s. in all.

This is simply the total price the capitalist fetches on the market. 24 articles * (10d. / article) * (1s./12d.) = 20 s.

Since the value of the means of production is 12s., 14⅖ of these articles merely replace the constant capital advanced.

The means of production are 12s. because they still represent 6d. or ½s. per article. If each article sells at 10d. or ⅚s., the number of articles that represent the means of production is 12s. / (⅚s. / article) = 72/5 or 14⅖ articles.

The labour of the 12-hour working day is represented by the remaining 9⅗ articles. Since the price of the labour power is 5s., […]

(The capitalist has no immediate obligation to raise the workers’ compensation, so the price he’s paying for labour-power across the 24 articles is the same he laid out previously for the production of 12 articles.)

[…] 6 articles represent the necessary labour time, […]

5s. / (⅚s. / article) = 6 articles

and 3⅗ articles the surplus labour. The ratio of necessary labour to surplus labour which under average social conditions was 5:1, is now only 5:3.

6 / (3⅗) = (30/5) / (18/5) = 30/18 = 5/3. Now skipping down a bit:

Hence, instead of 10 hours, the worker now only needs to work for 7⅕ hours in order to reproduce this value.

As has been shown, the necessary : surplus ratio is 5:3, so ⅝ of labour time is necessary labour time. 12 hr * ⅝ = 60/8 = 15/2 or 7½. I’m pretty sure “7⅕” is a mistake, probably Marx or an editor had bad handwriting and misread “½” or “.5” as “⅕”. The error is then replicated on the next page with

surplus labour is therefore increased by 2⅘ hours, […]

which should instead be 10-7.5 = 2.5 hours. However, the following remains correct:

[…] and the surplus value he produces grows from one into 3s.

Of the 20s. realized for the capitalist by the 24 articles, 12s. is the cost of consumed means of production; the remaining 8s. is split 5/3 necessary/surplus, as shown, so 5s. to the worker and 3s. to the capitalist.

this sophistication, peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production, this complete inversion of the relation between dead and living labour, between value and the force that creates value, mirrors itself in the consciousness of capitalists.

Seeing echos of the commodity fetishism of chapter 1. In capitalist production, humans are dominated by things, by the production process itself. This is in contrast with all past modes of production in which humans had conscious control over their own production — by humans I mean society as a whole, not to dismiss the subjugation of exploited slaves, serfs, etc