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Das Kapital reading group, Week 11, March 11-17. From Vol. 1, we are reading Sections 9 and 10 of Chapter 15, plus all of Chapter 16 (hexbear.net)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Wow, look at us go. We have passed the halfway point of Vol.1, and are ⅕ of the way through the whole thing. You now have a better understanding of what Marx really said than most people.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (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? 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 [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10

Week 11, March 11-17, we are finishing Chapter 15 (i.e. sections 9 and 10), and reading Chapter 16. This is all in Volume 1.

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.

Audiobook of Ben Fowkes translation, American accent, male, links are to alternative invidious instances: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9

Resources

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

Harvey's guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
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
Engels' Synopsis of Capital or PDF
Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (3 children)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

giant-rat

I've fallen behind the last week or so bc personal stuff so hopefully i can get caught back up this week

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

meow-bounce week 11 and that were half ways through volume one!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I skipped to chapter 16 since I’ve fallen behind. Almost done with 16, then I’ll read 15 as much as I can, while keeping up with the reading otherwise

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

"On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects."

This might be the most savage own he's done so far, J S Mill BTFO.

marx-war

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

This is one of the best!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Progress is slow but I'm catching up! Almost done with chapter 8. I'm going to try and commit to reading more in my lunch this week.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Nice!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I found this part really interesting at the end of chapter 15, very relevant today.

Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. [245] Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

He really predicts the dust bowl right here. Massive speculation on the wheat markets just had people leasing land, overproducing and depleting the soil. With early 20th c. plows and tractors, tenant farmers and older animal-based equipment gets forced off the land

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

side-eye-1

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Metabolic rift theory marx-goth

Marx mostly talks about this sorta over-extraction from 'nature' in terms of the soil, but it ofc applies to rare earths, wood, animals, water, etcetc too.

Saito (convincingly imo) argues this became more and more foundational to Marx's critique in the decades after 1867.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I really like how Marx looks around the world, I never heard of the Orissa famine and like. ukkk it just so fucked what britian did

also this footnote was interesting

The necessity for predicting the rise and fall of the Nile created Egyptian astronomy, and with it the dominion of the priests, as directors of agriculture.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Also yeah britain absolutely despicable; like 40million+ people starved / died of famine-induced disease in 1880-1900 alone. Evil fuckers

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Marx's random "here's a big historical take I won't elaborate on" footnotes are my favourite

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Can any comrades help me out with the dichotomy at the end of C. 15 sec. 10?

"Thus [capitalist production] destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker and the intellectual health of the rural worker."

From what we've read so far, it would seem that capitalist production is bad for both physical and intellectual health for urban workers, because the self-valorization requires long working hours especially for children, minimizing their time for education. I would think this criticism is true for children employed on farms as much as for children employed in facotries.

I think Marx here, as an "Urban Intellectual" falls into the trap of idealizing agricultural work. True, it has a certain seasonality that factory work doesn't have, and agricultural workers have more open space for excercise and fresh air. But specially after the advent of tractors and combines, modern agriculture is incredibly dangerous.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom, and independence.

This is in the same section, I don't think he's idealizing rural life or work, he's observing that the concentration and exploitation of large numbers of laborers in cities is also in a dialectical relationship with the disposession and destruction of the peasantry. He's both/and-ing, it's both deeply unhealthy for city dwellers and complete ruination for the rural inhabitants who need to do less and less besides mind a machine, and in decreasing numbers at that.

I felt like it rhymed with the larger dynamic he describes of core/peripheral exploitation, wherein market forces remake everything outside of the industrial centers of the market into pure fodder for the mills.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The hours of agricultural work are also limited by daylight

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

:so-far: In Central California, where daytime temperatures can reach 110ºF, lots of produce is picked at night. Either a tractor with floodlights will follow workers or they use headlamps. In addition to maximizing the workday, this saves money on refrigeration. The fruit might be coming in at say 65 or 75 rather than 100 degrees.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Right but I was talking about Marx's era.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

while on the other hand the absence of that antagonism is sufficient to explain the delays and chicanery of the legislation on mines.

chicanery

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

After some further crooked questions from these bourgeois, the secret of their “sympathy” for widows, poor families, &c., comes out at last.

Not unlike our modern pundit class who will suddenly be very vocal about human rights when a war needs to be justified. You can always tell if someone is a ghoul if they use their value system as a rhetorical cudgel rather than a guide.