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Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity' (hexbear.net)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. This will repeat yearly 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.

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

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)

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] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Is intensified/multiplied labor referring to the use of fixed capital in production? I.e. the machinery as dead-labor whose value is then transferred to the product through living labor, intensifying the value transferred into a commodity per unit of labor-time? Or to forms of labor which are more difficult/intensive/complex?

So the way I understand it is that more complicated work requires training and/or special talent to be done. An hour of brain surgery is not qual to a hour of ditch digging in terms of the value of the labor but it is still essentially the same thing. A brain surgeon has expended a significant amount of time to be capable of doing brain surgery so the value of the labor is multiplied and is worth more.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

So the way I understand it is that more complicated work requires training and/or special talent to be done. An hour of brain surgery is not qual to a hour of ditch digging in terms of the value of the labor but it is still essentially the same thing. A brain surgeon has expended a significant amount of time to be capable of doing brain surgery so the value of the labor is multiplied and is worth more.

This is how I read it the first time, but thought maybe I was misreading.

I wonder how this can be accounted for though. It doesn't figure into the chapter or his example he gives. On the scale of the entirety of social labor, these situations are outliers, so I'm fine with the blunt way he is using labor time, but once he invoked his example of a non-capitalist association I wanted more specificity.