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Das Kapital reading group, Week 14, April 1-7. From Vol. 1, we are reading parts 4 and 5 of Chapter 24, and parts 1,2,3 of Chapter 25 (hexbear.net)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Sorry I didn't post this on Sunday or Monday I just forgot.

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 – Week 12 – Week 13

Week 14, April 1-7. We are reading Vol.1.Ch.24 parts 4 and 5, and Vol.1.Ch.25 parts 1,2, and 3

In other words, aim to get up to the heading 'Section 4 - Different Forms of the Relative surplus population. The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation' by Sunday.

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)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Chapter 25 and its first three sections are also really good. Can't say I heard anyone talk about like value composition or like technical and organic composition of capital before? So that's really new. I found these really interesting

. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital relation itself, i.e., the relation of capitalists on the one hand, and wage workers on the other, so reproduction on a progressive scale, i.e., accumulation, reproduces the capital relation on a progressive scale, more capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage workers at that. The reproduction of a mass of labour power, which must incessantly re-incorporate itself with capital for that capital’s self-expansion; which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, this reproduction of labour power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat.

Also I really like Marx going into centralization and along with clarifying differences between centralization and like concentration. Since I had some like misunderstandings over that? But Marx cleared it up. Thinking like, centralization was tied to concentration. But Marx made it cleared it's not. Also this sounded like financial capitalism?

Apart from this, with capitalist production an altogether new force comes into play — the credit system, which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralization of capital.

Marx also like had a really big footnote in this chapter with Malthus. Also like going to the periods and cycles of capitalism along with like the industrial reserve army. Really reminded me of how important dialectical materialism is for this. And speaking of misunderstandings, I think I had a misunderstanding from like the last few chapters with population where Marx also cleared it up when talking about the reserve army. Not entirely just the seeking of more people, but more like, the composition of like active and reserve army. Along with how like, that technical composition of capital, where like. Constant capital grows more while variable capital is less as capital wants to employ lesser people, or use overwork.

Along with this, it reminded me how much of like, how machinery is a form of class warfare like Marx mentioned before? I also really like the ending to section 3. that ill just quote here in a spoiler tag, since it's big. But like it just really good. And it's a nice thing to end the week off on.

spoiler

Capital works on both sides at the same time. If its accumulation, on the one hand, increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of labourers by the “setting free” of them, whilst at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain extent, independent of the supply of labourers. The action of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital. As soon, therefore, as the labourers learn the secret, how it comes to pass that in the same measure as they work more, as they produce more wealth for others, and as the productive power of their labour increases, so in the same measure even their function as a means of the self-expansion of capital becomes more and more precarious for them; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as, by Trades’ Unions, &c., they try to organise a regular co-operation between employed and unemployed in order to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic production on their class, so soon capital and its sycophant, Political Economy, cry out at the infringement of the “eternal” and so to say “sacred” law of supply and demand. Every combination of employed and unemployed disturbs the “harmonious” action of this law. But, on the other hand, as soon as (in the colonies, e.g.) adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army and, with it, the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class, capital, along with its commonplace Sancho Panza, rebels against the “sacred” law of supply and demand, and tries to check its inconvenient action by forcible means and State interference.