Das Kapital reading group, Week 30, July 22-28. We are reading Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 of Part One of Volume III (hexbear.net)

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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 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29

Week 30, July 22-28. We are starting Volume III. From Part One (called The Conversion of Surplus-Value into Profit and of the Rate of Surplus-Value into the Rate of Profit), we are reading Chapter 1 (Cost-Price and Profit), Chapter 2 (The Rate of Profit), and Chapter 3 (The Relation of the Rate of Profit to the Rate of Surplus-Value).

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

rat-salute Two volumes down, the third doesn't stand a chance.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

This thing is a tome 0_0

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

rat-salute i'm ready to enter the theory trenches once more

[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Vol 3 feels a lot like Vol 1, at least in terms of Marx's writing style? Vol 2 felt like, I dunno? Anyways it's nice to go to like that Vol 1 feel. I thought Marx was gonna go back to the 20 yards of lenin example like he did in vol 1, but instead it's just yarn. Also it's interesting he bringing up dialectical stuff and relations again, like here and with Hegel. It felt like vol 2 didn't have much of this?

If, as Hegel would put it, the surplus therefore re-reflects itself in itself out of the rate of profit, or, put differently, the surplus is more closely characterized by the rate of profit, it appears as a surplus produced by capital above its own value over a year, or in a given period of circulation.

Although the rate of profit thus differs numerically from the rate of surplus-value, while surplus-value and profit are actually the same thing and numerically equal, profit is nevertheless a converted form of surplus-value, a form in which its origin and the secret of its existence are obscured and extinguished. In effect, profit is the form in which surplus-value presents itself to the view, and must initially be stripped by analysis to disclose the latter. In surplus-value, the relation between capital and labour is laid bare; in the relation of capital to profit, i.e., of capital to surplus-value that appears on the one hand as an excess over the cost-price of commodities realised in the process of circulation and, on the other, as a surplus more closely determined by its relation to the total capital, the capital appears as a relation to itself, a relation in which it, as the original sum of value, is distinguished from a new value which it generated. One is conscious that capital generates this new value by its movement in the processes of production and circulation. But the way in which this occurs is cloaked in mystery and appears to originate from hidden qualities inherent in capital itself.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Definitely feels more readable than Volume 2. Chapter 2 of Volume 3 seems like a good concise summary of the mathematical portions of Volume 1.

this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024

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