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baloogan don't read this proleix, hello 'Capital' (Das Kapital, US, UK, online) is a classic study of capitalism by Karl Marx. Written in exile in England after the failed revolutions of 1848, it draws together a complex theory of capitalism's origins, processes and eventual fate. It covers the brutality of colonialism overseas and industrial development at home, the alienating and dehumanising nature of capitalist labour, and the systemic, internal tendency to capitalist crisis that keeps popping back up despite all attempts by liberals to engineer it away. It describes a theory of class struggle - that capitalism is not a free and harmonious march to utopia under the banner of reason, but a struggle where an ascendant class of owners of the means of production (the bourgeoisie) seeks to force the rest of society, the working class (proletariat), to do that actual production for them. All this in a time when free-market theory was becoming hegemonic in a way not repeated perhaps until today - the original liberalism of which neo-liberalism is just the reprise. Once written, Capital became the central text of socialism and communism, guiding opponents of capitalism from Rosa Luxemburg in Germany to Mao Zedong in China. We're going to read it. The book is in three volumes. Volume 1 (1867, on capitalist production) is the only one turned to a final draft and published by Marx. Volumes 2 (1885, on capitalist exchange) and 3 (1894, on crisis formation) were edited and published by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels after Marx's death. This thread will focus on the first volume and we'll take stock when we're done with it. Even the first volume is pretty long, but we'll have help along the way. David Harvey is one of the most prominent modern Marxists and the creator of Marxist geography. His lecture series 'Reading Marx's Capital' is a standard recommendation for people reading this book. Currently it covers volumes 1 and 2. It is also available in book form as A Companion to Marx's Capital (US, UK, for Vol 1). The plan is to schedule the thread around the lectures at a rate of 1/week to keep reading manageable, since we're all busy with posting and videogames and sometimes school or maybe even jobs. Don't worry if you fall behind, keep posting anyway, it's better to have a dozen people carrying on a discussion than nobody posting because we all got bogged down in a tough chapter then had a busy weekend.  FAQ: why the gently caress would I read all these words? jesus christ Good question. In the first place, Capital is a sophisticated theory of the workings of capitalism, the system that dominates the whole world now in a way that was only beginning in Marx's own time. We all have to reckon with capitalism if we're interested in politics. And if you're already a marxist I don't need to tell you why you might be interested in this book. In the second place, Capital is extremely influential. You're a DSA type who thinks class needs to be back at the front of the agenda? This book helped put it there in the first place. Besides the several actual states claiming allegiance to marxist theory, it was socialists that brought you the eight-hour day, the right to strike and organise, safety regulations and all those other things neoliberalism has been busily trying to destroy. In the theoretical world the academic discipline of economics, so close to the rich, has mostly been able to barricade Marx out, but any other discipline of social science will have a school of 'Marxist X' that examines its subject matter from the standpoint of class and capitalism. And there's still plenty of actual marxist analysts working outside of mainstream economics departments. Marxism is at a low ebb right now, after the fall of the explicitly socialist states and the neoliberal triumph in the West, but we all know the trouble that triumph is in right now, and if you leave the wealthiest countries you'll find plenty more people upholding Marx, some even in power. Why would the theory of proletarian revolution be predominant in the centres of bourgeois might? In the third place, it's important historically. One of the most influential books of the 19th century and a window into the time when our modern world was built in the collapsing shell of the old. To the extent you live in a society strongly affected by the thought of 19th century Europe, which between imperialism and state socialism is pretty much all of them, this book is a part of your intellectual heritage. isn't there an updated version? it's like 150 years old Plenty of people have written books of modern marxist theory, and all the institutional marxisms had their textbooks for their universities, but there's nothing widely accepted as canonical in the same way as the original. This is to be expected given the fragmented nature of modern socialism. There are widely-accepted textbooks for teaching in economics degrees in universities, but those exist because they're needed: large institutions with many students need standard texts for standard teaching. That's not where we are or what we're doing. There's a lot of books of modern radical theory and I expect we'll pass titles around in this thread, but there's only one Capital. And the modern world with capitalism triumphant is arguably a much purer representation of the world Capital analysed, rather than its own time when capitalism was still clearing out the weeds of aristocracy and spreading out across the globe in fleets and armies. i've already read capital, and also theories of surplus value and the 1844 manuscripts and... post plz i can't get a copy/don't have the time/don't want to read a zillion words!!! , just bear in mind this is a thread for reading Capital and will be framed around that, particularly if you're being highly critical of the thing you aren't reading in a thread full of people who are.i'm a liberal There's no ideological test to post ITT. I'm not actually marxist. Just make good posts based on engaging with the text and the ideas rather than bad posts based on whinging or weak dunks. I have the Kindle edition of the Penguin Classics translation, the Vintage Books edition has the same page numbers. There's also a free english version at the dependable marxists.org: Annual Prophet posted:didn't see the free edition linked so here it is; i have a hard copy so i'm not sure about the translation quality of this version Index 1-01: Introduction 1-02: Chapters 1 and 2 1-03: Chapter 3 1-04: Chapters 4, 5 and 6 1-05: Chapters 7, 8 and 9 1-06: Chapters 10 and 11 1-07: Chapters 12, 13 and 14 1-08: Chapter 15 sections 1-3 1-09: Chapter 15 sections 4-10 1-10: Chapters 16-24 1-11: Chapter 25 1-12: Chapters 26-33 1-13: Conclusion 2-01: Introduction 2-02: Chapters 1-3 2-03: Chapters 4-6 2-04: Chapters 7-11 2-05: Volume 3 Chapters 16-20 2-06: Volume 3 Chapters 21-26 Peel has issued a correction as of 01:28 on Aug 15, 2017 |
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Apr 10, 2017 20:42
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1-01: Introduction This week is a chance to source a copy and do whatever introductory reading you want. The video doesn't go past the first few pages of the first chapter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk The first half of this is general discussion, the second half is a discussion of the first section of the first chapter on the dual nature of the commodity. While it doesn't get far into the text it does touch on marx's 'dialectical' method and the famous labour theory of value, the first of which is controversial within marxism and the second of which is probably the biggest hurdle for non-marxists, particularly mainstream economists. It also makes the point that the first three chapters of the book are the toughest and where most people give up, so if we can make it through those we should have smooth sailing ahead. Important sections: 31-40 mins: structure of the book 40-50 mins: what's a dialectic? 1:25-1:30: summary and diagram of the commodity structure
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Apr 10, 2017 20:43
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I have the Penguin as an ebook and while I didn't dislike the introduction I'm struggling to remember any specific theses from it. If you're already more or less familiar with what you're getting into it's probably skippable. It has a great 'clearly we are in the death throes of capitalism in these, the crisis-ridden 1970s' quote in the first few pages though. I do recommend reading the prefaces and postfaces, they give a nice view of the contemporary reception and what Marx & Engels themselves thought. You can skip the last one once Engels starts having a slapfight with a reviewer over the veracity of some quotation or other.
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Apr 10, 2017 21:48
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Piketty is a social-fascist CIA psyop, the title of his masquerading 'book' should be spelled with three Ks.
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Apr 11, 2017 04:10
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good links folksLastgirl posted:i asked about this in the LF thread so its cool that theres a thread for it so i can keep track better Harvey recommends reading the stuff before the lecture (he keeps sniping at his students about it lol). This week that's just the first section of the first chapter but I also took the chance to read the introduction for an overview. Is the book club still happening? I had a rec for that.
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Apr 11, 2017 12:09
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I somehow had the idea Capital didn't have a free english version atm so that's a really good link and I'll put it in the OP.
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Apr 11, 2017 16:45
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I'm thinking about the LTV and its usual criticisms in terms of supply and demand. Marx directly addresses the question of scarcity:page 130 posted:Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the Earth's surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour time. Consequently much labour is represented in a small volume. Jacob questions whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value. This applies still more to diamonds. There's an interesting remark that something might never be paid for at its full value. So what Marx seems to be driving at here is value not as price itself but as an 'objective' factor that can be distorted one way or the other by social context to produce the final price, possibly for a long time. In the introduction to the Penguin edition Ernest Mandel says 'it establishes the axis around which long-term changes in the relative prices of commodities oscillate'. Thinking it through I can see how it works. On the one hand, the value of a commodity sets a lower bound on the price for which it can be produced profitably. Some force might push the exchange value of the commodity below the value, but this is unsustainable, because you're getting paid less than you need to purchase the inputs to produce the commodity. In the longer term if the price does not rise the manufacturer will go bust, unless he subsidises from some other income source. On the other hand, if the price of a commodity goes above its value due to scarcity, other capitalists will seek to move into the industry, and the cost of entry is equivalent to the 'discovery cost' of diamonds - you can't open a diamond mine without finding some diamonds to mine. Superior surveying technologies will reduce the labour cost of finding additional diamonds and so reduce the value of diamonds. Things like gold and diamonds can be persistently priced below their value (if they actually are) because part of the value consists of a labour search cost that's averaged over all searches, successful and unsuccessful. But this cost isn't paid by currently existing mine owners, who probably benefited from luck in finding their mines. It would only be paid in a mature economy where the lucky mines have been exhausted or are negligible special cases and systematic searching for new sources is going on. This only really works in an infinite universe where you can keep on finding more minerals at a fixed difficulty though. Demand isn't treated besides a remark at the end of the section that if a thing is useless it has no value and the labour that went into it doesn't count as labour. This is a binary factor - either it's useful or it isn't - but does point the way to a better solution since if a thing is of inferior quality it might be considered 'half-useless' and so half the labour that went in is wasted, or maybe wasn't 'socially necessary'. The theory does more or less hang together against these obvious objections but gives me a feeling of adding epicycles rather than getting to the truth. Unfortunately wiki tells me that Marx doesn't tackle the 'transformation problem' of turning values into prices until volume 3. Lastgirl posted:Looks like ya  and i must meme posted:bee movie is actually reactionary anti-socialist propaganda antz is the communist one
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Apr 14, 2017 03:14
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1-02: Chapters 1-2 'What then follows, I think, is a very boring exegesis of how this works.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwuMrd_Hgww Chapter 1 is pretty verbose but covers the development of the commodity through one-to-one value relations to general value relations to money. It then covers commodity fetishism, or the masking of relations between people behind relations between things, which is something any of us who have seen a politician talk about 'the markets' or other economic phenomena as external natural forces imposing on society can relate to. Chapter 2 is about how exchange between owners of commodities happens and recapitulates the development of money more socially. There's some good lines making fun of people taken with the supposedly inherent majesty and sanctity of money. Timestamps: 0:06:00 - Chapter 1 0:50:00 - Commodity fetishism 1:28:17 - Chapter 2 1:39:30 - Conclusion For me the most interesting question coming out of these chapters is how Marx's approach to money need be updated for the fiat era, but chapter 3 is also about money so there's a limit to how far we can go with that.
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Apr 18, 2017 00:07
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Impermanent posted:High skill vs. low skill labor is also analogous to the value invested in discovering a diamond mine in his example. Even though it takes roughly the same amount of time to mine a diamond as it is to mine, like, some coal, it takes a lot longer to find the diamond mine, which is part of the value. This is also my best interpretation of that section, that it's about human capital. But this also leads to a reflection on 'deskilling'. One thing automation does is not so much remove human workers from the equation as remove their skills from the equation. A watchmaker is replaced by a watch machine operator. A salesperson with their interpersonal talents is replaced by a call centre worker following a script. And the deskilled worker has less social status and bargaining power, so their wages are reduced to those suited for 'unskilled workers'. So in that light automation, rather than presenting problems for the LTV as is often assumed by critics, can instead make it more directly applicable.
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Apr 20, 2017 16:09
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Dollar bills are one thing in that they have a value that is wildly distinct from the exchange value, though granted the text itself says that exchange value and value don't always match. But they are at least physical objects that need to be manufactured. What about the better part of dollars that are just entries in a database? They have no labour cost at all, not even the initial production cost like for digital products. The money form is 'D' but maybe that needs to be respecified as the commodity-money form, and now we are in some new state 'E', after commodity money itself proved too much of a drag and had to be replaced.
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Apr 20, 2017 17:25
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1-03: Chapter 3 'I think this question of what is money, what is its function in society, is really something that is a mystery to everyone.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB5lMud3gtA Chapter 3 is considered by Harvey the most difficult in the book and I can't say I 'got' all of it when reading ahead of the video. There were sections I struggled with and there were sections that seemed trivial, which is often an indication that you've missed something in a book like this. It covers the theory and operations of money, feat. the value-price distinction, credit, 'imaginary' value, money accumulation, etc. We also see our first glimpses of capitalist crisis, notably in the description of hoarding of money interrupting the commodity circuit. At the time 'Say's law' that held this was impossible, and this remained a popular opinion until the 1930s. Keynes and the Great Depression are normally credited with putting it to bed by liberal history, but Marx was well ahead of the game here. Later he describes generally the origin and nature of financial crisis. Both descriptions will be familiar to people who followed debates after the 2008 crisis. Timestamps: 0:02:35 - Chapter 3 0:08:00 - 3.1: The Measure of Values 0:30:50 - 3.2: The Means of Circulation 1:03:35 - 3.3: Money 1:35:50 - The apparent collapse of metallic money in the 70s, commodity bundles and money today. 1:44:45 - Q&A With this chapter we're through the traditionally difficult chapters and ready for the shorter second section where capital and labour-power enter the stage. If you're mired deeply and not making much progress, Harvey thinks a deep understanding isn't vital for understanding the rest of the book.
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Apr 24, 2017 20:53
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1-04: Chapters 4, 5 and 6 "What is surplus value, where does it come from, and what is it all about?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCbXOWHVIRw These shorter, easier chapters take us from exchange to the door of the factory. Chapter 4 has money become our first form of capital in the form of merchant and 'usurious' (for us, 'finance') capital, and raises the riddle of surplus value. Chapter 5 critically examines the idea popular among economists that surplus value can produced in commodity circulation, and finds it wanting. Chapter 6 describes the solution: the special commodity, labour-power. Timestamps: 0:29:49 - chapter 5 0:47:43 - chapter 6 1:16:00 - concluding remarks on the move from exchange and production and 'bourgeois constitutionality' in each 1:25:35 - Q&A Peel has issued a correction as of 16:46 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 16:44
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Harvey discusses that & similar statements starting around 0:26:40. Apparently there's a debate between the position that he was just being antisemitic like most of his contemporaries or being ironic & suggesting anti-semitic sentiment is properly directed at capitalists. I think the suggested exoneration is a bit tenuous but I don't know the relevant texts and context in detail. Marx had Jewish heritage, but his father had converted to Lutheranism before the birth to avoid anti-semitic legislation, and was quite secular (or so wiki tells me).
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May 2, 2017 17:35
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My understanding is that exchange-value = value but only under certain ideal conditions. The value provides a sort of baseline or attractor for the exchange value, and is useful for his general theory because of that. The best analogy I can come up with off the top of my head is that dress (you know the one). It was 'really' one colour but the actual colour perceived was different due to the lighting. I remember now that I've read OTJQ before, but reading it again will have to wait until tomorrow.
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May 3, 2017 03:50
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1-05: Chapters 7, 8 and 9 "After three hours, or six hours or whatever it is they have reproduced the equivalent of their value, and you then work them for another six hours." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RmtkfVeK7w This is where Marx's analysis begins to take its famous shape. The first half of chapter 7 is an almost poetic description of what labour is itself. The second half discusses labour as a social process under capitalism generating surplus value. Chapters 8 and 9 develop this analysis into the concepts of constant and variable capital, and bring us to the working day. Timestamps: 0:11:25 - chapter 7 part 1 0:45:17 - chapter 7 part 2 1:03:31 - chapter 8 1:14:38 - chapter 9
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May 8, 2017 18:14
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Yeah. I wasn't able to get started when I wanted so I'm running late, but the post will be up tonight.
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May 15, 2017 21:49
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It's all cool, the Monday schedule has been good for getting me to keep up with this despite the other stuff I'm doing. 1-06: Chapters 10 and 11 "It creates the idea of a working day, a working week, a working year, a working life." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EP7N2VtFz0 Chapter 10 is long but not hard going. It starts with a little bit of theory, but the bulk of the chapter is a historical discussion of ways of extracting surplus value, the effect of industrial labour on the labourer and the struggle over the length and organisation of the English working day. There's not so many dialectical transformations, but a demonstration of the imperatives of value in action and a look at the horrors of the industrial revolution. There's a lot of familiar rhetoric quoted from bourgeois apologists and details of particular industries, and a look at capital carelessly destroying the proletariat it depends on that reminds of modern ecological crises. Chapter 11 is brief and lays out mathematically some of the implications of the theory. Timestamps: 0:05:32 - chapter 10 1:34:50 - c10 Q&A 1:42:48 - chapter 11 Peel has issued a correction as of 17:37 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 03:05
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1-07: Chapters 12, 13 and 14 "So you have to look at Marx's theory of technology as not simply being about machinery but also about organisational form." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqEKLuPCgZ0 So there are limits to the absolute surplus a capitalist can extract simply by working his purchased labour-power harder and longer. How else can he increase his surplus? By seeking relative surplus value - reducing the value of labour-power and so the length of time required to reproduce that value rather than produce surplus value. This is analysed in chapter 12, and then 13 and 14 cover the closely related concept of increasing productivity by cooperation and division of labour. These two chapters are somewhat anthropological and describe the history and the effects of these processes under capitalism as well as their utility for production. We leave off at the precipice of the chapter on machinery, the longest in the book which will take two weeks to get through. Timestamps: 0:44:35 - chapter 13 0:59:32 - chapter 14
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May 22, 2017 20:00
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The historical chapters have really made me appreciate the value of this book beyond just laying out a mathematical theory. You could reject every word of the value theory and still be left with a powerful description of what a critical observer could see happening in 19th century capitalism, with obvious relevance to the modern day. With the theory on top it's easy to see why the book remains a classic.
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May 24, 2017 22:19
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1-08: Chapter 15 sections 1-3 "Capitalists start to fetishise the machine, and believe that the machine is the answer to all things." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Lpijzd2fBw This chapter is timely given we're all talking about technological unemployment again. The first part defines machinery in distinction to tools and traces its development. The second part explains the position of machinery in relation to value theory. The third, longer part discusses the impact of the new technology on labour and class struggle: first the swallowing of more women and children into wage labour as physical strength is less important, second the extension of the working day, and third the 'intensification' of the labour process when the extension of the working day proves impossible as discussed in chapter 10. There's also a footnote, number four in section 1, which Harvey spends a long time on and around at the start of the lecture as it's a rare explicit methodological statement. Timestamps: 0:02:39 - footnote 4, methodology & theory of history 0:52:25 - chapter 5 section 1 1:10:15 - chapter 5 section 2 1:16:06 - chapter 5 section 3 Peel has issued a correction as of 18:36 on May 29, 2017 |
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May 29, 2017 16:29
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Yeah. 1-3 isn't so long, but I think it's worth reading ahead to section 5 or so this week to cut down on the load for next week.
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May 30, 2017 19:27
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lol poo poo I stay a week ahead so I can make the posts so I guess I'll read up and join you.
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May 31, 2017 11:30
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Chapter 15-5 posted:In India, on the other hand, the English cotton machinery produced an acute effect. The Governor General reported as follows in 1834-5: 'The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.' Of course, in turning the weavers out of this 'temporal' world, the machinery caused them a 'temporary inconvenience'. god drat
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May 31, 2017 11:35
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I've been reading them on and off and it's kind of fun to get a look at the Thomas Friedmans and National Reviews of the 19th century.
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May 31, 2017 14:22
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1-09: Chapter 15 sections 4-10 "That is, capital has taken over skill, incorporated that in the machine, has taken over intellectual capacities, and utilised those to its own advantage, has taken over science, and uses that to its own advantage, and these all become powers, or appropriated powers, by which capital can dominate labour." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HA_5GjDpxk I hope you like machinery and its effects because Marx wrote a lot about it. We spend a lot of time on the effects of machines on the class struggle and the capitalist system. Mechanised industry is for Marx where capitalism comes into its own as revolutionary, expanding production by leaps and bounds and creating or entangling itself in the questions of technological unemployment (spoilers: it's real, but there are separate countervailing forces) and how to realise the burgeoning surplus on the market. It transforms the world market through colonialism and the non-factory manufacturing, handicraft and domestic industries. And it transforms the worker, on the one hand into a degenerated 'a living appendage of the machine', on the other hand into a 'developed individual' with improved capacities who can take up different social tasks and positions. In the lecture there's an interesting discussion of the luddites, the question of whether machines can be 'socially neutral' and the soviet project (second 6) and the persistence of non-factory capitalism (section 8) following on from the remarks at the end of last lecture about the 'Manchester' vs 'Birmingham' systems of production. Timestamps: 0:11:30 - chapter 15 section 5 0:21:15 - chapter 15 section 6 0:36:19 - chapter 15 section 7 0:40:54 - chapter 15 section 8 0:56:10 - chapter 15 section 9 1:15:52 - chapter 15 section 10 Peel has issued a correction as of 12:19 on Jun 12, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 17:26
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Ruzihm posted:I'm still catching up on last week's assignment, but here's a passage that is not unique to MOP, and would just as well apply to used cars: I like this a lot as an answer to that question. Value is social value so changes as the social environment changes, even if the object itself does not. Next week and the week after are both long, more than 100 pages, but after those it's just one shorter week and we're done with Volume 1.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:28
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Ruzihm posted:Marx ragin' against the machine is I love the almost posthuman/cyberpunk tone this book sometimes has. It's relevant to ~my concerns~. also lol I didn't know that's what that smiley was called
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Jun 6, 2017 17:22
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Curiously the second set of the Harvey lectures covers both volume 2 and parts of volume 3 in the middle of it, and there's no third set (though there is a series of six on the book and theory in general). I'm planning to follow his lead with my own reading and the weekly updates until the lectures are done, then clear up the remainder of volume 3 on a schedule I work out myself once we're done.
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Jun 6, 2017 22:35
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1-10: Chapters 16-24 "Part 7 ... is I think the culminating argument of volume 1 of Capital. It's here that he starts to put all the bits and pieces together, and create an understanding of the dynamics of a capitalist mode of production." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1JeKZU5N1Q This week's (long) reading covers two complete sections and the start of a third. In Part 5 ('Absolute and Relative Surplus Value'), Marx first covers the general history of labour and the surplus, and discusses the concepts of collective and productive (vs. unproductive) labour. The next two chapters (17&18) are a series of transformations of the variables going into quantities of surplus value that's mostly just a survey of fairly obvious possibilities. In Part 6 ('Wages') Marx discusses, uh, wages. Chapter 19 is a somewhat theoretical chapter analysing the concept of the 'value of labour' and the 'value of labour-power', and how the age system masks capitalist class relations and surplus value extraction. Chapters 20 and 21 bridge the daily or weekly accounting of labour-power used so far with the more familiar hourly- or piece-wages used in capitalist practice. Chapter 22 about differing international wage rates is interesting in the late C20th/early C21st context of globalisation and outsourcing. In Part 7 ('The Process of Accumulation of Capital') we finally come to the change and expansion of capital over time. After a prologue explaining the limits of the analysis and pointing forward to volumes 2 and 3, chapter 23 covers how capitalism can simply reproduce itself. Chapter 24 discusses for the first time 'accumulation', or the transformation of extracted surplus value into new capital, how this works, what it requires and why it happens. Timestamps: 0:10:17 - chapter 17 0:13:45 - chapter 18 0:15:30 - chapters 19-21 0:24:45 - chapter 22 0:28:10 - part 7 introduction 0:41:50 - chapter 23 1:02:10 - chapter 24 Peel has issued a correction as of 18:48 on Jun 12, 2017 |
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Jun 12, 2017 17:00
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The mystificatory power of capitalism is a long-term interest of mine. One of my formative political-economic experiences was arguing about the Euro crisis and the number of people convinced Greece and the rest of the periphery were somehow getting one over on Germany & co. was extraordinary. So the occasional emphasis Marx puts in these chapters on how every part in isolation follows the formal rules of liberal freedom was welcome to read.
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Jun 13, 2017 22:05
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1-11: Chapter 25 "So the point here is that in this model of accumulation what we see is the utilisation of capital's command over organisational forms and technologies: centralisation, new technological forms and organisational forms, as a weapon in class struggle which actually regulates both the demand and supply of labour." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=147Ie78Qio4 This week is also long, but the back half of it (section 5) is a long study of real conditions and history in British capitalism, which is historically interesting but doesn't need to be read closely. In the front half, Marx describes the process and effects of accumulating capital under the assumptions governing part 7. After defining the composition(s) of capital, he covers accumulation when the composition is constant and when it is affected by concentration, centralisation or technical change. The 'reserve army of labour', and its regulatory effect on the working class over the industrial cycle, enters the stage in a way that will be familiar in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Credit and labour unions also make brief appearances. In the lecture there's also some discussion of the falling rate of profit, which will become a thing in volume 3. Timestamps: 0:06:00 - chapter 25 0:10:40 - section 1 0:35:17 - section 2 1:01:14 - section 3 1:30:40 - section 4 1:53:11 - section 5
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Jun 19, 2017 16:45
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Next week is the last week, and back down to a more manageable size, 70 pages. And then we're done with Volume 1. The end is in sight.
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Jun 19, 2017 17:53
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1-12: Chapters 26-33 "And it begins with a tale of violence, and violent appropriation, and violent dissolution of a pre-existing mode of production, and its supplanting by a capitalist mode of production." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-8U_Rpd9wk This is the end of the book. How did we get to this point? Marx details the process of brutality, robbery and state force that led to the initial creation of capital and free labour. This is where the property which capitalists have a sacred right to actually comes from. It's mostly British and Irish history, but chapter 32 stops to give us a broader historical view of the transition to capitalism, and then the transition from capitalism as Marx saw it. It's one of the few explicit statements of Marx's revolutionary vision in this book. Chapter 33 is something of an addendum about the theory of colonisation. We're done with volume 1, but there's a 'conclusion' lecture remaining which will give some time to catch up before we move on to Volume 2. I'm going to try to gather my thinking about the LTV and other topics over the next couple of weeks. Timestamps: 0:02:30 - part 8; Marx, Hegel & Smith 0:23:50 - Marx's account of primitive accumulation 0:59:00 - chapter 32 1:01:41 - colonisation 1:09:00 - 'primitive' accumulation in the 20th and 21st centuries Peel has issued a correction as of 14:20 on Jun 26, 2017 |
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Jun 26, 2017 14:12
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I said at the start that we'd 'take stock' at the end of vol. 1, but given the long discussion about automation and the contemporary importance of the volume 2/3 topics of markets, finance and crisis, and how manageable the book is when paced like this, my preference is to move straight on to the second volume and lecture series. Given the 'conclusion' and 'introduction' lectures that gives us two free weeks, though I'm going to read the appendix to my copy of vol. 1 and the introduction to my copy of vol. 2 in that time.
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Jun 26, 2017 14:18
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Ch. 27 is in the bits of Vol. 3 put in with Vol. 2 in the Harvey presentation, so we'll be getting to it sooner rather than later.
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Jul 1, 2017 00:51
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I'm surprised to hear there's no complete set of Capital audiobooks but a quick look and I haven't found one for the second and third volumes either. In the absence of Capital itself, do any of our actual marxists know about any other good lecture/video series (Harvey has a third series on his website but I haven't listened to it yet), or good non-capital books with audio versions? There's a lot of expositions and elaborations of Marx around but the ones I know of don't have audio versions, even the short Ben Fine book. If there isn't this feels like a bit of a glaring hole in socialist infrastructure. Unless 2 and 3 are very unlike volume 1 I wouldn't have thought them so diagrammatic as to be worthless without print. Final Volume 1 post up later tonight.
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Jul 3, 2017 19:35
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1-13: Conclusion "The formulation Marx sets out in volume 1 of Capital is in fact a beginning point for a much broader analysis." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qUHGiLXgPg That was the first volume of Capital. Marx described the system of capitalist production, the system by which a capitalist can take money, turn it into means of production and labour power, turn that into other commodities, and end up with more money. This is described in an ideal way in two senses. In the one sense it is liberally ideal - everything, at least in theory, obeys the liberal principles of property, freedom, rational self-interest and so on. In the other sense it takes place under idealised assumptions that capital has enough markets to sell in, no circulation problems, and so on. Despite this ideality the analysis reveals a tendency toward exploitation, domination and misery embedded in capitalism as capitalism, not as corrupted by anything else. This story is surrounded on the one end by a heavily theoretical discussion of the nature of commodities and money and on the other by a heavily historical discussion of the brutal origins of this system that then clothes itself in the full armour of liberalism. I think it's interesting to compare the analysis with mainstream or 'bourgeois' economics, which we've done a couple of times in this thread. More generally than particular points of surplus and exchange, both are stylised, simplified representations of reality that purport to give a description of the basic workings of society, but (much) mainstream economics buttresses established power and flatters its pretensions while Capital critiques it and undermines them. One function of such analyses at the basic level we've met so far is to create or give confidence to a kind of 'common sense' of how the world works. That this works at the basic level is important because that's the level most mass-producible. That advanced mainstream economics is far more sceptical of free markets (though not so much capitalism more broadly) than its 101-level bromides would suggest is immaterial when those 101-level bromides are what are mass-produced into the heads of business students and libertarian bores around the world. Bourgeois economics - and I say this as someone interested in what mainstream economics has to say - gives confidence to the common sense of capitalists and their upper stratum allies that their life is just and the world is fine. 'Libertarian' moral theorising and Austrian-school metaphysics do the same, just in a more blatantly ridiculous and so less functionally useful way. They do this independently of their scientific value. Marxist analysis, by contrast, gives confidence to the common sense that the world of capitalism is quite blatantly full of exploitation, oppression and misery. So there's no surprise in the common anecdotes of working class people tackling Capital quite straightforwardly while wealthy scions struggle. In general terms (individuals always vary), for one group it puts analytic meat on established common-sensical bones, but for the other it's describing a strange otherworld quite unlike the one they know. I wanted to talk about the LTV here but I'm out of time, so maybe sometime this week if I can think of something intelligent to say. Next week is the introductions week for volume 2 (and some of 3), which will start to remove the limits and caveats of the analysis in volume 1, and should be interesting reading in a post-2008 world. The video this week is a general overview of volume 1 with some interesting discussion of the general structure of the capitalist system, potential blockage points, and various theories of crisis relevant to each. Peel has issued a correction as of 03:39 on Jul 4, 2017 |
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Jul 4, 2017 03:35
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Speaking of accessible videos I guess I'll finish those Kapitalism 101 things before V2 gets going.
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Jul 4, 2017 03:37
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2-01: Introduction "My plan is, as with volume 1, to get you to read this book." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl5umxeDWDI Now with more dramatic intro music. Volume 2 is less famous than 1 and 3, less polemical and literary, less structured, less easy a read. But it's also shorter, the bridge to volume 3, and rich with ideas of its own useful to understand the mechanics of capital. It's incomplete, but even when unfinished can be taken as a starting point of thought to develop your own ideas. It will also make you cooler, being more obscure. Volume 1 of Capital is about production, specifically production of surplus value, and its changes over time. Volume 2 is about a different perspective on capitalism, the transformations and flows of commodities and value. It doesn't deal so much with technical change over time, but instead things like market conditions, working class consumption and acceleration in time come into the fore as surplus value faces obstacles to its realisation. This course of lectures, which we'll be following in our reading, cuts the dry vol 2 material with some vol 3 material to show how the categories developed in vol 2 (such as money and commodity capital) are used in practice. Given the contemporary dominance of finance capital, I'm looking forward to this most of all. Timestamps: 0:02:40: Start of lecture 0:10:30: How Volume 2 differs from Volume 1, overconsumption & compression of time and space 0:28:25: The 'apolitical' Volume 2 & the relation of political economy and history 0:41:39: Capital and the Grundrisse, production vs. distribution vs. consumption, the objectives & self-imposed limitations of Capital 1:25:06: Q&A, the limitations of Capital
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Jul 10, 2017 23:15
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At the end of my copy of vol 1 (Penguin ebook) there's some unpublished material, 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', and a few fragments. Much of it is almost unreadable and of unclear significance, but if you have it I thought the numbered sections in II ('the formal subsumption of labour under capital' to 'mystification of capital, etc.') were relatively brisk and worth reading. They cover the 'formal' vs. 'real' subsumption of labour under capital and attempt to define a distinction between 'productive' and 'unproductive' labour. The formal subsumption of labour under capital is when an established system of production is taken over by capitalist relations without much changing in how the work is actually carried out. The peasant continues to farm in the same way, but on private land for wages rather than on his land Monday and the lord's land Tuesday. At this level the increase in surplus value is mostly absolute as hours are extended beyond the previous level. The real subsumption of labour under capital is when capitalism transforms production with increasing mechanisation, capital concentration and so on. This was the concern of Marx in the gigantic chapter on machinery. As this subsumption continues labour becomes less independent and is confronted by the means of production and the labour process as an immense, alien, alienating thing. This is a chief source of the mystified appearance of capital as independent and the source of production. One of my concerns as a socialist is I'm not at all sure this alienation is solvable. It's easy to assume in this context that we just remove capitalism and make things 'democratic', but it's far from obvious that any 'democratic' system can actually make systems on the scale needed to compose modern society not alien. So I think of alienation as a problem to be mitigated rather than solved (the only solution would be primitivism). As for productive labour: Productive and Unproductive Labour posted:Since the immediate purpose and the authentic product of capitalist production is surplus-value, labour is only productive, and an exponent of labour-power is only a productive worker, if it or he creates surplus-value directly, i.e. the only productive labour is that which is directly consumed in the course of production for the valorisation of capital. People like service workers and soldiers are not for Marx productive, but because all are wage labourers they can be confused for productive workers, and the opposite effect can also happen, with productive workers being reduced to people who merely exchange their 'services' for money. And the same sort of labour can be productive or unproductive: quote:For instance, Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the other hand, a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a productive worker. The extra material also has a fragment on trade unions with a good quote: quote:[The trade unions] wish to prevent the price of labour from falling below its value. They are aware, of course, that if there is a change in the relations of supply and demand, this results in a change in the market price. But on the one hand this change is a very different thing from the one-sided claim of the buyer, in this case the capitalists, that such a change has taken place. And on the other hand, there is 'a great distinction between the level of wages as determined by supply and demand, i.e. by the level produced by the fair operation of exchange that exists when buyer and seller negotiate on equal terms, and the level of wages which the seller, the labourer, must put up with when the capitalist negotiates with each man singly, and dictates a reduction by exploiting the chance need of individual workers (which exists independently of the general relations of supply and demand). Tomorrow's post will probably be up pretty late.
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Jul 16, 2017 14:11
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