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2-02: Chapters 1-3 "At the end of the day we are interested in industrial capital, but we're interested in the circulation of industrial capital as it incorporates all of the things we see about this circulation process through these separate windows." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0OZP55EfMs If you enjoyed the parts of Volume 1 where Marx goes on and on about pedantic permutations of simple concepts, these are the chapters for you. Capitalist production is cyclical. Machines don't run once and then stop, shops don't open once and then close, consumers don't buy once and then starve. Capital must transform between money, commodity and productive capital, each of which has different properties and each of which presents possibilities for disrupting the cycle if its transformation is blocked. Marx examines this cycle from the perspective of each type of capital as a starting point, locating points of differentiation and blockage, and connections to the wider economy of other circuits. These introductory chapters more desert than oasis, but introduce concepts that will be important going forward: the three types of capital, the dependence of each part of the circuit on various social and physical conditions, the importance of turnover time and money reserve, etc. There's not just the necessity of money to exist in the needed quantities and in the right places, or buyers for commodities that need selling, but the physical preconditions of production. Timestamps: 0:02:27 - start of lecture 0:22:30 - Chapter 1 (The Circuit of Money Capital) 1:08:10 - Chapter 2 (The Circuit of Productive Capital) 1:29:42 - Chapter 3 (The Circuit of Commodity Capital) Since I didn't post it before, here's a link to the free english translation of Volume 2 on marxists.org. Peel has issued a correction as of 17:55 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 18, 2017 02:40
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Electric Owl posted:If you're pointing to the alienation as the problem I think you're missing the entire point of Kapital. Alienation itself isn't a problem, in fact its necessary for trade. How could anybody trade anything without first alienating themselves from the good's use-value? If instead you're referring instead to the "alienating" effect of capital, such as the class struggle embodied in the machinery the worker confronts, then I really fail to see how anarchro-primitivism necessarily provides a solution to this. What are you, a Luddite? It's not the problem, but alienation from the labour process is surely a problem for Marx in capital. But it's the latter form of alienation that I'm referring to. My concern is that any large-scale organisation of production is going to confront its human members as something alien to themselves and oppressive to them, because it is large enough that they are effectively powerless before it even if it is controlled democratically, and they cannot identify themselves properly with something so large and mostly remote from their experience. Primitivism would hypothetically solve this in the sense that it would destroy social structures so large that people can't fully grasp and identify themselves with them even if they aren't structured around class oppression. But that destruction is obviously unacceptable since it would kill the great majority of humans alive and lose us all the goods large-scale organisation can provide. So alienation becomes something to be mitigated through whatever means, rather than something to actually be eliminated. quote:The way I see it, Capitalism is here to stay. We're already well on the way to slapping a floor (UBI) on this elevator headed into the Sun. There is simply no way to reconcile the naturally spontaneous system of organization in capitalism with the disruptive and interventionist approach necessary in a new system that does away with Capitalism's driving organizational principle, the pursuit of surplus-value. Without that principle it becomes necessary to transition into a centrally organized economy where information asymmetry (problems of demand and supply are handled explicitly, rather than naturally) along with the familiar cadre of tired problems concerning centralized power come into play, 'honest' vanguard or not. It's surely far premature to declare capitalism is here to stay or will even survive the next century. Even granting for the sake of argument there's no way to achieve the useful elements of (some) markets without their destructive elements, a new social formation could just abandon them. A number of things that will possibly or definitely affect the system are already known - automation, climate change, nuclear war - and there will doubtless be many more things we aren't aware of yet. We don't know how capitalism will respond to these changes (reading Capital might help).
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Jul 22, 2017 01:13
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https://twitter.com/autonomio/status/888302438343741440
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Jul 23, 2017 02:04
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2-03: Chapters 4-6 "This language of continuity, fluidity, coexistence, succession is as it were punctuated by this other language of interruption, with the potentiality of course of that interruption becoming 'a disruption'." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLJH-jnKORI Chapter 4 stitches the three circuits of capital together. Obviously, each is just a different perspective on the same thing and each takes place simultaneously, with production of new commodities happening even as previously produced commodities are sold. There's a lot of different observations here: - Capital (self-valorising value) can only be understood 'as a movement, and not as a static thing'. - If the circulation is interrupted then a money reserve is needed to smooth things out. This is one of the factors that leads to money capitalists becoming the dominant form of capitalists. - Not everything that enters the circuit as commodity or money need have itself originated from capitalist production. - Capitalists supply more value than they demand, creating an imbalance and a question of how the surplus can be realised. Chapter 5 introduces time analysis: the concepts of production and circulation time and the subdivisions of each. This is a short chapter of straightforward conceptual material. Chapter 6 looks at the costs of the circulation process and outlines the various costs involved in administering production, getting commodities to and from the market, and buying and selling them there. Most of these are cordoned off as 'not productive' and so needing to be paid out of the surplus value rather than adding to value. I have to say I'm not really convinced by the separation. The LTV is supposed to be a theory of what things exchange for against one another, underlying supply/demand fluctuations. Why would some of the costs required to get from M to M' factor into the 'value' but not others? What's the analytic significance of the productive/unproductive distinction? It's all the same to the capitalist. But the point is also made in this chapter that capitalism is limited by time and space, and there's advantages to collapsing these in expanding your market and reducing transport costs. Timestamps: 0:02:55 - Chapter 4 1:01:24 - production vs. circulation, productive vs. unproductive labour 1:06:20 - Chapter 5 1:20:44 - Chapter 6 Peel has issued a correction as of 17:53 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 25, 2017 03:20
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asdf32 posted:An obvious one: without capital ownership/management being defined as unproductive there is no guarantee capitalists exploit. This isn't 'obvious', it's wrong. Exploitation arises from the nature of the use-value and exchange-value of labour-power. It makes no difference to this which levels and types of management of the production process are considered as productive. Please refer to the last entry in the first post Q&A before continuing your posting career ITT. edit: first post index is now up-to-date edit 2: Aeolius, I'll try to get to your post this week. I think Marx might be drawing some unnecessary lines he can't justify, but I need to make sure I understand just what he's doing & trying to do. Peel has issued a correction as of 18:14 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 26, 2017 17:40
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asdf32 posted:A dividing line between value producers and everyone else is necessary for the basic concept of exploitation and capitalists placement on the unproductive side of the line is what enables the entire concept capitalist exploitation. If we decided that their role was productive (or ceased to draw categorical lines and took things on a case by case basis) that wouldn't be possible. No. Exploitation arises from labour being paid v but producing v + s. This remains true if management is considered a form of productive labour that produces s, or unproductive labour that is paid out of s. Exploitation can proceed perfectly well if everyone involved in the process is a productive worker. In full seriousness: Your understanding of Marx is pretty clearly superficial and vague, so you're not in a position to answer, or even understand, technical questions in this thread. It's fine if you've decided you don't like what you've heard of Marxism and don't want to know more, my superficial and vague understanding of Austrian economics is enough for me to decide I'm not going to read Human Action any time soon, but this isn't the thread for you.
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Jul 26, 2017 19:27
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asdf32 posted:One step at a time here. No, that is not correct.
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Jul 26, 2017 21:33
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i could be wrong but i don't think unproductive labour even enters the analysis in a serious way until volume 2
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Jul 26, 2017 21:54
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for any book readers not familiar with asdf he has a long history of walking into marxism discussions and trapping them for pages on end in circular arguments over basic concepts, while making confident pronouncements to people who have more relevant knowledge than he does, which is why we are being short in this of all threads but i forgot to answer this: Annual Prophet posted:Hey Peel is there a particular hard copy translation that's better than others? Would like to get vol 2 in that form if there's a worthwhile translation. (If not, I'll work with the free online version.) Harvey uses the Penguin Classics translation, which is also the version I have in ebook. I don't know what the alternatives are, but if it's good enough for a marxist professor...
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Jul 26, 2017 22:13
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Ruzihm posted:Under capitalism, each firm producing for exchange competes for market share. That is the root cause of exploitation. The organization of the firm merely determines how the surplus value is managed and distributed. I don't think that's quite right, I think it's more fundamental than that. Competition obliges competing capitalists to exploit their workers, but the exploitation itself just originates from v vs v+s, workers being paid at the value needed to reproduce their labour-power, but producing more value than that. This happens even under monopoly conditions. In Aeolius' example there's no 'surplus value' produced and hence no exploitation because the worker, receiving the full proceeds, is compensated at the full value of his labour. At some point in volume 1 I think Marx refers to workers receiving the full value of their labour and still setting some aside to improve their means of production, and this not being surplus value in the capitalist sense. The crucial distinction there is that it is under their own control. But the categories are starting to get warped. The model in Capital is a model of the capitalist firm, a society of independent producers or worker co-operatives is not what it's designed to describe, Peel has issued a correction as of 23:17 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 26, 2017 22:55
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asdf32 posted:And my point was simply that if all people involved in the production of a good were labeled 'productive', as is the case with a self-employed carpenter, then the price of the good would be equal to the 'full value' of their labor: thus no surplus and no exploitation is possible. The analytical value of the distinction between productive and unproductive workers is thus critical to Marxian analysis. Nope. A workplace can be all productive workers and exploitative. To find out more, I suggest reading Capital, vol. 1 ch. 1-9 or so.
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Jul 27, 2017 02:01
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2-04: Chapters 7-11 "What is a city if not a huge amount of fixed capital? And yet there is a lot of motion within the city. And the city has to be designed so as to facilitate the motion." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDn8jlSC4Wc The key concept in these chapters is fixed capital, as distinct from 'fluid' or circulating capital. Fixed capital is capital that persists after the production process, i.e. only gives up part of its value to the product in one 'cycle' of the process. An example would be a blast furnace: this consumes x coal, iron ore, labour each day, which give their full value to the product each day, but the furnace itself lasts for y thousands of days and gives 1/y000 of its value to the product each day. Chapter 8 is the essential chapter here that outlines the categories in its first part and in its second part discusses the additional factors of repairs, moral depreciation, et cetera. 7 and 9 discuss turnover periods in this context and extend the analysis of the organisation of capital in time. Fixed capital presents some problems for capitalists. It requires more up-front investment. It makes your investments vulnerable to technological change. It requires continued combination with circulating capital not to be useless, which in the case of capital fixed to one place (land improvements, for example) requires the circulating capital to come to the location of the fixed capital. But things 'fixed' in one place are not necessarily fixed capital. For a capitalist who constructs infrastructure in order to sell it, infrastructure is circulating capital he need not think about long-term, even though the long-term use is what is important from the general social perspective. We can see how this causes problems in the case of the recent American housing market crisis, or empty cities and useless infrastructure in China (houses, incidentally, are fixed but part of the consumption fund rather than capital). Snarls like this take us further from the volume 1's idyll of infinite untroubled expanded reproduction. Chapters 10 and 11 are Marx's critique of Smith and Ricardo. They're of limited interest until you're into 19th century intellectual debates. Besides discussing the text itself (including digging out interesting parts from the otherwise difficult to penetrate chapters 10 and 11), the lecture discusses some additional perspectives from the Grundrisse. Timestamps: 0:02:32 - fixed capital, Capital vol 2 and the Grundrisse 0:23:15 - fixed capital defined 0:28:46 - geographical fixation 0:38:00 - capital with multiple functions, fixed capital & economic development 0:53:35 - Q&A 1:01:11 - repairs & replacements 1:04:11 - capital depreciation 1:23:47 - Q&A Peel has issued a correction as of 19:47 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 19:15
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Next week is the start of the detour through volume 3, so get a copy ready. The free marxists.org version is here.
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Jul 31, 2017 19:45
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Ruzihm posted:I'd like to read this in context, because it seems to be contrary to much I've understood from reading Capital. If you could point this out to me I'd super duper appreciate it. About market competitive co-ops in general, after thinking I think it's right to say they in theory replicate capitalist relations to a significant extent. There's two things Marx repeatedly invokes in Capital: first, that capitalists are compelled to harshen exploitation, advance production etc. by competitive pressures, and second that 'capitalist' is a role, not a person. Capitalists insofar as they are following the role of a capitalist, of being the conscious personified form of capital, will follow the dictates of capitals self-expansion, and so on. There's a sense of capital as an alien parasite taking over human self-determination. So this being a role not a person, it can be taken out of a separate capitalist and shared across the workers. On the other hand though, we have to ask how class struggle works in this context. Obviously there's a psychologistic interpretation of the struggle within each individual, and the social struggles over the distribution of 'surplus' within each firm and between firms (the question of how money capital is controlled here is pretty critical). But when you get to the state, what does it mean to be the 'managing committee of the whole bourgeoisie' when there's no separate bourgeoisie? This is where I'm more optimistic. A society that got to this point was obviously already able to take strong action to bring capital to heel, and I think would be much more able to reform itself into a truer socialism without massive dislocating violence. It's a candidate for a transitional stage.
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Aug 1, 2017 02:58
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Labour value is tricky since Marx doesn't really argue for it in Capital much (so far). He takes over and refines a concept in Smith and Ricardo. I don't know if he lays down a solid justification in his own terms somewhere else in his writing.
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Aug 3, 2017 14:20
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2-05: Volume 3 Chapters 16-20 "This chapter then is about these divergent turnover processes, which interlock with each other in an uncomfortable kind of symbiosis, which can sometimes break down in a crisis form. And that then leads Marx to sort of say that a crisis is ultimately a crisis of the circulation of industrial capital as a whole." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAE1bcgJVGA This is the start of our three-week detour through volume 3. In volume 2 up to now we've seen how the results of production must be mediated through commodity and money exchange to complete the valorisation of capital. These mediating functions are not necessarily performed by the same capitalists as who supervise production. The retailer capitalist who buys wholesale and sells to final consumers, the money capitalist who lends out and collects interest, both are capitalists who advance value to recoup greater value. The capital they control is merchant capital. 'Commercial capital' is capital in the form of commodities to be traded, existing independently of production. Retailers, wholesalers and other intermediaries between production and consumption of commodities are commercial capitalists. 'Money-dealing capital' is capital in the form of money, existing independently of production. The most important aspect of this is the credit system considered the next two weeks in vol 3 part 5, but even the simple aspect of managing payments can be considered part of this function (consider payment processing) and if independent is money-dealing capital. These capitals do not increase total amount of value or surplus-value in society, but still perform indispensable functions that prevent the value that is produced being lost. The treatment of money-dealing capital is cursory in this section, but commercial capital is considered at length in technical detail. Both these forms of capital are ancient, long predating the intrusion of capital into production. Chapter 20 discusses Marx's view of this historical context. But under capitalism, they fight for position with the new productive capitalists. Marx holds that commercial capital is subordinate to the production capital it brought forth, but Harvey brings this into question with commercial capitalists like Walmart which can dictate terms to smaller suppliers. Timestamps: 0:04:20 - start of lecture, the nature of parts 4 and 5 of vol. 3 0:16:49 - chapter 20 0:37:07 - discussion of conflict of merchant vs. productive capital 0:54:33 - commodity capital as independent vs. commodity capital as a form of industrial capital 1:06:37 - chapter 17 1:24:04 - turnover of commercial capital 1:38:00 - chapter 19
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Aug 8, 2017 00:17
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Capital vol. 3 p. 415 posted:Secondly, because basic skills, knowledge of commerce and languages, etc., are reproduced ever more quickly, easily, generally and cheaply, the more the capitalist mode of production adapts teaching methods, etc. to practical purposes. The general extension of popular education permits this variety of labour to be recruited from classes which were formerly excluded from it and were accustomed to a lower standard of living. This also increases supply, and with it competition. With a few exceptions, therefore, the labour-power of these people is devalued with the advance of capitalist production; their wages fall, while their working ability increases. Capital vol. 3 fn. 39a posted:We can give an example of this prognosis, written in 1865, of the fate of the commercial proletariat since this time, in the form of the hundreds of German clerks skilled in all commercial operations and in three or four languages, who are offering their servies in vain in the City of London for a weekly wage of 25 shillings - well below the wage of a skilled mechanic. Marx on 21st century education.
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Aug 8, 2017 00:27
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2-06: Volume 3 Chapters 21-26 "If everyone tries to live off the interest and nobody produces anything, what on earth happens?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKmAB_JSjbc We finally arrive at one of the most important but so far untheorised aspects of capitalism: the credit system. The relatively completed material I found one of the most interesting sections of Capital so far, but there's also long sections of poorly organised quotes or controversy with some bourgeois economist lost to history. Credit is capital given to another temporarily, that they may valorise it and then return the original capital plus an additional quantity, the interest. It is another way of securing a share of the surplus extracted from unpaid labour. In a sense it is the purest and simplest expression of capital, but also one of the most obfuscatory, the highest form of fetish. He seems almost offended by the notion of a money that is worth a different amount to itself, and a price that varies based purely on contingent factor of supply, demand and competition rather than a deeper necessity. Credit appears pure because its valorisation cycle is M-M'. No P or even C is involved, one merely lends the money out and gets it back plus extra. This of course only happens because it manages to secure surplus value from some production cycle elsewhere, but this reality is obscured from the money capitalist. More than any other form of capital, money capital loaned as credit appears to grow as an innate property rather than as part of a production process dependent on labour. The two main elaborations on this theme are the division of money capitalist from productive or commercial capitalist as functions, and the rise of 'fictitious capital'. The former leads to the rise of a managerial class, and the latter to a lot of monetary gymnastics with fractional reserve banking and speculation that unfortunately we mostly see in the form of tedious quotations from the financial world rather than analysis. All of this is very relevant to the modern world of parasitic upper management salaries, crisis-prone financial gymnastics, and skyrocketing house prices and tech valuations with little relation to material reality. Timestamps: 0:04:04 - overview 0:19:54 - the 'irrationality' of credit 0:41:03 - chapter 21 1:02:32 - chapter 22 1:11:36 - chapter 23 1:32:44 - chapter 24 1:48:00 - chapter 25 1:56:05 - chapter 26
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Aug 15, 2017 00:54
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2-07: Volume 3 Chapters 36, 27-32 "Some of it's pretty spiky stuff, some of it's very obscure stuff, some of it's you're-not-quite-sure-what's-going-on stuff." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ygBNzhNyeE This week is a little chaotic, and it's clear that this section is painfully unfinished, but there's interesting material hidden inside. Chapter 36 describes the existence of credit before capitalism. Like other forms of merchants' capital, it existed before capitalism itself, in this case as 'usury'. Unlike capitalist credit usury tends to retard development of production, but does serve to dissolve traditional social forms and concentrate capital, setting the stage for capitalism proper. There's interesting remarks here about the way capital allows capitalism to recruit certain energetic proletarians to the ranks of the bourgeoise, and on the origin of the national debt and the struggle between different interest groups among capitalists. Chapters 27-32 describe the functions and effects of credit and fictitious capital in a capitalist economy. Credit has important lubricating and developing functions but produces a great deal of scope for additional crises as it becomes too ambitious and baroque. There's long analyses of the relation of loan capital and the interest rate to the business cycle, and a lot of quotes from and criticisms of contemporary writers. I highly recommend the video this week if you aren't watching them already as it helps to make legible some of the more tedious and obtuse chapters we've encountered so far. Marx thinks of credit and financialised capital as destroying a lot of the legitimising myths of the capitalist system, and there's a number of comments in this section that suggest the financialised capitalist system prefigures the socialised post-capitalist system in key ways, which I'm gonna discuss in its own post tomorrow since it's bedtime and it connects to some stuff earlier in the thread. This completes the detour through volume 3. Next week is back to volume 2 and we stay there until it's done. Timestamps: 0:03:06 - overview: collective capital, credit vs. reality 0:35:00 - chapter 36 0:58:02 - money capital vs. production and consumption 0:59:55 - chapter 27 1:25:31 - chapters 28-29 1:37:47 - chapters 30-32
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Aug 22, 2017 02:23
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One of the interesting things about the chapters on credit is Marx's belief that the financial system points the way to socialism. Marx thinks the separation of ownership from management and the spreading of ownership among large groups of owners is incredibly important, for demonstrating that management can be just another job rather than inherently associated with command of the surplus, and for developing mutual rather than private ownership. These two elements preview what Marx reveals as his vision of the next mode of production in these passages, that of the associated producers controlling the means of production socially. But Marx also reveals his love of contradiction here, since even though the financial system is a preview of socialism in a certain sense, in itself it is an incoherent mass of swindling. Within capitalism this preview of the future cannot develop into the future because capitalism demands it turn back on itself to advance the imperatives of private gain. Whenever a large body of socially-owned capital arises, capitalism will attempt to parasitise it and suck it dry for private ownership - witness the struggles over pension funds or social security.page 568 posted:In joint-stock companies, [management] is separated from capital ownership, so labour is also completely separated from ownership of the means of production and of surplus labour. This result of capitalist production in its highest development is a necessary point of transition towards the transformation of capital back into the property of the producers, though no longer as the private property of individual producers, but rather as their property as associated producers, as directly social property. It is furthermore a point of transition towards the transformation of all functions formerly bound up with capital ownership in the reproduction process into simple functions of the associated producers, into social functions. page 571 posted:Expropriation is the starting-point of the capitalist mode of production, whose goal is to carry it through to completion, and even in the last instance to expropriate all individuals from the means of production - which, with the development of social production, cease to be means and products of private production, and can only remain means of production in the hands of the associated producers, as their social property, just as they are their social product. But within the capitalist system itself, this expropriation takes the antithetical form of the appropriation of social property by a few; and credit gives these few ever more the character of simple adventurers. page 572 posted:The credit system has a dual character immanent in it: on the one hand it develops the motive of capitalist production, enrichment by the exploitation of others' labour, into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling and restricts ever more the already small number of the exploiters of social wealth; on the other hand however it constitutes the form of transition toward a new mode of production. When we discussed co-ops earlier in the thread we rapidly agreed that they'd replicate capitalism to a significant extent due to market discipline. Marx was ahead of us here with the same point, as a particular example of the general point about structures that show the way beyond capitalism still being straightjacketed by capitalism so long as it still exists: page 571 posted:But the transformation into the form of shares still remains trapped within the capitalist barriers; instead of overcoming the opposition between the character of wealth as something social, and private wealth, this transformation only develops this opposition into a new form. page 743 posted:Finally, there can be no doubt that the credit system will serve as a powerful lever in the course of transition from the capitalist mode of production to the mode of production of associated labour; however, only as one element in connection with other large-scale organic revolutions in the mode of production itself. On the other hand, illusions about the miraculous power of the credit and banking system, in the socialist sense, arise from complete ignorance about the capitalist mode of production and about the credit system as one of its forms. So despite it being 150 years since this was written, with ever more sophisticated finance still crashing in all the same ways, we're still waiting on 'other large-scale organic revolutions' for the promise revealed even in the 19th century to be fulfilled. What those revolutions might be remains to be seen. Until then it'll be booms and the construction of islands of social capital, followed by crashes and the raiding of those islands for private capital.
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Aug 23, 2017 02:17
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That's a prognosis that's always worried me. If it's that unstable, how can it last, or be established in the first place?RedSpider posted:David Harvey has a new book coming out in a few weeks: This looks like it might be based on his free six-lecture course starting here. I'm going to watch it when I'm reading volume 3 since there's no dedicated lecture series for that.
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Aug 27, 2017 23:33
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2-08: Chapters 12-14 "What Marx is doing is putting this the other way around, and asking the question: Why is there this perpetual search to speed up like this, where is it coming from?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h47PlK5MjxM This is a really short week. A nice break after endless pages of quotes from victorian nobodies and a good time to catch up if you've fallen behind. These three short chapters continue to embed capitalist production in time and space. Chapters 12 and 13 defines the 'working period' and total production time, which hold up capitalist reproduction and require lubrication through the credit system. Chapter 14 extends this with discussion of delays outside the immediate production process, most of all transport. Turnover time is determined by configurations in space and the systems of transport that cross it. This week is very straightforward, and even the Harvey lecture spends most of its time summarising the material from the volume 3 detour, which is useful clarification. Nontheless you can see places where the concepts developed in volume 3 are relevant. Timestamps: 0:02:56 - summary & discussion of volume 3 material 0:37:09 - return to volume 2, chapter 12 0:54:41 - chapter 13 1:04:52 - chapter 14
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Aug 28, 2017 15:04
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I expected this would happen eventually - while I work on the next post, can I get a roll call of how many people besides me are still following along with this? I'm going to keep going regardless since it helps me keep up a schedule and organise my thinking, but as Harvey warned volume 2 has been something of a desert compared to volume 1.
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Sep 4, 2017 20:22
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2-09: Chapters 15-17 "In volume 2 of Capital, when you start to look at all of the circulation processes, you realise that the workers have a very important role in consuming the product. And throughout volume 2 this theme of the role of workers as consumers comes more and more into the picture." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao4I9nIHdLs This week sorts out some of the implications of the turnover time analysis, and then deals with the logic and problems of circulation implied by the theory so far. It's dry and sometimes difficult to follow, but lays the groundwork for important material in part 3 of this volume. Chapter 15 works out what it means for capitalist production to keep itself going despite delays arising from circulation time. The need to wait before the value of products is realised on the market creates a demand for additional money capital, and mismatches between circulation and production schedules create a supply of additional money capital. These two factors make the struggle to reproduce capital under real rather than ideal conditions a major impetus for the formation of the credit system. Chapter 16 has plenty of dry technical discussion of how to calculate rates of surplus value, but it builds to a more essential point that shorter turnover time is beneficial to capital. The Harvey lecture has an interesting discussion of this in context of the 19th century revolutions in communications (much more significant than our own) and what Engels tried to do with it in volume 3. Toward the end there's a moment where Marx gestures again to what communist society might look like and his view that capitalist anarchy engenders waste and crisis, and a frustratingly undeveloped footnote that lays the groundwork for the 'underconsumptionist' theory of capitalist crisis. Chapter 17 walks right up to developing such a theory but doesn't, mainly focusing on resolving questions and apparent problems of how the capitalist cycle can work en masse under conditions of static or expanding production. There's a lot of attention given to gold and silver production which is a little hard to get into in this fiat era. Next week we get to part 3 of volume 2, which is where the meat of it lies. Timestamps: 0:03:46 - start of lecture 0:07:18 - chapter 15 0:34:32 - chapter 16 1:20:23 - chapter 17
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Sep 5, 2017 02:29
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okay thanks folks, glad to see we still have people with us Probably going to take a short break after volume 2 to let people catch up some & unclog my IRL schedule, and because there's no Harvey lectures to lean on so I'm going to have to do more preparation. After capital reading more classic left literature sounds like a good idea, there's the bread book, and I'd also like to read Imperialism and State and Revolution off in the other direction so might as well do it in C-SPAM. It helps that all three together are shorter than the first volume of Capital.
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Sep 6, 2017 01:13
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2-10: Chapters 18-20.5 "So now we come to part 3 of Volume 2, and it's the macroeconomic culmination of the argument in much the same way that the three chapters which culminate in the general law of accumulation in Volume 1 are the culmination of Volume 1." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0m8oXLkE2g This week we finally begin to answer the question latent even since volume 1: how does this all fit together as a whole? The readings are chapters 18 and 19 and then up through the 5th section of chapter 20. After a short introduction to the question in chapter 18 and an argument with Adam Smith & others in chapter 19, Marx lays out a simple model of a complete capitalist economy in chapter 20 in the form of 'reproduction schemas'. Capitalist production is divided into two departments, department I which produces means of production, and department II which produces means of consumption. Department II in turn is divided into the production of luxuries for capitalists and the mass market for both workers and capitalists. There are limitations on the possible values of the capital invested in or extracted from each division, as each department needs a supply of means of production, all workers need to eat to live, and capitalists need to realise their value on the market if they are to reinvest and continue production. Harvey's lecture has interesting material about the history of the ideas here in soviet history and macroeconomics via Kalecki, Sraffa and others, and reading these chapters as a starting point for rational economic planning. He also teases out the tension between interpreting the equilibrium in of either use-value or value and discusses the question of effective demand as a source of crisis (Harvey, who supports underconsumptionist crisis theory, has to tackle a swipe at that explanation by Marx). Timestamps: 0:02:25 - start of lecture 0:14:50 - chapter 18 0:27:54 - chapter 19 0:57:20 - interview question 1:01:12 - chapter 20
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Sep 11, 2017 22:35
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https://twitter.com/McCaineNL/status/908378099640913920 Happy birthday, Capital.
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Sep 14, 2017 18:22
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Update will be tomorrow, got a lot of stuff going on.
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Sep 18, 2017 11:00
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2-11: Chapters 20.6-21 "What he's trying to do here is say what it is that capitalism would have to do if it wanted to survive in a crisis-free mode, in order to show that it can't possibly be in that crisis-free mode." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rSZo_aeuak This is the last week of volume 2 reading, all the way to the end of the book. Next week is the last Harvey vol 2 lecture summarising what we've seen so far, then a break for a couple of weeks so people can catch up and I can work out how to divide up the book without Harvey doing the work for us. We have our reproduction schema, describing how all the elements of capital fit neatly together and run forever at the same scale, reproducing themselves and supporting one another on an annual basis. Which is a problem, because the last thing capital does is fit neatly together and run forever at the same scale. It contorts itself through business cycles, shoots out new industries and lets old ones rot. So it's unsurprising that it's pretty hard to get things to actually work. The first big problem for harmonious reproduction is fixed capital. The assumption the schema so far relies on that at all capital reproduces on the same schedule is of course completely wrong, and its loss creates immediate difficulties which Marx works through at length. The second problem is expanded reproduction, which is likewise not impossible but tricky to enable without crisis. Of course the conditions of this enabling are often not met, so crises and waste happen, prompting Marx to note at several points that the problems could be solved fairly straightforwardly if only society were socially organised rather than an anarchy of capitalists on the market. There's also a passage more akin to the most interesting parts of volume 1 where he criticises bourgeois condescension to 'improve' the consumption of the working class, and as usual the Harvey lecture is good at bringing out some the more interesting aspects of a dry section of the work. Timestamps: 0:04:36 - start of lecture 0:06:33 - hoarding, fixed capital and repairs 0:11:58 - a look at a schema 0:23:12 - issues with the schema 0:41:15 - the credit system and reproduction 0:53:21 - the accumulation schemas, later economists & economic management 1:16:53 - human capital 1:22:21 - making consumers out of workers 1:29:38 - Q&A
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Sep 19, 2017 22:31
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2-12: Reprise "You've finished volume 2, right? Time to celebrate, so we can party." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Un72h95Ik No readings this week. After volume 1, we had already read more Marx than most people who talk about Marx. After volume 2, we're two-thirds of the way to finishing a classic of political-economic analysis and world literature. It didn't have so much in the way of those specifically literary virtues as volume 1, it's dry and without the polemic power of volume 1 in indicting the brutality of Victorian (and modern) capitalism, but nontheless it covers some important elements of the operation of capitalism. The three biggest for me are: acceleration in time, the problem of fixed capital, and the importance of credit and the money system. The faster capital can turn over the faster it can restart the production process, and the more profit it can make in a given period. This means it has to minimise the time between production of commodities and their sale, and purchase of commodities and their employment in production. Capital also requires larger markets as it expands and produces more value requiring realisation, markets that may be distant from the site of production and impose prohibitive transport times. This is why capitalism is compelled to shrink distances and accelerate reproduction. In the financial world capital is accelerating past the point where humans can engage with it, as trading is taken over by machines. A contradictory pressure is fixed capital - heavy machinery, but also roads, buildings, railways and more besides. Producing more faster, and even shrinking transport times in particular, requires investment in expensive pieces of capital that can't be easily disposed of, but contribute to the production process over several cycles. This disrupts simple models of the reproduction and expansion process by introducing multiple reproduction periods and constraints on the possible scales of production, requiring money hoarding or credit to bridge the gap. Fixed capital also provides a frame for thinking about labour 'flexibility'. So far in Capital labour has always been treated as fluid capital. It can be adjusted up or down as needed for each production cycle. This isn't necessarily the case in the real world, where some workers can secure long-term contracts, protection against dismissal and so on depending on the local position of the class struggle. In such a situation the variable capital becomes, in effect, fixed variable capital with all the attendant problems of financial commitment, stasis amid changing market conditions, and so on. Capital seeks to avoid these problem by making labour 'flexible', i.e. making workers as disposable, replaceable and atomised as possible. However living in such unstable and precarious conditions has a horrific effect on human mental and physical health. The imperatives of capital, an abstracted network of commodities, are opposed to those of real humans and stability of employment is another scene of class struggle, like the current struggles over zero-hours contracts in some countries. All of these problems - reproduction delays, fixed capital proportionality, and also the difficulties in the final sections of harmony between different capitals on the scale of society as a whole - tend to encounter a similar suggested solution in volume 2: money. Reserves of money, whether accumulated via hoarding or robbery or taken out on loan, are essential for any real, non-ideal capitalist system to smooth out the myriad problems it throws up. The volume 3 excerpts on the credit system analyse how this causes money capital to become capital par excellence, the purest expression of how capital works as self-expanding value, and the highest, most mystifying level of the commodity fetish. In the modern world, finance is the unquestioned dominant form of capital, the officer class of its armies and a chief method of disciplining miscreants. Greece is an object example: incredible suffering was visited on the Greek public by the simple method of limiting Greek access to money capital. All this to preserve the logic of austerity and the integrity of core European creditors, things not even necessary for the continuance of capitalism as such but vital for the maintenance of the highest possible level of capitalist class power. Any socialist movement will have to work out how it is going to deal with a hostile financial sector. Despite all this, Marx at several points in volume 2 and in the volume 3 excerpts points beyond this chaos and brutality to a brighter future. The disruptions of capital imbalance and scheduling are not, he thinks, so hard to solve if only you actually sit down and draw up a plan to solve them rather than committing suicidally to an anarchy of sovereign firms. And the combination of money capitals from the whole of society into jointly-held, professionally administered finance capital points the way to how the total wealth of society might be mutually organised and directed toward the good of all, even if under capitalism this forms the highest symbol of capitalist power, the untouchable wrecker, high finance. Timestamps: 0:03:12 - start of lecture, Capital and Grundrisse, levels of analysis 0:37:24 - q&a part 1 0:57:53 - interview question, Capital and (liberation) theology 1:00:14 - q&a part 2 There's one more volume left, and we've already read a big chunk of it. The remainder covers important and controversial topics like rent, or the falling rate of profit, which are essential for the long-term destiny of capital. However, I'm taking a two-week break before we actually start volume 3 proper, to plan how to do it without video lectures and give people a chance to catch up. And if you've actually given up on volume 2, volume 3 will be a good place to jump back in.
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Sep 26, 2017 03:08
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Late Victorian Holocausts, ch 5, pp 152-3 posted:In addition, wrote a contemporary economist, "the historic conditions controlling production and distribution ... had been revolutionised." Th integration of Burma's huge rice surpluses into the imperial system, along with the 10,000 miles of new railroad track (much of it financed by the Famine Fund) were heralded as providing the rural population with a decisive margin of food security. "Famine in the original sense of the word, that is to say as a result of a lack of food, has become impossible. In case of shortfalls, Burma feeds the Punjab and the North Western Provinces or vice versa; Madras comes to the aid of Bombay or the other way around. As Lord Elgin assured Queen Victoria: "The improvement of the means of communications particularly by railway makes it possible to cope with scarcity now in a way that was out of the power of the officers of former days."
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Oct 7, 2017 11:33
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3-01: Introduction Welcome to the third and last volume of Capital. Ernest Mandel's introduction starts: 'If the first volume of Capital is the most famous and widely-read, and if the second is the unknown one, the third is the most controversial.' This volume covers infamous topics like the relation of values to prices and the falling rate of profit which are the main source of arguments and attempted refutations or dismissals of marxian economics today. It also covers retail capitalism, the financial system and rent, which are the main ways a lot of us reading this interact with capital, rather than the idealised factory system. It was published in 1894, 27 years after the first volume and 9 years after the second, and 11 years after Marx's own death. Engels had to prepare the manuscript for publication from a single incomplete draft, despite failing eyesight and the demands of practical politics in the international communist movement. The details of the problems are summarised in his preface. Engels himself died of throat cancer in 1895, and the leadership of communism passed to the generation of Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg and so on. In the wake of the liberal capitalism's cataclysmic great war, this generation was to see and affect the European revolutions - successful, unsuccessful or betrayed - that inaugurated the struggle for, against and over socialism that drove political economy in the 20th century. Broadly, volume 3 covers three main topics: profit, credit and rent. It also covers various measures of prices as distinct from values, commercial capitalism, and the social (re)production as a whole with its concomitant class structure. The layout is roughly as below: Profit and Prices Part One: The Transformation of Surplus-Value into Profit, and of the Rate of Surplus-Value into the Rate of Profit Part Two: The Transformation of Profit into Average Profit Part Three: The Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit Credit (and commercial capital) Part Four: The Transformation of Commodity Capital and Money Capital into Commercial Capital and Money-Dealing Capital Part Five: The Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise Ground Rent Part Six: The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground Rent Social Reproduction and Class Part Seven: The Revenues and their Sources We covered parts four and five when reading volume 2 with the Harvey lectures, with the exception of 'the confusion' in chapters 33-35. Working from page counts (in the Penguin Classics ebook) and chapter titles, I've worked out the following reading plan, which keeps up a relatively easy and consistent pace: 3-01: Introduction (wb. 16/10) 3-02: chapters 1-4 (wb. 23/10, part 1, 57pp) 3-03: chapters 5-7 (wb. 30/10, part 1, 69pp) 3-04: chapters 8-12 (wb. 6/11, part 2, 76pp) 3-05: chapters 13-15 (wb. 13/11, part 3, 62pp) 3-06: chapters 33-35 (wb. 20/11, part 5, 75pp) 3-07: chapters 37-39 (wb. 27/11, part 6, 63pp) 3-08: chapters 40-44 (wb. 4/12, part 6, 70pp) 3-09: chapters 45-47 (wb. 11/12, part 6, 69pp) 3-10: chapters 48-52 & addendum (wb. 18/12, part 7, 96pp) The four weeks after the introduction deal with the definition of the rate of profit, the formation of a general rate of profit and the long-term tendencies of this general rate. This is where the most controversial material is, and if you're looking for reasons to read this book, being able to intelligently discuss those controversies is one. Another is that the falling rate of profit is one of the prime reasons given in marxist theory for the long-term unsustainability and crisis-prone nature of capitalism, and that's a pretty important topic right now for obvious reasons. The sixth week is the parts of the 'confusion' we didn't cover when reading volume 2. I'm assuming Harvey skipped this for a reason and I'm not optimistic we'll get much out of it, but it's included for completion. I'll at least skim it and see if I can extract anything interesting for the thread. Weeks 7 through 9 are about land rent. Here in the UK this is a central axis of politics and discontent, between the eyewatering cost of living in London, the gutting of social housing provision, social cleansing and emblematic mass crimes like the Grenfell fire, all presided over by parliaments full of landlord MPs with direct financial interests in leaving their parasitism unchecked. I doubt it's much less important elsewhere. Week 10 rounds things off with a look at the social production process as a whole, and the class structure and struggle within that. This week is an introductory week so we can all find a copy and do whatever initial reading we want. The free marxists.org text is here. If you have a copy with the Mandel introduction I found it well worth reading to cover the major controversies. The Engels preface is also worth a read, at least until he starts tediously arguing with late C19th economists you've never heard of and don't care about.
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Oct 16, 2017 18:59
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It's a fair question. When I started the thread I resigned myself to the fact that interest would almost certainly eventually peter out, and decided I would keep it up in that case to organise and motivate my own reading. I do actually want to read these books and have enjoyed doing so, and doing it in 'public' helps keep things moving even though the stands are now mostly empty. There are some things I'd like to post about, like the labour theory of value (spoilers: I don't like it), but I've put off writing up my thoughts because often I find something suggesting that what I'm concerned about is addressed in volume 3. I want to at least read the first three parts of v3 so I can see what Marx actually said about it before passing judgement on it. I don't, even having read two volumes of this and plenty of side material, think I could do a good analysis of Marx's dialectics and honestly I've never found a description of what Marxist 'dialectical' thinking is supposed to be that didn't seem either relatively trivial or metaphysical speculation. It seems like something that seemed significant in the wake of Hegel and to people looking for a secret key to make Marxism seem inherently or transcendently superior to 'bourgeois' thought, but which should really have been left behind in the 19th century. Or maybe it carries more weight if you've been exposed to or trained in a particular bad style of thinking which I haven't been very much, since I was a physicist at school rather than a social scientist. Doing a summary of each volume is a good idea, maybe aimed at the I Will Never Read A Book crowd, but (being totally honest) it would take a lot of time and effort which I dunno if I want to spend on this right now. I might do it anyway, or I might do it after I've read the third volume and can try to go 1-2-3. Volume 2 in particular I don't think is really worth reading itself rather than in summary. Posting more and more contemporary reading material is also a good idea and I was thinking of doing something like that for the third volume since there isn't a handy set of videos, but I wonder if it might not be better suited to the LF thread or some other less dead location. I do plan to do more actual analysis as I go now since I can't fob that off on Harvey videos any more.
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Oct 16, 2017 22:07
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3-02: Chapters 1-4 One problem with all the wrangling with surplus value, variable capital and so on so far in Capital is that it doesn't match how capitalists seem to actually think. They don't talk about surplus value, they talk about profit, and they certainly don't seem to think it only comes from labour. This is something Marx is well aware of, and which he tackles here. To start this book Marx defines two new concepts: cost price and profit. The cost price of a commodity is simply what it cost the capitalist to produce it, i.e. c + v, the total capital advanced (per unit of the commodity). The profit is the difference between the sale price of a commodity and its cost price, i.e. the . If the commodity is sold at its full value of c + v + s, the quantity of profit is the same as the quantity of surplus value. This isn't always the case (and the ways in which it is not the case become important later), but it being the case is a working assumption Marx takes up here for this phase of the analysis. Marx underlines a few times that a capitalist can still be turning a profit if he sells at more than the cost price, even if he is selling his commodities at less than their value and so seeming to be losing out in that sense. A further distinction between surplus value and profit is how their rates are calculated. The rate of surplus value that we are familiar with from volume 1 is s/v, the ratio of unpaid to paid labour perfomed by the workers. The rate of profit is p/(c + v), the ratio of profit to the total capital advanced. If the commodity is sold at its value, the profit is equal to the surplus value, but the rate of profit is smaller than the rate of surplus value, and continues to get smaller as the ratio of constant to variable capital increases. That's chapters 1 and 2. Chapters 3 and 4 go through some permutations of the equations and straightforwardly extend the analysis of the effect of turnover time from volume 2 to the new category of profit. They don't need to be read in close detail, imo. A major theme in these chapters is the distinction between appearance and reality. Marx grants that capitalists think about cost price, profit and rate of profit rather than the categories of Capital like surplus-value and exploitation, but part of the work of these chapters is to demonstrate just why they do so, and what are the consequences. Profit and the rate of profit are the mystified surface appearance of surplus-value and the rate of surplus-value which arise from how those latter categories manifest the concrete social reality of capitalism. It is only careful analysis that reveals the underlying nature. The surface appearances are not just illusions though - capitalists really do need to concern themselves with profit in the context of capitalist production and competition. This was something Harvey emphasised in his reading of Capital: social categories that are in a sense mystified and misleading, but still have real binding effect on members of society. This move however starts to put Marx's theory of the 'real' underlying nature of value under stress. If capitalists actually making decisions, setting prices and so on don't care about surplus value and the special status of labour, where does its claim to be the real nature of capitalist production come from? This is the root of my problem with Marx's value theory, but I know there's some important developments to come so I'm going to get through those and have another look at some volume 1 material before going all in here. We can already see here the shape of the famous declining rate of profit appearing out of the mist - if the rate of profit declines with increased ratio of constant capital to variable, other things equal, and if (as we saw in volume 1 part 7) the ratio of constant capital to variable capital tends to increase over time, then over time the rate of profit will fall. Or at least, this is what it looks like from here.
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Oct 24, 2017 03:08
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Electric Owl, sorry to leave you hanging, I've been a bit busy IRL recently. I'm interested in talking about dialectics and I'll try to lay out my thoughts in the next couple of days. I definitely want to get a grip on what Hegel, Marx and their successors were doing with this concept if I want to claim to understand them. I'm also less daunted by the idea of summarising the volumes having thought about it a bit - they're long, but I think the essential ideas can be dealt with in short format without too much loss (I have a book on my shelves that does this, but we can probably go even shorter).
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Oct 24, 2017 03:08
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Electric Owl posted:I don't know why anybody thinks dialectical thinking is some sort of philosophical swindle (probably Chomsky). It's like you said, Hegelian. And Hegel, being the OG he was, developed a method where everything is considered symptomatic of absolute ideals. So like, when Marx analyzes historical record and comes to his conclusions regarding the progression of the material conditions underlying certain historical epochs, he's simply attempting to devise a general theory whereby historical progress becomes explainable as symptomatic of certain predictable and opposing (in this case economic) prepositions (labour theory of value vs capital accumulation leading to an ever weakening position of the working classes for example). I don't think it was a swindle in Marx's hands, in that I don't think he was being insincere, but I think it is a swindle conscious or not in the hands of some marxists, some particularly dogmatic types who just use the idea as a cudgel, and the occasional non-dogmatist who seems like they're just trying to preserve the idea even as they empty it of content because they think it should be important. The former are the ones who treat it as some kind of superpower, possibly applicable to the whole universe including the domains of natural science, and suppressed by bourgeois society because they fear its inevitable revolutionary conclusions. The latter end up reducing 'dialectical' thinking to avoiding elementary errors of reasoning like forgetting that things can change. But this is a digression since I don't think this is true of Marx and I don't think it's true of your idea of his method. (My Hegel is limited to the Phenomenology, which I understand to be about presenting successive models of the world and one's place in it and showing how attempts to resolve problems with these models fail and lead to more sophisticated models.) Your model isn't any of the above which I was stereotyping from, but is the historical model of contradictory forces in history working themselves out. I guess specifically historical dialectics rather than 'dialectics'. I think I have a grasp of the basic idea but I'm having trouble getting hold of it in enough detail that I can apply it myself or judge attempts to invoke it. I guess my questions would be, what sort of thing are these opposing propositions (ideas? social structures?) and how do they 'oppose', and what justifies claiming this as a tremendous advance and gaping hole in modern intellectual life rather than just another limited historical model - which now that I think about it has had plenty of influence, since Marx is a major figure in history and the social sciences. If this is best dealt with by some book or article feel free to just link that, I can hardly claim to be unwilling to read itt  quote:Comrade! You work too hard. I'd be glad to help out writing whatever portions you'd think would make a good OP. I have a lot of free time since I told my employer to screw I thought about it a bit and it's maybe not as daunting as I thought. There's a fairly straightforward analytic core, which is the basic v + c -> v + c + s model of production. A good chunk of capital is just long-winded elaboration or historical material on various aspects of this which doesn't need to be rehearsed in detail. A summary of volume 1 by topic could go: 1. commodities, value and money 2. capitalist class relations and production (c + v -> c + v + s), basic class struggle elements 3. transformation of production (co-operation, mechanisation) 4. capitalist accumulation 5. primitive accumulation None of these is hard to get the basics of down. There are details that I think are important, like the stuff about how the structure of capitalism creates illusions about how it functions, how competition enforces exploitation, and how the oppressions of capitalism are 100% compatible with (in fact buttressed by) liberalism, but nothing intractable. What I definitely don't know is how to deal with the 'dialectical' angle since as I said I've had a lot of trouble with that adjective. Even if I think I could describe the content without invoking dialectical terminology, which I'm not sure of, dialectics is a big issue in marxism, so an introduction should give people something to hold on to if they go to read some more marxists that start off about it. Volume 2 is pretty straightforward, it's mostly just defining circulation time, explaining why reducing it is good, outlining 'unproductive' labour and summarising the two-department model of the economy. The stuff on credit in Harvey's lectures is the most difficult and interesting, but that can go in volume 3 since we only dealt with it as a detour.
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Oct 29, 2017 00:50
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3-03: Chapters 5, 6 and 7 Capitalists want to maximise their profit and, generally, their rate of profit p = s/(v+c). The rate of profit is distinguished from the rate of surplus value by the fact that it includes the constant capital c - the smaller c, the higher the rate of profit. So naturally, capitalists want to economise with constant capital. This is what chapter 5 is about. Mostly it's fairly straightforward - obviously, capitalists want to reduce their capital outlay and will do so by reducing waste, pursuing economies of scale, technical advancements, etc. - but there are some noteworthy aspects. Marx puts a lot of emphasis here on the importance of social labour - benefits and powers arising from mass co-operation in production. When capitalists gain benefits from economies of scale, these benefits are caused by the social, co-operative nature of production, not the genius of the capitalist or the powers of capital. More complicatedly, when technical advancement leads to savings on constant capital, this is because the productivity of a predecessor branch of industry has improved, meaning the unit value of the products of that industry is reduced. This means the other industries that use those products as means of production can fulfill the physical requirements of production at a lower value cost. And so as Marx puts it: page 174 posted:The benefit that accrues here to the capitalist is once more an advantage produced by social labour, even though not by the workers whom he directly exploits. This development in productivity can always be reduced in the last analysis to the social character of the labour that is put to work, to the division of labour in society, and to the development of intellectual labour, in particular of the natural sciences. What the capitalist makes use of here are the benefits of the entire system of the social division of labour. All the towering achievements of capitalist production are not achievements of individual capitalist captains of industry, but of society as a whole and its expanded cooperative production. Capitalists are just positioned to receive the benefits and mistake themselves and capitalism as the creators of efficiency and its only possible source. Economy in the use of constant capital is not always desirable efficiency, though capitalists would like to cast it as such. It also covers those elements of the production process that affect the life of the workers. Due to the time spent on the job, the conditions of production are to a large extent the conditions of life for the proletariat, and to be economical with these conditions of life means cramped conditions, minimal outlays on safety, and other efficient arrangements. These burn up and destroy the workers just like overwork in pursuit of absolute surplus value did in volume 1, but this means nothing to the capitalist - they can replace the variable capital from the reserve army of labour as required. With a similar logic to the restricted working day in volume 1, the destructive pursuit of profit by individual capitalists eventually threatens the whole capitalist system by destroying its essential base of labourers, requiring a reaction from the governing committee of the bourgeoisie in the form of the factory acts mandating certain minimum standards of working environments. The factory acts provide Marx with empirical evidence for his points in a section based in reports from factory inspectors, describing horrific and dangerous working conditions among various sites of Victorian industrial production. Even the most trivial outlay on safety can be found being resisted by capitalists, at the expense of life and limb. page 180 posted:Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist. page 182 posted:Yet it squanders human beings, living labour, more readily than does any other mode of production, squandering not only flesh and blood, but nerves and brain as well. In fact it us only through the most tremendous waste of individual development that the development of humanity in general is secured and pursued, in that epoch of history that directly precedes the conscious reconstruction of human society. Since the whole of the economising we are discussing here arises from the social character of labour, it is in fact precisely this directly social character of labour that produces this waste of the workers' life and health. Capitalism is a strange and contradictory creature. It is economical, but only with some things, and notably not human life (this point can be easily extended to cover ecological destruction). It promotes individual efficiency, yet produces an enormous amount of ruin through competition and lack of coordination. It is social, but to the destruction of society and the human bodies of society. It's reminiscent of the comments about joint-stock companies being a prelude to socialism that we saw in the credit sections. Aspects of capitalism prefigure the better society of the future even as they horrify us in their effects on the society of today. The last section of chapter 5, 'economy through inventions', is very short but makes a couple of interesting points. First, for theory, Marx defines 'universal labour' to mean 'all scientific work, all discovery and invention'. It is cooperative between workers but also builds upon previous work, and I think implicit in the name he gives it is a sense that it is the common work of mankind. However today we might say that intellectual property and the modern patent system have enclosed this commons like all the others. Second, Marx says that the first people to innovate and introduce some new invention to the production usually go bankrupt, and it is the second comers that truly flourish, as the technology is cheaper and more mature then. He says: page 199 posted:Thus it is generally the most worthless and wretched kind of money-capitalists that draw the greatest profit from all new developments of the universal labour of the human spirit and their social application by combined labour. Chapter 6 talks about the effect of changes in the price of components of production. Again there's some mechanical details that don't really need to be rehearsed in the summary and some empirical backing, particularly in a lengthy recounting of the cotton crisis in the mid-19th century, but also some key points worth taking out. Marx notes the enormous importance of the price of raw materials to the profit rate, which only increases as production advances and more raw materials can be worked by a smaller amount of variable capital (and hence surplus value). Marx doesn't develop this point but we can see it in action in capitalist imperialism, which invested a great deal of effort in securing reliable and cheap supplies of raw materials. This is the fundamental misdirection in claims that empire 'developed' the countries it occupied - it may have created certain transport and administration systems, but these tended to be only for the production and export of raw materials. Indigenous industry was destroyed, notably in India. And when the raw material they were expected to provide without question or interruption was food, horrific famine ensued (see the quote a few posts back from Late Victorian Holocausts, which is an excellent book on capitalist famine in the late 19th century). Marx also outlines a theory of business cycles based on raw material prices and temporal delays - investments to take advantage of an aspect of the market (low raw material prices, high demand for raw materials, etc) take time to come to fruition, so inevitably there is excessive investment, a reverse fluctuation, crisis, waste and human cost. No matter how often they happen capitalists never learn and return to their superstitious belief in the self-regulating market as soon as the trouble passes. As he puts it after discussing these effects in agriculture: page 216 posted:The moral of the tale, which can also be extracted from other discussions of agriculture, is that the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture) and needs either small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated producers. In chapter 7, 'supplementary remarks', there's a final salvo against the delusions of capitalists about their own action and genius. page 235 posted:This variation in the way the same mass of surplus value is expressed, or the variation in the rate of profit and therefore in the profit itself, with the same exploitation of labour, may also stem from other sources, it can even arise purely and simply from the variation in the business skill with which the two enterprises are conducted. And this circumstance misleads the capitalist by convincing him that his profit is due not to the exploitation of labour, but at least in part also to other circumstances independent of this, and in particular his own individual action. The emphasis is mine because that 'even' struck me when I read this passage. Marx regards it as marvellous and worthy of note that there is a part of the capitalist system dependent on the individual ability of the capitalist. This is in total contradiction to the cult of the entrepeneur liberal capitalism relies on. For capitalists, Apple was made by Steve Jobs, not Foxconn workers. Facebook was made by Mark Zuckerberg, not the gap in social media ecosystems waiting to be filled. This arrogation of the credit for social production to their own genius is essential to the capitalist's ideology, as it legitimises the arrogation of the results of social production to their own bank accounts.
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Oct 31, 2017 03:03
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LegoPirateNinja posted:Is there a good English hardcover edition of Volumes II and III? I have the Modern Library hardcover of Vol I, but they didn't do II or III because apparently they didn't expect anyone to actually read it. The only one I've found is a fishy looking one reproducing the original (translation?), which declares 'As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc,' which sure sounds like a scheme to rip people off by charging them premium for a no-effort public domain reprint. So that seems like a pretty big gap. I've been using an ebook edition but it does make flipping back and forth a drag.
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Nov 1, 2017 15:43
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Was out all day trying to sell my labour-power, posting about dialectics and the formation of the general rate of profit tomorrow. e: I was thinking of doing the bread book and some lenin after this in separate threads. Key for those is they're free, and also short which is a nice break after these tomes. I'm not going to read any more Hegel any time soon
Peel has issued a correction as of 03:26 on Nov 7, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 23:33
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The first couple of sections are okay imo but then the back half of Force & Understanding is straight incomprehensible and it never really recovers. One day I'll drag myself through his political philosophy just for the background but like, not yet.
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Nov 7, 2017 03:32
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