Very proud of us all who have kept it going. We’ve gotten into a nice groove now. We looked at the labour theory of value, and how all commodities are commensurable by measuring the labour time. We saw that money is a commodity (gold) used to measure value. We learned that surplus value isn’t generated by trade, because that would cancel out over the economy. We saw that surplus value comes from the variation between the value of the food etc. required to MAKE a day’s labour, and the value of the work done in that day. We have learned the general formula of capital, and how capital differs from money. Not only am I proud of you, Stalin would be proud of you.
Let’s use this shared activity as an excuse to also build camaraderie by thinking out loud in the comments.
The overall plan is to read Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week.
I’ll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.
Just joining us? It’ll take you about 8½ or 9 hours to catch up to where the group is.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4
Week 5, Jan 29-Feb 4, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 9, and from Chapter 10 we are reading section 1 ‘The Limits of the Working Day’, PLUS section 2 ‘The Greed for Surplus-Labour’, PLUS section 3 ‘Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation’
In other words, aim to get to the heading ‘4. Day Work and Night Work. The Shift System’ by Sunday
Discuss the week’s reading in the comments.
Use any translation/edition you like. Marxists.org has the Moore and Aveling translation in various file formats including epub and PDF: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
Ben Fowkes translation, PDF: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D
AernaLingus says: I noticed that the linked copy of the Fowkes translation doesn’t have bookmarks, so I took the liberty of adding them myself. You can either download my version with the bookmarks added, or if you’re a bit paranoid (can’t blame ya) and don’t mind some light command line work you can use the same simple script that I did with my formatted plaintext bookmarks to take the PDF from libgen and add the bookmarks yourself.
Resources
(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)
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Harvey’s guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
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A University of Warwick guide to reading it: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/worldlitworldsystems/hotr.marxs_capital.untilp72.pdf
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Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/
Why would improving technology increase profit, based on the theories we’re reading in Capital? Woulldn’t increasing technology (decreasing labour) decrease profit/Mehrwert?
Only relatively. Human labor power is variable and so different from other forces of nature, yet there are also various forms of labor. By cutting down the production time of a commodity (through technology), you can expand the amount of labor expended in the time allotted, and so increase surplus value inasmuch as the workers movement can be suppressed and wages kept static/rise at a lower rate than the unpaid labor expended rises.
The proportion of labor which is unpaid increases.
No. This doesn’t sound like what Marx is saying at all, no.
I don’t know what to tell you given you’ve shown nothing to contradict this. I’d recommend reading Ch. 15, Sec 3, Part C [link].
I’m not sure I understand you.
Surely you’re not saying that machines perform labour that adds value in the Marxist theory?
Can you explain what you’re saying? Coz it sounds like you’re saying machines do labour.
Machines do fixed “labor” (where there is no struggle/surplus), while human labor power is variable/open to struggle (this is where value/surplus comes from). Machines always require an input at the very least, and so are simply tools of production, both to ease the labor process (to wear workers down more slowly) and allow workers to create commodities at a faster pace. Machines are used to streamline production, and increase surplus labor exploitation by allowing workers to create more commodities in a lower amount of time. Contradictions only arise with machines in capitalist society, where exchange value and not use value predominates, and so machines lead to a decrease in profit (negative effect) when they sideline human labor power, since this is the only place where profit can come about in the long term. This is part of the fall of the rate of profit, but from the immediate perspective capitalists only see an increase in efficiency/profit.
Under the orthodox Marxist conception, machines are created by labor, which means that they themselves embody a certain about of “stored up” labor. Let’s say the machine costs $1,000 and can be used to produce 1000 things. Under Marx’s conception, the machine imbues $1 of value in each of the individual things it produces. Variable capital (labor) also adds value to the thing, so it costs more than $1, but $1 of its price comes from the machine. But you are right - the machine does not do labor. It stores labor, which is then released when the machine is used to make commodities. Marx repeats this a lot in Volume II and III, so it’s kind of easy to miss it in Volume I.
After typing the other reply I might not have answered the question directly.
An individual producer receives relative surplus value by reducing their personal labor costs relative to the market. This lasts as long as the industry has not caught up to the new technique. Eventually it does, and it’s a race to the bottom as individual producers compete against each other.
I suppose the sticking point might be about the level of abstraction or how “zoomed in” the analysis is. There is no abstract capitalist roaming the earth acting in its own best interest, nor is there an abstract laborer. The law of value operates through “blindly operating averages” and the classes are individuals who share a common material interest, regardless of their personal consciousness of their class.
The law of value works as a social average, in the same way that temperature is a measure of average kinetic energy, although individual particles may have a higher or lower energy than the average.
Value is dependent on the degree of technological development in society. Price is grounded in value in the aggregate, but they do not correspond for individual commodities. But price does tend toward value, i.e. to the minimum of labor necessary, precisely because competition between individual producers opens the possibility of one producer undercutting the market for relative surplus value. There is an explicit quote by Marx about competition being the basis of the law of value, i.e. prices tending toward labor costs. I can’t find it right now but I can look later if curious.