Ok comrades, we have quite a bit done, we are well into our stride. Look at those fat juicy progress bars: while there is still a long way to go, remember how recently they were just a flimsy few pixels. Last week we left behind Dickensian factories and looked at the liminal space between master crasftsmen’s workshops and the drone-work on assembly lines. Now we are going to get into more detail on how that change happens, and how factory-work takes hold of society.

Don’t forget that this is a club: it is a shared activity. We engage with Karl Marx, and we also engage with each other in the comments and build camaraderie.

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 15-16 hours to catch up to where the group is. Use the archives below to help you.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7

Week 8, Feb 19-25, we are reading from Volume 1: what remains of Chapter 14 (i.e. sections 3,4 and 5), plus section 1 of Chapter 15

In other words, aim to reach the heading ‘The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product’ by Sunday

Discuss the week’s reading in the comments.

Use any translation/edition you like. Marxists.org has the Moore and Aveling translation in various file formats including epub and PDF: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

Ben Fowkes translation, PDF: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D

AernaLingus says: I noticed that the linked copy of the Fowkes translation doesn’t have bookmarks, so I took the liberty of adding them myself. You can either download my version with the bookmarks added, or if you’re a bit paranoid (can’t blame ya) and don’t mind some light command line work you can use the same simple script that I did with my formatted plaintext bookmarks to take the PDF from libgen and add the bookmarks yourself.

Audiobook of Ben Fowkes translation, American accent, male, links are to alternative invidious instances: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9

Resources

(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)

  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    9 months ago

    Toward the end of last week’s reading, in chapter 13, Marx again traced an effect of the two-fold character of capitalist production, this time manifesting in the two-fold character of the control of the capitalist within the workplace.

    [T]he connexion existing between their various labours appears to them, ideally, in the shape of a preconceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of the authority of the same capitalist, in the shape of the powerful will of another, who subjects their activity to his aims. If, then, the control of the capitalist is in substance two-fold by reason of the two-fold nature of the process of production itself, which, on the one hand, is a social process for producing use-values, on the other, a process for creating surplus-value; in form, that control is despotic.

    I have been keeping note of these two-fold things since it helps me track which things are specifically capitalist and which might be inherent to production in general.

    • Vampire [any]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      two-fold character of the control of the capitalist within the workplace.

      Basically the owner & the manager.

      which things are specifically capitalist and which might be inherent to production in general.

      It took very close reading of the last passage to figure out was Marx saying is detail work specifically capitalist or inherent to large-scale production

      • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        two-fold character of the control of the capitalist within the workplace.

        I read it as a direct correspondence to the value/use-value split. For producing use-value, the capitalist superintends the laborers, so as to organize their cooperation; to this end it is basically a good thing, a necessary aspect of cooperation in general. But because the capitalist also has in mind surplus-value, this superintendence takes on a “despotic” character, it spirals to ever greater intensity, because it is in the interest of the capitalist to push labor harder and harder without limit. The first aspect of organizing cooperative labor is natural, the latter aspect specific to capitalism.

        Is this what you meant by owner & manager? The owner wants surplus-value, whereas the manager is focused on use-value, the technical work to be done?

        • Vampire [any]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          “As co-operation extends its scale, this despotism develops the forms that are peculiar to it. Just as at first the capitalist is relieved from actual labour as soon as his capital has reached that minimum amount with which capitalist production, properly speaking, first begins, so now he hands over the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and groups of workers to a special kind of wage-labourer”

          There is where Marx starts talking about capitalist-as-manager.

          As for capitalist-as-owner, well that’s been discussed at great length.

          The manager and the owner can be the same person or different people. e.g. a shareholder or venture capitalist performs the functions of capitalists that we’ve seen at length (providing money for fixed and variable capital) but doesn’t do “the work of direct and constant supervision”. On the other hand, the guy who owns your local tyre shop probably runs it too.

        • Vampire [any]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
          4·
          9 months ago

          “While division of labour in society at large, whether such division be brought about or not by exchange of commodities, is common to economic formations of society the most diverse, division of labour in the workshop, as practised by manufacture, is a special creation of the capitalist mode of production alone.”

          Finally at the end of Ch.14 Sec.4 he makes it clear whether or not Manufaktur is capitalist or not.