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)

  • Sasuke [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    This is not the place, however, for us to show how division of labour seizes upon, not only the economics, but every sphere of society, and everywhere lays the foundation for that specialisation, that development in a man of one singular faculty at the expense of all others…"

    p. 474 in my penguin edition

    I’ve been reading a lot of jameson lately, and this is a point he repeatedly emphasises in his critique of postmodernism — how “postmodern” philosophers, in their rejection of grand narratives and totalizing theories, have completely failed to grasp the social reality produced by capitalism or something like that

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

      That’s interesting. If it’s not too hard to find, do you have a book or article on that?

      I do think this point is relevant to the increasing specialization in the sciences. Look no further than the separation of politics, economics, history, and sociology as independent areas of study.

      • Sasuke [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        Sure! Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989) is probably the go-to book for a Marxist critique of postmodernism and the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ within Western philosophy (i.e. the obsession with text, sign, signifiers and so on). That, and maybe David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989).

        For a more recent look at the state of academia, the introduction to Jason Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021) gives a decent overview of some of the discourses and practices postmodernism has produced (like the separation within the sciences; the tendency to favor ‘micro’ histories over larger narratives; the distrust of reason/knowledge etc.)

        I also recently came across this article from a didactics study that’s quite good (it summarizes some of the core arguments made by Jameson and other Marxist in the 90s):

        "Brosio, A. Richard. 1994. “Postmodernism as the Cultural Skin of Late Capitalism: Educational Consequences..”

        Some quotes from Brosio on the concept of totality:

        Many postmodernist thinkers do not believe it is possible to employ intellectual activity to unmask oppression and injustice, partly because of their fear that all forms of inquiry merely refer persons from one authority to another, therefore adding to the perpetuation of authoritarianism. . . . How convenient this is to those who exercise real power.

        One must add that writers in France and elsewhere in the West successfully have represented totalism as a dangerous Leftist concept that allegedly leads inevitably to the gulag, instead of as a description of global capitalism and its current hegemony that makes radical change seem not only unattractive to most but impossible because of the very nature of things

        It would be fair to say that the consequence of giving up the concept of totalization is to repudiate the possibilities for theoretically informed collective action