Good work so far, crew. We are about a quarter of the way through Volume 1 and about 10% of the way through the whole thing. Having said that, we’re also about 10% of the way through 2024, so don’t get too comfortable, keep pedalling.
Having set up the idea of surplus-labour as the source of profit, Marx looked at how this plays out in practice, how it affects people’s lives.
I think we have a minimum of 8 people reading; it could even be 12 or 13.
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 10½ hours to catch up to where the group is.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5
Week 6, Feb 5-11, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 10 Sections 4, 5, 6, and 7.
In other words, read from the heading ‘4. Day Work and Night Work. The Shift System’ to the end of the chapter
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)
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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/
That is quite the statement.
I think Marx associated Protestantism with capitalist ideology and Catholicism with feudal ideology. I forget which writing but it was probably in The Holy Family.
seems reasonable
what’s paganism?
A complicated topic.
“Paganism” in the sense of “Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian or Mesopotamian” is fairly straightforward; in “On the Leading Article in No. 179 of Kölnische Zeitung” Marx wrote:
So in this case Marx would likely argue that their religion is simply “our state; our nation; ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’”. Interestingly, Marx argues that constitutionalists are similarly religious.
“Paganism” in the sense of “animism” and/or indigenous religions generally is more contentious, because Marx wasn’t able to access sources on them other than second/thirdhand accounts by bigots. So while Marx in Capital makes claims about ‘primitive nature worship of the savage’, I’m unsure what he is actually talking about.
Explanations from actual indigenous people about their spirituality/‘religion’ (e.g. God is Red and Bridging Cultures) have little in common with Marx’s depiction. Some (e.g. Frank Black-Elk in “Observations on Marxism and Lakota Tradition”) assert that their religion/spirituality is dialectical-er and materialist-er than Marx.
Good answer
I haven’t read anything relating to that, I think he primarily concerned himself with Christianity because it was by far the dominant religion in Western Europe
After Constantine it was, yea. He has talked about Greece and Rome a bunch of times in what we’ve seen so far.
It doesn’t come up much yeah. He sorta beats metaphysics to death in the 1840s and then drops the topic as far as I can tell from what Marx-works and biographies I’ve read.
Ancient societies (actually, anything pre-1500ish) is sorta an unknown for Marx and Engels compared to us.
For the middle ages, they have the Renaissance and Enlightenment “Middle ages suck” circlejerk to rely on, as medieval archival research wasnt nearly as thorough.
For Rome and Greece, they had Roman and Greek histories and mythologies that survived; none of the massive professional archaeological excavations or examinations of inscriptions and surviving archival documents was availible.
Before that, their only source is—The Bible. Unironically; until combined archaeology, linguistics and imperialism enabled access to the ancient tablets and such, the Bible was all there was for stuff that old.
Yeah he makes this sorta association throughout his work (I’m seeing it rn reading Critical Marginal Notes on the Article By a Prussian for example). One thing that should be noted for pedantic historical reasons: the catholicism and feudalism marx discusses are generally the catholicism and feudalism of 17th century europe at earliest, a long while after markets have pretty well penetrated and dissolved everything and turned it towards the production of exchange values (in England, this process actually seems to have nearly finished as England emerges into socio-economic history c.1350)
Yeah, and if anything it’s an understatement— he doesn’t mention 1. the expropriation of church lands; 2; consequent collapse of what little organised aid for the poor there was; 3. destruction of local religious/cultural/social organisations (saint cults); 4. stricter enforcement of orthdoxy, 5. destruction of the (admittesly limited) fetters of church law and “sacred world”