This post in the Anticapitalist Chat supports a group reading of Karl Marx’s Capital Vol 1. #GoodMorningMarx #WeeklyMarx
"I have joined a family, and like all families, it's full of shit." - Pablo Picasso on the French Communist Party.
The “bump of Christianity”:
Religious qualities are about the ideological conditions of excusing one form of slavery to ensure the full development of another. Is a “bump” like sublation or subsumption. Or does relative autonomy go up one’s nose.
Antipatros, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the invention of the water-wheel for grinding corn, an invention that is the elementary form of all machinery, as the giver of freedom to female slaves, and the bringer back of the golden age. [74] Oh! those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and before him the still wiser MacCulloch have discovered, nothing of Political Economy and Christianity. They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working-day. They perhaps excused the slavery of one on the ground that it was a means to the full development of another. But to preach slavery of the masses, in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus, might become “eminent spinners,” “extensive sausage-makers,” and “influential shoe-black dealers,” to do this, they lacked the bump of Christianity.
en.wikisource.org/...
In this edition this is the passage p.533:
….But they lacked the specifically Christian qualities which would have enabled them to preach the slavery of the masses in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus might become' eminent spinners ', ' extensive sausage-makers ' and ' influential shoe-black dealers '.
Even in the 19th Century there was a nascent form of interoperability.
Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work. The most striking proof of this is afforded by the relays system, put into operation by the manufacturers during their revolt from 1848-1850. Lastly, the quickness with which machine work is learnt by young people, does away with the necessity of bringing up for exclusive employment by machinery, a special class of operatives. [101] With regard to the work of the mere attendants, it can, to some extent, be replaced in the mill by machines, [102] and owing to its extreme simplicity, it allows of a rapid and constant change of the individuals burdened with this drudgery.
www.marxists.org/...
1968 represented the disappointment of a revolution in our lifetimes
In my view, the greatest danger to ’68 as a legacy for the global Left lies in the two most common responses to it – to treat it as an audacious but ultimately futile youthful indiscretion on the one hand, or as a romanticized, heroic, nostalgic golden age of Revolution on the other. The fact is that ’68 was in many ways a defeat for the Left of an unanticipated type. The desire for personal freedom, self-creation, liberation from the old structures, transformation of the very notion of self, and so on succeeded paradoxically in providing a vocabulary at the cultural level for neoliberalism, for the radical individualism that would create its political impasses. Here, we only have to think of social media, Apple, the Whole Earth catalogue and so forth to come up with the most glaring examples. In that sense, ’68 was a defeat, not a victory, since we still live on the same earth, and it is still characterized by the destructive force of capital and the geopolitics of empire. But it’s OK to have great defeats in the encyclopedia of the Left too. The question is what we do with this defeat. If we treat it with dispassion and indifference or even as an excuse for defeatism and conversion to the side of reaction, then it’s worth nothing, just another bundle of historical trivia without an idea in our rudderless era. If we instead insist that politics is possible, that the aims of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, emancipatory and insurrectionary politics are just and correct, then we can newly deliver an active, passionate meaning to this historical defeat, and make its contributions a precious lexicon of struggle for our time.
www.versobooks.com/...
Reading group’s supporting links and resources:
Contents
Section 1 - The Development of Machinery
Section 2 - The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product
Section 3 - The Proximate Effects of Machinery on the Workman
A. Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-Power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children
B. Prolongation of the Working-Day
C. Intensification of Labour
Section 4 - The Factory
Section 5 - The Strife Between Workman and Machine
Section 6 - The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery
Section 7 - Repulsion and Attraction of Workpeople by the Factory System. Crises in the Cotton Trade
Section 8 - Revolution Effected in Manufacture, Handicrafts, and Domestic Industry by Modern Industry
A. Overthrow of Co-operation Based on Handicraft and on the Division of Labour
B. Reaction of the Factory System on Manufacture and Domestic Industries
C. Modern Manufacture
D. Modern Domestic Industry
E. Passage of Modern Manufacture, and Domestic Industry into Modern Mechanical Industry. The Hastening of this Revolution by the Application of the Factory Acts to those Industries
Section 9 - The Factory Acts. Sanitary and Educational Clauses of the same. Their General Extension in England
Section 10 - Modern Industry and Agriculture
The Historical Relation Between Absolute and Relative Surplus Value
- – in capitalism, social labor produces surplus-value
– early on: formal subsumption of labor produces absolute surplus-value by extending the working day
– later: real subsumption of labor produces relative surplus-value by reducing necessary labor
– but the means for reducing necessary labor also can increase absolute surplus-value– amount of potential surplus labor– Ricardo: saw labor productivity as source of profit
– Mill: affirms source of profits in productivity of labor against mercantilist focus on exchange
- – by making the working day longer
- – determined by natural conditions of labor– determined by requirements of life
- – need to master nature leads to development of social division of labor
- – where needs are few, a great deal of surplus labor can be imposed
The Historical Relation Between Absolute and Relative Surplus Value
Although, as this chapter makes clear, absolute and relative surplus value often co-exist as capitalist strategies, Marx nevertheless suggests a fundamental historical linkage between the two approaches.
- On the one hand, during the period of the "formal" subordination of labor to capital, before there is any capitalist modification of the labor process, absolute surplus value dominates, i.e., the main way capitalist seek to extract more surplus labor is through making workers work longer.
- On the other hand, the historical success of workers' resistance to absolute surplus value forces capital to shift its emphasis to relative surplus value.
As soon as the gradual upsurge of working-class revolt had compelled Parliament compulsorily to shorten the hours of labor, and to begin by imposing a normal working day on factories properly so called, i.e., from the moment that it was made impossible once and for all to increase the production of surplus-value by prolonging the working day, capital threw itself with all its might, and in full awareness of the situation, into the production of relative surplus value, by speeding up the development of the machine system. (pp. 533-4)
libcom.org/…
Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16
Summary of Capital Vol.1 by Harry Cleaver is also found in libcom.org: (14) libcom.org/… (15) libcom.org/…
The making of the English working class - E. P. Thompson libcom.org/...
This resource is for those who haven't come across this before, because everyone needs (neo-)"classic comics" for free https://www.academia.edu/34506723/_Rius_Michael_Appignanesi_Marx_for_Beginners_BookZZ_org_
also this introduction to Marx’s Kapital (also free)
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-2ZCqM065WT7tuisv
and then there's the 13-part series by David Harvey https://youtu.be/gBazR59SZXk
en.wikisource.org/…
Reading Marx’s Capital Volume 1 with David Harvey – 2019 Edition
A close reading of the text of Karl Marx’s Capital Volume I in 12 video lectures by Professor David Harvey. Recorded at The People’s Forum in New York City in 2019. Links to the complete course:
YouTube Playlist
Podcast available on Spotify, iTunes, PodBean, and RSS.
Course Materials:
davidharvey.org/…
is an epistemological break like a metabolic rift
Four main components of Marxism By Raju J Das
November 20, 2020 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — In a recent interview given to Jacobin, David Harvey (2019) says this about Marxism: “I still don’t know what it means”.It is difficult to exactly know how to understand this cryptic statement from one of the world’s most well-known Marxists. But this is not an unusual view. Many “Marxists” are “shy” to define their Marxism. It is also interesting that while there are numerous academic journals (e.g. Science & Society, Historical Materialism) that claim to be Marxist, they do not explicitly define their Marxism. When they say they are open to all varieties — forms — of Marxism, the question is: forms or varieties of what? There has to be content for it to have many forms. And to the extent that it is possible to know what someone or some entity (e.g. journal or group) means by Marxism, this Marxism often has little to do with the Marxism that was founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century, and continued by Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky and their followers in the 20th century.
In the light of this, I wish to present, in this short article, the main components of what I see as Marxism, which is the classical Marxism of the combined 19th and 20th centuries. (This article is a heavily condensed version of Das 2020a).
Some central tenets of Classical or MELLT Marxism
Let me begin with some general features of what I consider to be genuine Marxism — classical Marxism of the combined 19th and 20th centuries (henceforward Marxism). Classical Marxism, for me, cannot be equated to the work of Marx and Engels only. It is rather rooted in the work of MELLT: Marx, Engels, as well as Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, and in the work of scholars and scholar-activists who take them seriously.[1] Marxism covers four general areas: philosophy (dialectics and materialism); social theory (or historical materialism, which produces general statements about all forms of society and all forms of class society and about major changes in history and culture from a materialist standpoint)[2]; political economy; and theory/practice of communism (see Lenin, 1913).[3]
In terms of its main tenets, the Marxist tradition is defined by the fact that it:
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possesses an unflinching commitment to dialectics and materialism;
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treats class as the most important social relation, and as the most important cleavage;
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takes capitalism, as a form of class society, as the most important cause of social-ecological problems of humankind;
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says that capitalism and its state, whose fundamental job is to protect capitalism, cannot meet the material and cultural needs of the people, so they must be replaced by socialism in the only way possible — i.e. the revolutionary way;
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emphasizes two major contradictions, one between the development of productive forces and the capitalist social relations of production and exchange, and another between the national-scale framework of the capitalist state and the global-scale character of the capitalist economy, the contradictions that fundamentally make it impossible for the humanity to meet their social-ecological needs and to live in peace; and
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sees the working class as the most consistent fighter for general democratic rights and specific democratic rights of the specially oppressed and for socialism (See Das, 2017a, chapters 1; 5-8; Das, 2014, chapter 2).
As already indicated in these points made above, society has four inter-connected substantive components: the economic, the political, the cultural, and the environmental-corporeal. Correspondingly, these four components of society constitute the raw material for the four substantive components of Marxism, which is the scientific study of society and a scientific method of changing it. Because the economic and other processes exhibit historical and geographical variation, Marxism takes a historical and geographical approach to the study of all these aspects of society.
[1] The mention of these names does not imply any call for hero worship. Hero worship would be un-Marxist. "We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life" (Lenin, 1899b).
[2] On philosophy and historical materialism, Marx, Engels and Lenin wrote extensively (for a discussion of their ideas, see Das, 2017a: chapter 5; see also: Trotsky, 1995; Ollman, 2003, North, 2007 and Rees, 1998).
[3] Trotsky (1931a) says that “Marxism is above all a method of analysis – not analysis of texts, but analysis of social relations.” Strictly speaking, Trotsky is not correct, any more than Lukacs (1972) is when he expresses a similar view, if method means philosophy. Marxism includes all four aspects mentioned here. Marxism includes analysis of both texts and actual social relations.
links.org.au/...
The Structure and Content of Das Kapital, Deepankar Basu,
DAS KAPITAL, VOL 1—150 YEARS, Economic & Political Weekly September 16, 2017 vol LII no. 37
capital is value in motion that increments itself in size, that is, to use Marx’s terminology, capital is self-valorizing value
Marxism gives due attention to cultural issues. It takes seriously the idea that how people think about themselves and the wider society influences their politics. So cultural processes matter.
Consciousness is a serious matter. While it is the case that there are advanced layers within the working class who possess class-political and democratic consciousness, it is also true that actually existing proletarians can be traitors, chauvinistic, narrow-minded, conservative, sheep-like and patriarchal (as Marx himself had noted). Sections of the working class can be and are racist and Islamophobic and support fascistic forces, just as they are reformists and electoralists. This happens in part because in capitalism, common people have to compete for dwindling jobs and increasingly limited government welfare, etc., and in the process they blame certain oppressed groups for their own conditions. As well, capitalism’s political-cultural apparatuses (e.g. parties, media) spread hatred among common people in order to divide their united opposition to capital.
Marxism takes seriously the special oppression of women (including the issues surrounding privatized social reproduction) within capitalism (see Gimenez, 2018; Engels, 1884). It takes oppression of racialized and other minorities seriously, always connecting such oppression to class exploitation and without compromising with any idea or practice that simply is focussed on recognition-ism and concession to privileged layers of women and other minorities (Das, 2020b). Indeed, Lenin's “Tribune of the people” is a fundamental Marxist principle in relation to oppression. In the light of ongoing racial oppression and police violence against oppressed groups such as Blacks in the US and dalits (ex-untouchables) and Muslims in India, it is useful to recall Lenin’s (1901) famous lines:
[The Marxist-socialist is] the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects…[and] who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation(italics added).
Marx’s idea is that that all struggles (including) within the state, are ultimately “the struggles of the different classes”, and yet there are struggles that are patently not class struggles, at least not immediately. An important Marxist task is to explore the relations that class struggle and class relations have to the struggles that are based in non-class relations such as ethnicity, race and caste. The non-class struggles may have a degree of autonomy within limits vis a vis class struggles or may express class struggles in a mediated and distorted manner.
Social oppression and struggles against it are very important. Yet, in Marxism, the basic division of society is the class division, and not the one between Blacks and whites or women and men or lower and upper castes, and so on (Das, 2020b).
links.org.au/...
RW conspiracy theories about a “cultural Marxism” are essentially antisemitic.
According to their delirious foes, “cultural Marxists” are an unholy alliance of abortionists, feminists, globalists, homosexuals, intellectuals and socialists who have translated the far left’s old campaign to take away people’s privileges from “class struggle” into “identity politics” and multiculturalism…
[...]
Some Marxists, like the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci and his intellectual heirs, tried to understand how the class rule they criticized worked through cultural domination. And today, it’s true that on campus and off, many people are directing their ire at the advantages that white males have historically enjoyed. But neither the defense of the workers nor of other disempowered groups was a conspiracy on its own, and never was there a malignant plot to convert the first into the second — which is what “cultural Marxism” implies. Deployed to avoid claims of injustice, the charge functions to whip up agitated frenzy or inspire visions of revenge.
And while increasingly popular worries about cosmopolitan elites and economic globalization can sometimes transcend the most noxious anti-Semitism, talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable from it. The legend of cultural Marxism recycles old anti-Semitic tropes to give those who feel threatened a scapegoat.
A number of the conspiracy theorists tracing the origins of “cultural Marxism” assign outsize significance to the Frankfurt School, an interwar German — and mostly Jewish — intellectual collective of left-wing social theorists and philosophers. Many members of the Frankfurt School fled Nazism and came to the United States, which is where they supposedly uploaded the virus of cultural Marxism to America. These zany stories of the Frankfurt School’s role in fomenting political correctness would be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals ruling the world that fed the right’s paranoid imagination in prior eras.
The wider discourse around cultural Marxism today resembles nothing so much as a version of the Judeobolshevik myth updated for a new age. In the years after the Russian Revolution, fantasists took advantage of the fact that many of its instigators were Jewish to suggest that people could save time by equating Judaism and communism — and kill off both with one blow. As the historian Paul Hanebrink recounts in an unnerving new study, according to the Judeobolshevik myth, the instigators of communism were the Jews as a whole, not some tiny band of thinkers, conniving as a people to bring communist irreligion and revolution worldwide.
www.nytimes.com/...
www.wikihow.com/...
- ↑http://marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1903/economic/index.htm
- ↑http://libcom.org/library/reading-capital-politically-cleaver
- ↑http://davidharvey.org/
- ↑http://librivox.org/capital-volume-1-by-karl-marx/
Read books of interpretations by modern authors.
How to Read Marx's Capital by Louis Althusser (1969) and other works by Althusser.
Read Harry M. Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically (1979)[2] .
Read the writings of Ernest Mandel (late 20th Century).
Read Marx's "Das Kapital": A Biography - A Book That Shook the World by Francis Wheen (2006).
Reclaiming Marx's Capital by Andrew Kliman.
Marx's Capital by Ben Fine and Alfred Saad-Filho.
A Companion to Marx's Capital by David Harvey.
www.wikihow.com/...