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#WeeklyMarx Instalment 12, #GoodMorningMarx Day 90, Capital v.1, pp. 467-494, 14 secs 3-5, start of Chp 15.
As we learned in Chp 13 Co-operation, many hands make light work; many working together produce more than their individual capacity aggregated. It is a social process!
As we learned in Chp 13 Co-operation, many hands make light work; many working together produce more than their individual capacity aggregated. It is a social process!
One outcome of that social aspect of the labor process is the increased resistance to the domination of capital and the pressure of capital to overcome this resistance. A despotism of the capitalist. But special kinds of wage-labourers must be developed to manage and control the
labour process of coordinating the army of workers, officers or foremen, like the overseer on the plantation. So the capitalist now without the obvious coercion wields the power that the Pharaoh had of coordinating the coerced labour of so many to produce the wonders of pyramids.
#WeeklyMarx Instalment 7, #GoodMorningMarx Day 48 of Capital v. 1, pp. 299-326. Chp 7 sec 2 partial, Chp 8, Chp 9 sec 1. We have to go back a bit to the start of Chp 7 sec 2: the valorization process. Marx began a universal inquiry into the labor process as the human transmuting
of nature and, being shaped by that dialectical process, implying that each mode of production would have a particularly relationship to ecology. He specified at the end of the section, some features of the labour process under capitalism: 1) the worker gives up control of
organizing one's own labor to the capitalist, 2) gives up ownership of the product of labour and all its use values and value since the capitalist has purchased the labour-power. As we see now in the valorization process that the use value of the commodity of labor-power to the
#WeeklyMarx Instalment 6, #GoodMorningMarx Day 41 of Capital v. 1, pgs. 270-298, Chps 6 and most of 7. Crucial concepts of labour-power and surplus value and the valorization process. Follow @weeklymarx and @MorningMarx. Thanks to @PeoplesComic_ for original art! Follow him!
Last instalment 5, rushed chps 4 and 5, so back to the conclusion of chp 5... Marx shows that the surplus value required in capitalist circulation and classical political economic theory cannot be accounted for. He concludes that "surplus-value cannot arise from circulation, and
therefore that, for it to be formed, something must take place in the background which is not visible in the circulation itself." (i.e. not in the theory of market exchange itself). He poses a contradiction--capital cannot arise from circulation and equally cannot apart from it.
#WeeklyMarx Instalment 5, continued in Part 2. 25 tweets in a thread the limit--I'm too wordy! So we will complete Chp 3, 3:c on "World Money" and stop here. Despite nation state monetary systems, these markets are responsive to a world market, so Marx addresses the world
monetary system. Value actually requires the world market for money to realize its function. Marx has set up the structures necessary to understand now in an M-C-M form of circulation how money will be transformed into Capital. He starts this as a new section of v. 1 and chp 4
lays out "the General Formula for Capital." He recapitulates that the circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital, that the production and circulation of them in trade forms the historical conditions in which capital arises from the 16th century, when he dates the
#WeeklyMarx Instalment 5, #GoodMorningMarx Day 35 of Capital v. 1,, pgs. 237-269, Chp 3, sec 3b-c, Chp 4, Chp 5. So much to cover here since we stopped at p. 209 in instalment 4 with Marx forecasting the possibility of crises in the capitalist economy because of contradictions
arising in his analysis of the circulation of commodities even in a perfectly functioning market according to the conceptions of the liberal political economists he is critiquing, namely Smith, Ricardo and those following Say's law that posits because every sale is a purchase and
every purchase a sale that an equilibrium would exist between producers and consumers. But Marx was showing in the previous section how there was no requirement that the seller spend the money realized in the sale of the commodity... He will discuss the conditions later that
#WeeklyMarx Instalment 4, #GoodMorningMarx Day 35 of Capital v. 1,, pgs. 209-236, Chp 3, sec 2b-part 3b. Now we delve into chp 3, the start of which we skipped last week, so we start from p. 188, the beginning of Chp 3: Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. A day late, sorry!
Will try to catch up to #GoodMorningMarx reading schedule by next week! Sec 1 "the Measure of Values" establishes that gold, as the standard money commodity, acts as a material for equating values as different magnitudes of the same substance, as a universal measure of
value. That is what transforms gold as a commodity into money. Money "as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labour-time." The money form or price is the expression of the value of a commodity in
#WeeklyMarx Instalment 3, #GoodMorningMarx Day 28 of Capital v. 1, pgs.181-208, Chps 2, 3 sec 1-2a. Last week Marx developed exchange value, the origin of money, and the secret of the commodity fetish. This week, we summarize his initial discussion of the process of exchange.
Chp 2 begins by postulating that to understand that commodities are exchanged in the market through social and legal agreements depending on the mutual recognition of possession as private property--recognizing guardians of commodities as owners and commodities as alienable.
He is setting up in this chapter his mammoth chp 3 discussion of "money, or the circulation of commodities." So he clarifies that his abstract characterization of buyers and sellers etc..., is as a personification of economic relations.
#WeeklyMarx Instalment 2, #GoodMorningMarx Day 14 reading Capital v. 1, pgs. 153-180 (Part 1, Chp 1: Commodity, Sections 3-4 and start of Chp 2: Process of Exchange). The first two sections last week introduced the commodity as having use value and exchange value, but discovered
that exchange value is only a representation of value, which is actually rooted in socially necessary labor time, ever changing and variable according to historical conditions and is a social process. Wealth, all the material use-values, is different from value which is social.
So, as Harvey puts it: we have a situation in which objects have social relations between one another and people have material relations between themselves in the capitalist mode of production. Think about that! We see this revealed in the remainder of the chapter in secs 3-4.
First instalment of a fool's errand: a weekly tweet/tweet thread summary of 28 pages of Marx's Capital for #GoodMorningMarx, read 4 pages a day, that we can call #WeeklyMarx. Bk 1, Part 1, Chp 1, sec 1-2, partial 3 (pgs. 125-153, tr. Fowkes):
Definitions: a commodity, a thing that satisfies human needs whether physical or imagined/desired, whether an object of consumption or as a means of production (of other commodities). In physical form has quantity and qualities, many properties that are discovered historically.
More fundamentally, for Marx's theory, commodities, through which wealth appears in capitalist societies, have a use value and exchange value. The use value is realized in use or consumption. In capitalism societies it is also material bearer of an exchange value in proportion
