Capital Reading Group - Wk 1

I read some of the first chapter and then I got bored. It's not the most difficult thing I've ever read, at least. I'm looking forward to seeing what other people have to say about Capital.

discord anyone?

>AIM for nu-kidults
Pass

Probably best to just keep discussions on Veeky Forums. Discord breeds idiocy.

sorry, no discord, an user requested it and it's kind of autistic. this is better so we can attract more anons instead of being contained in a chatroom.

you should read it so you're able to refute the false claims of those (((people))) who are trying to corrupt our nations youth

A lot of people reading this aren't commies; I'm not, but it's an important part of intellectual history

dont be a brainlet user

I get the feeling we're gonna need to space the reading out, reading three chapters of capital in two days is too much for me and I'm not a particularly slow reader

lol!
i totally understand, and the only reason im up right now (it's 4 am where im at) is because i wanted to catch up and finish, but we can do this, we can discuss only chapter 1 today because today is the official start of discussion, it's only 45 pages. I didn't realize how heavy the reading is when i was making the schedule so it will definitely be fixed. Plus this is a very important book to understand imo so taking it slow would benefit us, especially with stuff from our lives that need attention. No worries.

Im thinking we finish this week on chapter 1, talk about terms and ideas from there, then gather info on pace. Im thinking all next week will be dedicate to chapter 3, chapter 2 is really really short, only 9 pages and we can finish it by Sunday night. then
Monday to Sunday all chapter 3, 47 pages.

Yeah, user. Or at least watch some Richard Wolff lectures on youtube. At least know what it is you think you hate before you judge.

Going to catch up this weekend and slide in to the discussions next week. I don't think I'm a marxist but am a leftist so should probably read at some point.

Good job OP.

>a fucking facebook meme
Get a job you fat retard

I work. What do you do?
And I'm no longer using Zuckerspace. They stink.

Marxian economics is all he's still relevant for. A brilliant asshole. Veeky Forums should like him more

>Marxian economics is all he's still relevant for.
What a stupid statement.

sounds like a good plan my man

>Marxian economics is all he's still relevant for.
Did you miss the entire last century of Marxists intellectuals?

Eight little words.
His work is still relevant. But like Darwin, it's a little out of date.

I'm not a commie and want to join a capital reading group some time

Going through a chapter a day is a bit dense don't you think? Especially the first chapter being a big hurdle.

not OP, but i think were gonna reschedule things slightly to take this into account

Are we reading all 3 volumes of Capital or just 1? I'm downloading the files now and throwing them on my ereader.

also we need to establish a definite schedule, i'm with other user's in that if threads die i will make them, but we need to establish a true schedule that we will all stick to. honestly we can draw it out a little longer, it would give other anons time to divulge and actually read the material.

>mfw reading section 3: the form of value or exchange-value
how many more fUCKING pages

I think it's best to play that by ear, once we finish vol one, and see whether people want to do the rest.

lol c1a nigger/socialite sociopath insect

don't miss table C and D on page 484

Just read Capital abridged

>how long until somebody says 'communism doesn't work in the real world'?
You don't need to say what's obvious

Wait, you're rushing through chapter 1? Might as well not read it like Altbuaser suggests. If you're not willing to take the chapter slow like it should be since it's the most philosophical part of the book and the only truly dialectical one you're rushing past the chapter that shows why Marx is so confident he has nailed capitalism down unlike others.

see
OP here, just read / discuss chapter 1 until Sunday and discuss and ask questions till then, i didnt realize how heavy the reading was, it feels like reading math texts imo.
Sunday ill re make the schedule with page numbers and even when doing the schedule ill go into detail, maybe going down to what to read each day if you guys want.

Classical economics doesn't work in the real world, that's kinda the point of Capital. Marx basically takes its concepts to their logical conclusion and undermines them with masterful historico-social analysis.
Still, one should respect Smith, and reject the picture that capitalists paint of him, he was far from being a simple defender of liberal capitalism. He couldn't predict the power of modern corporations and utter irrelevance of states to keep his oft-maligned merchants in line. But there are many tasty radical morsels in Smith.

This thread, like communists, should be culled.

Capital is a classic of western literature. You might as well screech about Plato's Republic being a shitty social analysis, it's literally irrelevant. Even if every single claim in Capital was wrong (it isn't, obviously), it's influence as a work of philosophy is completely assured.

Every claim in Capital is wrong... and just because it was violently forced on humanity by one of the worst states ever doesn't make it's influence earned. It's the product of a bygone sad violent terrible era, it deserves to be forgotten.

Look, if you're not reading Capital, why are you posting?

Might as well start here if you're going with the usual bullshit about the USSR:
gowans.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/do-publicly-owned-planned-economies-work/

To say how this tread should be culled...

The entire Soviet economy was gifted ot it by the west. Every factory, every machine, farms, power planets, building, *everything* was designed by western firms. Anything that wasn't given was stolen by the Soviets. The USSR was on international welfare, propped up so that there would be excuse to continue the military industrial complex. The only reason that marxism is still around today is from the huge subscity granted by the state to universities. Controlled oppisition.

this is what americans actually believe

>it deserves to be forgotten.
>bumps thread about the book

lol

But that wasn't real communism!

>sage in name field
gb2 r/t_d gaylord

Stay clear of Hartvey, a particularly dimwitted interpreter of Marx. He conflates exchange value with price and never manages to grasp the importance of exchange and fetishism in Marx' critique.

pls make suggestion

The Soviet Union clearly operated under a socialist mode of production. An early form of socialism, perhaps, but how is a planned economy that abolished private property and allocated surplus value towards social aims, supposed to be "state capitalist" as the ultra-lefts claim? It's just a shitty smearing tactic from a position of ideological purity. There were elements of the previous system, as there must be in any society emerging from a revolution, but it was predominantly socialist from the 1930s.

Sutton was English. Dipshit.

Terrible ideas should be confronted rather than suppressed.

(((sutton)))

youtu.be/yQsceZ9skQI

I'm pretty sure no one will actually read Kapital and will instead continue the American tradition of being retarded and not understanding Marxism whilst repeating American anti-communist propaganda.

why dont you read it with us and help us understand? are you to smart?

Yes.

but it wuznt... real communism..

PRO-TIP: If it has a state it's not actually communism. The Soviet Union was state capitalism. The same people that say the USSR was communist are the same idiots (read: Americans) that say Norway is socialist.

>wasnt real communism
>it was capitalism

it was state socialist

Chomsky is full of shit when it comes to the Bolsheviks. Portraying Lenin as an evil power-hungry opportunist is ridiculous - if ever there was a commited Marxist it was Lenin. Then of course he excuses Trotsky, a guy who constantly changed his views and advocated stupid shit like starting revolutionary wars right after ww1, and then retroactively wrote himself to be Lenin's right-hand man as if Lenin didn't write polemics against him numerous times. Even Lenin's wife was against Trotsky in the end.

>"The claim that through revolution the proletariat will be “raised to a governing class” thus has nothing to do with creating a dictatorship of a political sect, but is rather a claim that the proletariat will use “general means of coercion” to undercut the bourgeoisie’s power (by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, disbanding the standing army, and so forth). It is the entire proletariat that is to exercise this power. Bakunin asks, “Will all 40 million [German workers] be members of the government?”28 Marx responds, “Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities.”

and

>But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

When one central authority owns everything... it's communism.

It doesn't, but we're here to read, so fuck off with your bait

?

and

In political and social sciences, communism is the philosophical, social, political and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of the communist society, which is a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and the state.

I don't understand why you're all so against a discord when it's literally just going to devolve around shitty political discussions that have been said a billion times if you have it on Veeky Forums

communism is when homosexuals burn down churches and force job creators to give everyone the same wages

COMMUNISM DOES NOT HAVE A STATE, YOU STUPID MONGOLOIDS.

You stupid American retards deserve your shit for being so stupid.

totalitarianism you mean

And yet, if you don't make use of existing state structures, the best you can hope for is holding some provinces for a few months until you get crushed. Anarchist revolution, the establishment of which is really no less violent and forceful on the population, doesn't work, it can't defend itself against the global forces of capital, build a sufficient output of resources or create a stable system that doesn't rely on constant, fervored engagement by the workers. Chomsky and his ilk can cry all they want about coercion, but historical examples have shown the general form of a socialist revolution that might actually survive, and it's a Marxist capture of the state. I'm not overly impressed by constantly bringing up Catalonia and crying about being taken over by evil communists. Fuck that, I don't want to barely hold on for three years.
It doesn't help that anarchists fully buy into western propaganda about the USSR, they just swallow it all like idiots. Not even liberal historians like Getty, Kotkin or S.A. Smith no longer believe what anarchists will about the evils of communism.

But yeah, maybe we should go back to Chapter 1 lol.

Thanks for the thread OP, I hope it persists.

Quite true. Doesn't hurt to try though.

Is it worth it to read the unabridged version? Are real points lost in the shortening?

if you guys want to make one go for it and do what you want, it's just not every anons cup of tea, and i personally don't like using it. I like posting here, but I'll drop it on the OP for next week's thread for others that like discord to join too. I will continue to use the threads only, for me, so that other anons don't feel like they have to join discord.

>But yeah, maybe we should go back to Chapter 1 lol.
i think I'm going to have to start from the beginning lol, section 3 kicked my ass. I hate the wording, like the style of writing. I get lost mid sentence because of the barrage of terms. When he starts talking about abstract of value, forget about it.
Question: this is supposed to be an analysis of capitalist production right?, so is Marx telling us how they produce and how they define value, how they equate commodities and basically what chapter one is about? Like he's telling us how it works right but are those his terms for what capitalist production is or are these bourgeois terms? help a brainlet out.

Kinda hard to answer that in short, but basically he starts off with the assumptions of classical economists, and expands them as he goes on. His stated goal in the beginning is to create a "pure" theory of capitalist production, before he goes on into the historical and social prerequisites later on in the book. But before he can do that, he has to explain the basic theoretical terms of the science, which does cause some difficulty.
I think as you go on you will start to appreciate that his approach is actually really good and intuitive compared to the way economics is taught on, say, a college course. Marx is preparing you to understand the basic process of circulation, and once you see that things get more interesting.

If you have trouble with the basic arguments, you should check Engels' synopsis as you read along:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/1868-syn/index.htm

what the fuck does western propaganda have to do with the ussr being a totalitarian state? every ‘socialist revolution’ has been captured and held in place by democratic repression. how is this communist or socialist in any form to you?

The USSR held out due to the broad support by the population, and western caricatures of Stalinist dictatorship are simply silly. Stalin was in an elected position and enjoyed mass popularity (and still does, unlike Gorbachev for instance), in fact he was convinced to stay several times after wanting to resign. Council democracy had its flaws, but it was a very inclusive system and in many ways superior to modern parliaments.
You seriously overrestimate the power of the Soviet state if you think it could have survived without broad support. In fact, in took about 2 decades to destroy the foundations of the socialist system, which was done by revisionist like Kruschev introducing badly thought-out market mechanisms. If you want a great example of a country that was toppled by administrative decree instead of popular support, it's the Soviet Union. Why do you think Russia has a massive communist party?

thanks I'm going to have to do that.

How's the reading going fellas?

>how's the reading going
Good man, just finished section 3 and enjoying the change in writing style for section 4.

The entity that assumes the ownership of capital is a state. It's still a state no matter what you rename it.

It's still a state, no matter what you call it. The state is whatever the individual requires to submit to in order to use property.

Sure. But communism is totalitarian.

If it has a state it's not communism. Sorry.

It's a state, renaming it doesn't change it's nature. If it walks and fucks like a duck, it's a duck. Sorry.

Communism doesn't have a state. Sorry.

Renaming it changes nothing. Sorry.

Communism, by definition, is a stateless society. If it has a state it's not communism. Apologies.

Communism is a *method*, not a conclution. The *something* that communism is *doing* is statist, it's the same something. It *acts* exactly like a state. Defining it differently doesn't matter. Chemistry could be defined as magical, but it's not. Condolences.

ban am*ricans from Veeky Forums

I don't even quite know how to retort to this because it's so incorrect. Honestly, I'm at a loss.

Ban commies from life.

You're at a loss because you're wrong. It quite simple to explain truth. Because it's true. While falsehoods require logical leaps and bounds, as you've deminstrated through le appeal to defintion.

>using Marx as an authority is wrong

I just don't understand. All you're saying is basically that it doesn't matter because this is what communism is but you're just saying it. There's nothing to back it up.

backing up arguments is for gays and losers

Marx didn't invent communism, in fact he writes very little about socialism in general. I have no clue what you mean by "back it up", I'm just using simple logic here, if you need someone to hold your hand beyond that I can't help you. The state does x activity, which is "using a legal monopoly over violence to enfore the social contract". Communism does the *EXACT* same activity. Thus communism is a state. The states owns everything, the commune *owes everything*. It's exact same thing. The scope and range of democracy *doesn't change the inherent tyrannical nature of democracy*.

>
>The entity that assumes the ownership of capital is a state
nice definition mate

The entity that enforces property relations is a state. The commune owns everything, bro.

how many of u cunts are still reading

discussion starts sunday?

I'm still reading it, actually, I'm going to go back and re-read w/ notes right now. Yeah, turns out this material can't be rushed through, even Engels thought so too

>"On April 17, 1868, he wrote Marx: "I have a limited time at my disposal and the summarising of your book requires more work than I thought; after all, once having taken up the work, I must do it properly...."

and yeah, Sunday will be the "official" discussion day but you can post about the reading whenever you want, then Sunday night there will be a new thread with a new schedule.

I've been slowly catching up because I am a very slow reader and all around kind of dumb. Or at least I now realize this after trying to read this shit.

Holy hell, fuck you Marx. Every word apparently is critical to his strange reasoning, but I just can't follow at times. And, for me, the grammar and occasionally the words are opaque as fuck too. His fetishistic use of commas is really throwing me off.

>If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value

Like this. I'm not even sure I understand this sentence. What's that final comma about, Marx?