Dearest Anons, We all need to read more. I've seen our posts, and our understanding of theory could stand to improve significantly. So let us read together and improve our discourse.
This thread will contain a weekly reading club. Each Thursday we will start a new text. The first few weeks we will cover some Marx, Engels, and Lenin. After we lay the foundation, we will move onto other significant figures from the Marxist tradition. Initially the format will be dictatorial, meaning I will just tell everyone what we will read each week, but I hope to eventually cultivate a cadre of regular quality contributors who can start doing some Democratic Centralism LARP and voting on what texts to pick. If you are some user seeing this thread in the distant future and we are still active (Inshallah), feel free to jump right in to the current week of reading. If you are one of the handful of well read posters that still inhabit the board, your participation and leadership by example would be greatly appreciated. My hope is that we can intersperse leftist theory with the canon of Western political philosophy (figures like Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Rawls, etc) as well as meme authors like Stirner and Dugin. I'd also like to eventually circle back and cover Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach so we can understand the philosophy that Marx built upon and the ideas he was responding to. Covering this wide array of texts will allow us to come away with not only a better understanding of the path forward, but will also enable us to give a deep critique of a wide array of political thinkers.
lol, did you seriously just steal this idea? >>>/marxism/654
Angel Gomez
nice, anything this week?
Logan Fisher
Week 1 - Wage Labour and Capital by Karl Marx
I have not read this text myself yet, but from what I understand it is extremely foundational. In the future when we cover texts that I have already read, I will post discussion questions to respond to.
no, I hadn't seen that. I'll crosspost it here.
Isaac Torres
One pdf a week sounds a bit less rigorous than what's needed to get people to where they need to be as we are rapidly approaching a revolutionary moment in history (discounting long texts like capital, leviathan, anything by Hegel, or critique of pure reason).
when discussing texts, I encourage anons to use a tripcode using the format above in the spirit of anonymity, I think we should all go by "reader". Don't use your tripcode in other threads because tripfags are annoying
i'd love to accelerate in the future after we get traction, but for the moment my goal is to lift the discourse of the board a bit by converting a bunch of anons that have read next to nothing, into anons that have read the basics of Marx.
Elijah Russell
Once we're past basic marxist texts would you rather organize a set of pdfs based on tendency/school, region of the world, or both?
Xavier Hall
Aight chief, I will try to contribute as much as possible. I Planned to read more after my exams so this is a pretty good timing.
Ethan Mitchell
Sorry for going off topic, as I'm currently reading something else, but my question is, what are the best Marxist works concerning ethics?
i'm making this up as i go along fam. After we dwell on the basics for a while I was thinking about jumping around and sampling major theorists like Mao, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. I also want to do Hobbes and Bakunin pretty early.
Jackson Lopez
Any good Marxist take on antinatalism? Was thinking about making thread on this but want to explore other leftist's perspective on this one along with planned parenthood.
Joshua Gomez
Based and redpilled. Lenin's rafiq posting doesn't count.
Lucas Brooks
Sorry what are you implying? I did not project any ideas in my post methinks
he's posting a marxist pdf each thursday (this time is Wage labor and capital from Marx) and we do a collective review of the text until next week, when another text is posted
Ethan Kelly
if you can't read a 150 word OP, you are exactly the target audience of this thread
Nice. I’m in. will start reading in a day or two, to post a review on upcoming Thursday
Noah Cox
Nice. I had the idea to make a similar thread a few days ago as I wanted to find the motivation to read more, so this definitely helps.
I've already read W,L&C so I'm gonna give it a skim and come back her. Just wanted to know, does the discussion span the whole week or just on Thursdays?
discussion will hopefully span the whole week. I'll read it tonight and start posting about it to get the ball rolling.
Jacob Perry
wait fucker, it hasn't even been 24 hours. I'll try to read today, but I also have to read some shit for my communist collective.
Christian Roberts
you fucked up your tripcode you big noob
Grayson Roberts
will discussion of the text take place in this thread?
John Butler
yeah
Henry Young
I'll have this read by next week. This is a great idea.
Connor Johnson
Can we like not read WL&C? Marx's economy theory was far from finished when he wrote it.
Jonathan Bell
i am the party
Isaac Turner
even very early marx on the economy is good. eg, Poverty of Philosophy has important criticisms of mainstream econ that still stand up.
Elijah Adams
I'll start of the thread with its first couple of questions then.
"What are wages? How are they determined?"
- Is it correct to say that: Labpur power is a commodity which is a part of the labourers life which he sells. Thus he exchanges a part of his life to continue living.
- "Life for him [the labourer] begins where this activity [wage-labour] ceases". This isn't always true is it? Some people get enjoyment or reward out of their jobs. What about these people?
- "He [the labourer] does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class" I know these text have to be read in context But what about people who work for the state, or are self employed. It would me a stretch to say that they would belong to the capitalist class. If so you could even make an argument that a capitalist himself belongs to the capitalist class.
- Is the only difference between labour an labour-power that labour is a measure for value and labour power a commodity which creates value?
Noah Bell
Marx often says something like the worker is "selling themselves." It's not a wild stretch to say they're selling "part of their life," but I think it's just more precise to say labor power specifically, since the porkies don't care about your life anyway.
The vast majority of proles just can't relate to that. Shitty, repetitive factory jobs (often poisonous, hot, dangerous), mind-numbing retail work with shitty customers, and so on. Never any real connection to the bigger picture or understanding of the whole process (the factory worker just focuses on his part, the retail worker doesn't know how to make anything). We hate this shit. But anyway, what about those people? What is your point asking that?
If they work for a state enterprise, and it's the bourgeois state, then it still applies. If they're clerks, they're not really proles.
Incredibly small number of workers, most people like this are petty booj.
Labor power is the ABILITY to do labor. Labor is what creates value, labor power can be purchased and sometimes create no value at all (such as during a strike). Value is measured in labor time, specifically Socially Necessary Abstract Labor Time.
Logan Diaz
'Life' in this case has nothing to do with enjoyment or things one finds pleasure in, after all, in this context you might come back from work just to have a fight with your wife and find out your son has become a junkie or whatever. The time spent during work, because it is marked by a disciplinary spatial and temporal exclusion from the world of social relationships (at least in the context of an 19th century industrial worker, because it's difficult to argue the same for some contemporary white collar and gig economy jobs), and is literally time sold for the capitalist during which he can 'rent' the worker's labour power for his own profit.
Michael Sanchez
, is experienced as time that isn't part of the worker's own life.*
Jayden Jackson
Why is it important for marxists to read Hobbes?
Benjamin Gomez
he BTFOs the anarkiddies
Easton Butler
Jesus Christ, ca't anyone tell an obvious shitbost anymore?
Logan Thomas
Finished the book today, what's the next one?
I found the book quite easy to read, it didn't assume any prior knowledge before reading it and I understand a lot more about the world I live in now
Matthew Long
is this still going ?
Jaxson Morgan
Bump
Lincoln Garcia
Why is the idea that time = progress taken seriously? the idea of socialism then communism as the logical steps after capitalism yet the world has a chance to regress as time progresses.
So is labour-power just the capability humans have to perform specific tasks that create value?
Capital is : raw materials, instruments of labour, and means of subsistence of all kinds, accumulated labour, and the human relations necessary for said production to be possible? Am I missing anything for what capital is?
(each and every on of these fuckers will be reported)
Justin Russell
I'm currently reading Strike War written by Thakin Po Hla Gyi in 1938. Po Hla Gyi was a Burmese oil worker and the pamphlet was written during a period of strike You can read it here:
I would like to ask..how does this paragraph relate to Marxist theory:
"The workers’ share must be taken from that 80 million kyat. The value of commodities is determined according to the time worked for their production. In the labour time that must be worked in order to get 80 million kyat, calculating how much time must be worked for the capitalists’ profit and how much work time must be worked for the workers’ wages, the workers’ share is calculated at only one sixteenth. If we divide according to time, in the eight hours per day that the workers work they work only half an hour for themselves. The remaining seven and a half hours is forced work time for the capitalists to be able to extort profit. One worker gets an average of one kyat per day. Therefore, if one worker produces commodities valued at 16 kyat, he or she gets one kyat as his or her wage. The worker must produce 15 kyat for the profit of the capitalist BOC"
Brayden Stewart
I've restarted this thread here: >>>/marxism/917/
It includes summary / background. I'll start a new thread next week.
According to Marxist theory, exploitation exists due to the difference between wages paid to workers and the net surplus produced. So, if those workers only received 1/16 of the net surplus produced, then 15/16 (or 94%) of their labor is being appropriated from them by the capitalist. By comparison, in a country like Britain (I think maybe in the 80s or 90s) the rate of exploitation was about 50%.
Anthony Gomez
Oops, fixed link: >>>/marxism/917
Leo Ross
why restart? is this thread dead? also: Bump
Alexander Hughes
new update: >>>/marxism/1162
Benjamin Reyes
disgusting
Robert Rogers
am i retarded or is das kapital hard to understand? what is this talk of thirds supposed to mean?
some amount of corn can be exchanged for some amount of iron, and vice versa. the determining factor in their relative values is the third thing,
Luis Brown
Kapital is hard to understand, yeah, and that's not even the most difficult. But don't worry user, you could begin with an easier text. Anyway, you're probably confused with that sentence because it's actually quite obvious. He's just saying that among two things that seem different yet have some sort of equivalence, there must be one thing that they have in common, which is this third. Corn and iron are different, yet a simple market exchange tells us, for example, that 30 corns equal 1 bar of iron. How can this be? How can corn and iron be "equal" despite being so different? Obviously they have something in common, something that it's not either the corn or the iron (labor).
Samuel Moore
Historical note, Das Kapital was quite easily legible to the poorfags of the era it was published in
Adrian Reed
I haven't read Capital itself but from some of his shorter writings, it seems like the confusion often comes more from just awkwardness of translation (the strange german word order and propensity for long sentences) combined with the fac that as you say it was written in the 19th century in 19th century tehcnical prose style. Otherwise he writes pretty clearly and methodicaly, for instance always going one 'step' at a time, often repeating and rephrasing the most important ideas, and giving examples to illustrate each point
