Format
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Reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. This will repeat yearly until communism is achieved. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included, but comrades are welcome to set up other bookclubs.) This works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46 pages a week.
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I’ll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Discuss the week’s reading in the comments.
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Use any translation/edition you like.
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
What is the relationship between labor and labor-power?
Idk… labor-power is the maker’s skill and labor is its result?
“Labor” is just actual work. In this sense I think “labor” is a verb.
“Labor power” is the commodity of labor. When I sell one hour of my labor to a capitalist, I am selling my labor power as a commodity. I’m selling my labor in the same way a farmer sells apples he grows. Unlike a farmer I don’t have an apple tree - I have no capital, I only have my labor. So that’s all I have to sell and selling my labor as a worker is one of the defining characteristics of capitalism.
Marx will get more into this later, but it’s critical to understand that Marx views labor as a commodity that is sold to a capitalist just like how coal or steel is sold to a capitalist. And the final commodity that a capitalist sells - like a car - is an amalgamation of various commodities. In this case, the commodity steel and the commodity labor power.
I think that’s what I forgot to think of… good on you for getting this point
Remember that labor is treated as a commodity, but Marx also makes it clear that labor is a special commodity in that all other commodities require labor as an input.
The steel in your example required labor and other fractional products, and those fractional products required labor and fractional products.
Which means all commodities contain within them some amount of “dead labor” as Marx calls it, which is just that accumulated labor value from all fractional products.
Pretty close, but there should be some more explicit statements by Marx near the end of ch1 section 2 and beginning of section 3. In this chapter the distinction seems accidental, but it’s an essential distinction to keep in mind in later chapters as it is a point of emphasis for Marx.
Labor Power is basically Horse Power. Like when you buy a car, you don’t buy it for its current speed, you buy it for its ability to do work (e.g. start up and drive). Labor is the realization of labor power.