Holy guacamole this guy writes

Aw hell I haven’t even finished chapter 1

Damn 1 was rough to finish on time, I was still on a trip away. But dat down today and blew through 20 pages and just loving it. Not much to mention, but I for some reason feel like I’m enjoying reading Marx (not just doing it for learning purposes with no joy) for the first time in this case. Let’s goooo

Get hype

Alright, let’s get at it!

reporting in for posting duty o7

and yes, this week i have finished my communism homework on time!

Can you add me to the list please?

Nice summary!

it felt like he was just repeating himself in different ways

We all felt that

It was very grueling, especially restating the forms of value (which made me go cross-eyed). I think the main issue is that this is a foundational work, and so it has to be comprehensive, and also take baby steps to reach every point.

He started off with the most basic ideas and built up to a place that we all understand subconsciously. It all feels the same because it is such a basic understanding that people don’t ever consciously think about it.

Its like if you explain your morning routine in excruciating detail it ends up taking longer than it would to do it all.

I think the first couple chapters made way more sense to me when I finished chapter 3 and then go over 1 and 2 again right away. Maybe not that they made more sense but the reasoning behind why he started there made more sense and that made what he was saying more interesting and processable.

All good points, but it should also be noted that (at least as I understand it) the US dollar is a commodity because it is the only thing used to buy/sell oil internationally (until recently).

It’s alright. I prefer doing a lot of reading all at once as that’s what I find it easiest to put in my schedule, rather than actually doing 6-7 pages every day and then putting the book down again. So perhaps that will also work out for you.

Even in the worst case scenario, you can just start reading whenever it’s convenient for you (whether that’s in a week or in six months) and you’ll have the threads to look back on at least. If anybody right now is like “god damn it, I’m behind like 20 pages now and it’s just gonna get worse and I can’t catch up and–” then that is your brain tricking you, as the reading is challenging and it might not wanna do it. You can in fact do it and you don’t have to “give up” and try again a year from now when the threads reset - you can just postpone it a few weeks or months for when you’re in a better/less busy space. And think about how great it will feel at the end when you have actually read and (hopefully) understood Capital and have become an undisputed Marxist, no ifs, ands, or buts!

You can catch up by Sunday the 14th. Don’t fall too far behind. Read 8-9 pages a day this week or whatever.

Marx’s use of the Bible is honestly really interesting. Expect to see more of it through Capital (and even more the earlier in his writings you go). It is inarguably the single largest literary, theoretical and philosophical inspiration Marx has throughout his life. Marx’s library contained at least one copy of the Bible when he died, so it’s also likely that it (like Hegel) was something he came back to time and time again.

Some more Marx-Bible facts:

In his early articles for the Rheinische Zeitung he refers, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to both himself and other journalists as prophets and false prophets.

He closes his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” with a quote from the Bible identifying himself with Ezekiel.

He taught his daughters about Jesus as “the carpenter who the rich men killed”, reciting his own version of the story himself.

According to the memoirs of German socialist Max Beer (who met Eleanor Marx), Marx rarely had much to say about religion in her memory except, when her mother and sister started going to Mr. Bradlaugh’s secular Sunday services. This led Karl Marx to dissuade his wife and daughter from going there. Beer quotes Eleanor as saying: “[Karl Marx] told mother that edification or satisfaction of her metaphysical needs she would find them in the Jewish prophets rather than in Mr. Bradlaugh’s shallow reasonings”.

Some Jewish socialists have actually claimed him for the Jewish prophetic tradition, for example Abraham Shiplacoff’s speech in the 1910s said (originally in Yiddish):

Marx was a prophet, no less so than Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. With honest conviction and courage he proclaimed the economic liberation of humanity. He appealed to the workers of the world and inspired them with his conviction that they are destined to fulfill the great task of abolishing poverty, thus putting an end to wars between nations and classes, and, in doing so, realize the great thousands-year-old dream of human brotherhood.

Marx’s constant references made me curious so I looked into it, and the Bible has a shocking number of condemnations of poverty/oppression and outright critiques of markets, class, urban/rural divide, and so forth. The commodity-fetishism section from last chapter is especially neat because Marx secularises prophetic condemnations of idol worship, even using the same phrases (e.g. “work of their hands”).

If Marx was writing today, Capital would include stuff like “If by means of increased productivity the socially necessary labor needed to produce a pair of jeans is halved, then the value of those jeans also falls by half, as if Thanos had snapped his fingers at it.”

Marx wrote about religion and especially Christianity a lot in the 1840s. Mostly about how it is an alienated form that dominates over the people whose minds produced it. Sound similar to commodity fetishism?

This footnote excerpt from ch1 is relevant to the money discussion in ch3. Marx was not a fan of utopian socialist proposals of labor money, or alternative money that avoids the pitfalls of abstract labor by counting directly as social labor. Eg. if you work for 1 hour you get a 1-labor-hour token.

”It may therefore be imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character [of money] impressed upon them, just as it can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together.”

He’s dunking on Christians with their own book.

My favorite fun fact about Marx is that when Proudhon wrote a book called “The Philosophy of Poverty” in 1846, Marx hated it so much that he wrote an entire book-length takedown of it, published in 1847, and called it, brilliantly, “The Poverty of Philosophy.”

Funny the guy selling bibles is the one buying brandy, too. What’s going on in his life?

Yeah it’s pretty cool. Usually analytical thought is heavy on logic which focuses on states, so a formal contradiction in logic implies an invalid state based on given definitions. But Hegel’s dialectics focus on process instead of state. A contradiction is then a motor for change, a movement from one state to another.

The other nice thing about Hegelian dialectic for analyzing processes is that a contradiction can be investigated productively, whereas in pure logic, a contradiction is always negative: it negates the premises without positing something in their place, some new understanding of the contradictory premises and what makes them both true from different perspectives.

Mhm, that was an interesting footnote. I didn’t really think about it much in terms of supply/demand (even if that is there after I read it again) but just as the inevitable friction between using two (or more) separate commodities as commodity-money and attempting to fix the nominal value between each in relationship to each other.

Which is something I had not really considered for whatever reason, considering in my entire life the relationship between metals in coinage has been aesthetic more than anything (other than, for example) older pennies with a higher copper content becoming more valuable than 1c over the years and the alteration or in some countries the abandonment of it as legal tender).

I think it’s that and that for two commodities to be exchangeable they have to be the product of mutually exclusive private production.