World of LenidzkyReadings: Capital I, ch. 16-18; Grundrisse pp. 398-423, 649-652, 745-758; Capital III, ch. 10, 50; Limits to Capital, pp. 45-54 While the Grundrisse is challenging to read because it is often written just as Marx’s notes to himself, it contains significant theoretical material that complements the more formal presentation of Capital. One point that stands […]
Reading: Capital I, ch. 15, sections 5-10 In class 8, on the first part of chapter 15, Harvey focused considerable attention on footnote 4, on pages 493-4. This footnote contains important theoretical material that situates Marx’s discussion of the technology of large-scale industry in his theory of historical materialism. In order to be succinct, I […]
Reading: Capital I, ch. 15, sections 1-4 In Marx’s time, large-scale machinery was the highest form of development of the means of production, relegating simple cooperation and manufacture to obsolescence. (We will bracket for now the question of how significant subsequent technological revolutions have been for the labor process.) It is characterized by a vast […]
Reading: Capital I, ch. 12-14 Part 4, which covers relative surplus value, begins by first describing the basic economics of relative surplus value and then providing the reader with the historical background for its emergence as a key tool for capitalists to increase surplus value. I will skip the discussion of the economics because, while […]
Reading: Capital I, ch. 10-11 These chapters largely finish off Marx’s discussion of absolute surplus value by bringing us up through early- and late-modern European (mostly British) history into Marx’s period, in which industrial capitalism had established political-economic hegemony over the continent. His hint at the end of chapter 11 is that, while absolute surplus […]
Reading: Capital I, ch. 7-9 In my previous readings of Capital, I have glossed over some of Marx’s more subjective reactions to the economic processes he is describing, i.e. the fact that he hates them. The core purpose of Volume I is to analyze the extraction of surplus value from workers by capitalists and what […]
Reading: Capital I, ch. 4-6; Capital II, ch. 1; Capital I, “Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production”; Capital I, ch. 19-21; Grundrisse, pp. 239-272; Limits to Capital, pp. 20-24 This week’s reading brought to the front of my mind Marx’s dialectical method. Throughout the book, he uses a plethora of literary devices to […]
Reading: Capital I, ch. 2-3; Limits to Capital (Harvey), pp. 1-20; Critique of Political Economy, ch. 2 In chapter 3, in his extended discussion of the circulation of money and commodities, Marx explains the dialectical movement of this process as follows: “Commodities first enter into the process of exchange ungilded and unsweetened, retaining their original […]
I decided to start reading Karl Marx’s Capital: Volume I. I have read it before but I want to get a bit deeper into it and eventually move on to the other volumes. I am not sure where this is headed, but I’m curious if I can use this to gain a better understanding of […]
Over the past week, I have had a short-lived obsession with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the latest economic ideology adopted by left Democrats such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. My tentative conclusion, after learning the contours and policy implications of this “theory,” is that it would be pointless to delve further into MMT’s economic […]
World of Lenidzky 