How business works

Today is a repeat posting of the last part of the CU division of Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1, because we are going through it chapter by chapter. See the links below, and the Intro to Chapter 32 that follows. Tomorrow’s will carry an Intro for the book’s last chapter, Chapter 33, on Colonialism.

The other link given today is to a recent Declaration of the National Cooperative Association of South Africa’s Executive Council, held on the 4 July 2009.

Co-operatives

Since we are considering Capital, Volume 1, it seems a good time to ask some questions about co-operatives. We published the following words, yesterday:

“What makes a business work as capitalism is a dual relationship. The first part of it is the relationship between the worker and the capitalist. The second part is the relationship of the capitalist with his market. If these two relationships do not exist, or are faulty, then a capitalist business will not survive.”

The first question is: If the above is true of capitalist businesses, then is it not also true of co-operatives? In other words, do co-operatives not have to extract surplus value from workers? And do they not depend for their existence on having a market? In other words again, do they not have to compete for business with all comers, including bourgeois capitalist business?

On the other hand, is it possible to have co-operatives that are government-funded and that are supplying to government (local, provincial or national), so that government is their market? Is this real, or is it welfare? What is the cultural nature of co-ops? Are co-ops life, or are they work? How broad is the vision of the co-op?

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 31, 32 and 33, Industrial Capitalism, Colonialism (8265 words)

CU additional posting:

Declaration of NCASA Executive Council, 4 July 2009 (476 words)

Intro to Chapters 32 of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1 (33 to follow)

Chapter 32 of Capital, Volume 1 contains about 1000 words in only four paragraphs. It is like a full sweep of history from the past of slaves and serfs through present capitalism to the future, when the expropriators will be expropriated.

For the sake of this blog let us take one of the four paragraphs:

“As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many.”

The paragraph continues:

“Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

In the historical tendencies of capitalism, Marx sees the seed of its own destruction.

Basics? What is that?

Today's posting includes the link to the final part of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1 (see the links below and the big “Intro” below that). Click here for the full clickable list of downloads from our CU 24-part divided version of Capital Volume 1, once called the “Ghost” course because it was “running in the background”, but currently our “backbone”.

Part 24 of this division is our last part, and it may as well be kept as such, but for the purpose of today’s CU post and the following two, it is clear that each of the three included chapters merits a separate intro at this time, together with a critical attitude towards the book and perhaps towards David Harvey’s lectures, too, as well as agreement with Harvey elsewhere. So the intro to Chapter 31 alone is below, and the intros to 32 and 33 will follow. But first there is some more business about “basics” to be dealt with.

Basics according to the British YCL

Last week, we were asked by Cde Alroy Taai for a course for ‘first time users’. To assist with this request we will soon start using a CU course called “Basic Communism”. It is not a re-write or a new attempt to explain the basics of communism. It is made up of short, more-or-less “classic” texts. You are invited to judge for yourself whether this, our long-established CU method, is the best or not.

Yesterday, we saw that the CCS is going to rely heavily on the lectures of David Harvey when they do their two series of seminars in Durban later this year. That is a very different approach to the CU’s. We have tended to believe in live interaction, and that videos are part of the “banking” theory of education.

Yet another response has come from Ben Stevenson, a comrade who has visited South Africa in the past as a representative of the British Young Communist League. Ben wrote:

“Dom, the YCL’s Back 2 Basics series is now up on the YCL website. We find the series very useful as it serves as an introduction to theoretical concepts for younger comrades. Feel free to make use of it if you can. Cheers. Ben”

The British YCL produced this material themselves. It begins with “Materialism” (an approach that David Harvey does not approve of, by the way, and the CU has in the past tended to agree with Harvey about the meaninglessness, or worse, of “dialectical materialism”). Within a few lines from the beginning it mentions Ludwig Feuerbach, Frederick Engels and Lenin's “Criticism and Empirio-Criticism”. This is the British YCL's idea of “basics”! Whether Cde Alroy Taai would regard it as a useful “first time user's” course, is an open question that we must hope he will answer.

You must make up your own minds about this. There are many available roads to travel. Everybody has his own idea of what “basics” means. The CU likes to use the original classic texts, and it will continue to do so. Soon we will go to the basics of pedagogy with a chapter from Paulo Freire's classic “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Pedagogy is the theory and practice of teaching and learning. This discussion continues.

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting (with intro below):

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 31, 32 and 33, Industrial Capitalism, Colonialism (8265 words)

Intro to Chapter 31 of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1 (Intros to 32 and 33 will follow)

In Chapter 31 Marx states in direct terms that the origin of the industrial (not farming) capitalist is in colonialism. The question that will be raised here is whether Marx backs up this statement, or not. This post is going to quote at some length from this chapter, (in italics) and then make some critical observations:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.”

“Of the Christian colonial system, W. Howitt, a man who makes a speciality of Christianity, says: "The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth." [4] The history of the colonial administration of Holland — and Holland was the head capitalistic nation of the 17th century — "is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness" [5] Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men stealers were trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were the chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says: "This one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families." To secure Malacca, the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in 1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him, to "abstain" from the payment of £21,875, the price of his treason. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000. Sweet commerce!”

[yet] “...by 1648, the people of Holland were more over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together.”

“To-day industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture properly so called, it is, on the other hand, the commercial supremacy that gives industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant rôle that the colonial system plays at that time. It was "the strange God" who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl with the old Gods of Europe, and one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a heap. It proclaimed surplus-value making as the sole end and aim of humanity.”

This last describes in a single sentence, the state of affairs that Marx's book was written to expose. Marx did succeed in exposing “capital” as “surplus-value making”. But I would invite you (without condemning Marx, because he wrote elsewhere about colonialism), to consider whether in Capital Volume 1 he did describe colonialism adequately, or demonstrate its part in what he chose to call Primitive Accumulation?

In my opinion Marx did not deal with Primitive Accumulation fully. Nor did he explain the term adequately. Marx does not really establish that capitalism required a ready pile of resources. What he establishes is how the requisite class forces were brought into being, in Western Europe, in the revolutions that overthrew feudalism there.

It is a mistake to think that a capitalist business requires “capital” in advance, if by “capital” is meant money in the bank, or land, buildings, equipment et cetera. It does require such things, but they do not make it a capitalist business as opposed to any other kind of project. What makes a business work as capitalism is a dual relationship. The first part of it is the relationship between the worker and the capitalist. The second part is the relationship of the capitalist with his market. I these two relationships do not exist, or are faulty, then a capitalist business will not survive. But if they do exist, then the other means will probably be found without too much difficulty.

Marx shows clearly how the proletariat arose, historically, in the countries of Western Europe in the 16^th century. He shows how the bourgeois class arrives on the scene. He shows how all the social building blocks including proletariat and market, are assembled, but not the money. That is fine, because capital is not money, it is a relation. Marx says so, directly, in Chapter 33, and it is true. So the accumulation necessary for capitalism is not treasure, but is an accumulation of relationships.

What Marx does not do in Capital is to make a strong distinction between slavery and capitalism. He describes slavery candidly, even angrily, and without flinching from the horror of it. But he never discusses slavery in a comparative way, as distinct from surplus-value-extracting bourgeois-and-proletarian capitalism. Yet (bourgeois) slavery also started in the 16^th century, or slightly before, and it ran on as a transcontinental Atlantic system for the next three hundred years, in parallel with the early development of capitalism proper, until Marx’s time, such that the last end of bourgeois slavery was the cataclysm of the American Civil War, that was happening while Marx was writing Capital, and yet it does not feature in the book at all!

In other works, Marx acknowledged the revolutionary status of the American Civil War, but not here, in Capital. He does acknowledge, in passing, the triangular Atlantic, and the far Eastern, trade based on slavery, but not its distinctness from capitalism proper, or the lethal historic antagonism between these two competing bourgeois systems. Marx does not acknowledge that the international sinews of global commerce were laid down and strengthened by the slavery system, as much as, or more than, by proper capitalism. He does not directly recognise or stress that the bourgeoisie did not invent only one system of productive relations, but at least three, namely the guild system, the modern bourgeois slave system, and capitalism itself. These distinctions have become important to us, because they bear on our understanding of the history of colonialism, as well as on recent attempts to create new bases for the survival of the bourgeois class, such as fascism and militaristic monopoly-capitalist Imperialism, which, we may think, differ substantially from normative capitalism based on simple extraction of surplus-value at the point of production.

So my conclusion is that while Marx established the fact, and the immediate consequences, of surplus-value conclusively, he did not, in Capital, describe colonialism or slavery adequately as systems. And while it may be true that the accumulation of treasure that slave-plantation colonialism caused to happen in England and the Netherlands in particular, did prepare the ground for industrial capitalism as Marx states that it did (see above), yet Marx does not really demonstrate how that was so. These thoughts about colonialism will be further developed in the two subsequent posts.

Capital, the book: All the rage

The CU will continue to aim to publish so as to be in your Inbox first thing on weekday mornings. To achieve this, it will usually be posted the evening before, or during the day on a Sunday, as today. That's the routine. This week we feature the last two sections of the CU's 24-part division of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1. See the link below and the “Intro” at the bottom for today's “backbone”.

As it turns out, the CU is by no means the only centre of enthusiasm for Capital Volume 1 at this time. Patrick Bond and the CCS crowd in Durban have put together a serious two-month programme that will run twice, starting next month, using videos of David Harvey's lectures on Capital. A short, recent, David Harvey seminar input can be seen on YouTube at http://davidharvey.org/2009/07/the-crisis-now/. It is deeply excellent and relevant. Please view it if you possibly can, comrades.

The details of the KZN “Capital” seminars are as follows: A pilot for 20 participants at UKZN Centre for Civil Society facilitated by Patrick Bond and Samson Zondi will run in August and September. A bigger group of 50 will run in October and November at Diakonia in central Durban, facilitated by Samson Zondi and Trevor Ngwane. Perhaps more details will appear on the CCS web site in due course. According to information received so far by e-mail, the draft programme looks something like this:

• 14 sessions (two per week) for participants who can become trainers

• 12h30-14h30, to include David Harvey seminar screening plus discussion

• Taxi fare, accommodation subsidy, lunch subsidy (to be eaten during sessions)

• Das Kapital book plus two DVDs (one with Harvey lectures, one with Brutus/Marx plus lots of other materials)

Click here for the full thirteen sessions called “Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey” which will be the basis of the above seminars.

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 28, 29 and 30, Suppression, & Capitalist Farming (4803 words)

Note that nearly all the Marx, Engels and Lenin texts of the CU have been downloaded from Marxists Internet Archive, which is a vast store of revolutionary literature.

Intro to Chapters 28, 29 and 30 of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1

Marx's first concern in his description of Primitive Accumulation is to establish where the labour power came from, in the metropolitan countries where capitalism was established as a system for the first time, and where it proved itself even more profitable than the slave trade that stole people from Africa and worked them to death on plantations in North and South America, and in the Carribean islands.

This new abundance of available labour power in the metropolis, personified in citizens without property, was the consequence of deliberate dispossession. It had the immediate consequence of producing what we now call “unemployment”, which was immediately criminalised as “vagrancy”. The unemployment was an essential precondition for capitalism to arise, yet the bourgeoisie in its eternal hypocrisy, criminalised its own victims.

Chapter 28 is an easy read detailing the legal steps in the original case, that of England.

Having shown where the labour power came from, Marx at the beginning of Chapter 29 asks “whence came the capitalists originally?”. This very short chapter answers the question in the case of the capitalist farmers, who were the necessary original capitalists, and who were already a historically-existing class in England by the late 16^th century.

In Chapter 30, Marx turns his attention to the question of just how yet another of the necessary pre-requisites of capitalism came into being, namely the “home market”. The very same peasants who had been thrown off the land into the towns to live in shacks had to eat, whether they were working or not, and the farms that they had left were still the only source of food. Thus was set in motion the relation of demand and supply, and also of concentration of industries into “manufactories” as opposed to the family-scale production of earlier times. These kinds of changes can still be observed as they happen, in South Africa today.

Primitive Accumulation

Karl Marx begins Capital, Volume 1, with three great, defining chapters on Commodity, Exchange, and Money. On this groundwork he constructs an overall outline of capital. Then, through many chapters, patiently and eloquently, he builds an exact description of the essence of capitalism, which is the extraction of surplus value from the waged citizen proletariat.

The extraction of surplus value is what distinguishes capitalism from earlier bourgeois relations of production. Bourgeois propaganda pretends that capitalism has always existed, but really its full hegemony was achieved less than a century and a half ago, in the 1860s. Whereas the previously dominant bourgeois relation of production, the Atlantic slave trade (see image) and plantation system, had ruled for more than three centuries before that.

Capitalists found it necessary to suppress the slave trade with violent naval action, and then to purge what remained of slavery with a bloody war, the US Civil War. That ended in 1865, just two years before the publication of Karl Marx’s “Capital”. The incompatibility of slavery with capitalism has to do with surplus value. The Slave was a wholly-owned commodity, whereas the Proletarian possesses his own commodity labour power, only to be compelled to sell it daily for the bare price of survival. Capitalism turned out to be much more profitable than slavery and was for that reason enforced, by war.

Within his many, mostly short, chapters in Capital Volume 1 on Surplus Value, Karl Marx interweaves a lot of descriptive material about capitalism in practice, including the long Chapter 10, almost a book on its own, called “The Working Day”. At Chapter 19 Marx comes to Wages, which we studied two days ago, and follows with capitalist Accumulation, which we looked at yesterday. These are still a continuation of the long exposition of Surplus Value, which is the heart of the book.

How did capitalism start?

Only after this point in Capital, that is from Chapter 26 of Volume 1 onwards, does Marx begin to discuss “a primitive accumulation preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point.” He goes back to the beginning. This is the point we have arrived at today. See the “backbone” link below and the “Intro” below the links.

Marx continues to examine Primitive Accumulation until his final Chapter 33, on Colonialism. The last eight chapters of the book are naturally of great interest to us in South Africa at this stage in our history.

The Communist University’s 24-part division of Capital Volume 1 (with some of its precursor texts) is available as a set of MS-Word downloads from the Internet for anyone who wishes to read the work in this way. But it is mainly designed for dialogue groups and study circles. Please feel free to download these texts and get on with it. There is no need to ask permission.

Native republic thesis – a precursor to the tripartite alliance

SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande will address a seminar on the above topic on 7 August 2009 at 10h00 in COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Also present will be David Masondo (chairing) and Prof Eddie Webster.

Contact Priscilla Magau, priscilla.magau@gmail.com, pmagau@chi.org.za, or telephone 011 339 3040.

Books on education from MIA plus “Les Enragés” and Hegel:

Marxiststs Internet Archive books (these books can be bought, or downloaded free)

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 26 and 27, Original Sin & Expropriation of People (5992 words)

CU additional posting:

What is to be done? (Extracts on Economism and the Vanguard Party)

Note that nearly all the Marx, Engels and Lenin texts of the CU have been downloaded from Marxists Internet Archive, which is a vast store of revolutionary literature.

Intro to Capital Volume One, Chapters 26 and 27, Original Sin & Expropriation of People

In the first of these two chapters on primitive accumulation, Karl Marx describes what is required before the system of surplus value can start pumping and reproducing itself. As he says, the myths around this origin are many, but the truth is written in blood and fire, the ruin of the feudal system, and the destruction of the semi-feudal, semi-bourgeois guilds in the towns of Western Europe. These revolutions made possible the existence of “free labourers”, which is to say people with no means of production or subsistence, who must sell their only possession – their labour power – in order to survive from day to day.

Chapter 26 is quite an easy read.

According to Marx, the capitalistic era began in the 16^th century, but he does not say that capitalism was dominant or hegemonic at that time. Many of the bourgeois institutions that are nowadays taken as part of capitalism, such as double-entry book-keeping, banks, stock and bond markets, insurance, contract law and global freight navigation, were first developed under late feudalism, but especially under the big, bourgeois, transcontinental business of slavery, which is very different from capitalism.

How the “free labourers” historically came into existence is exemplified in the second of the two chapters, where Marx takes the “classic form” of this process as being that of England, starting from the 16^th Century. Clearly the creation of the proletariat was contemporary with the slave trade while the latter was dominant. Capitalism only began to supersede slavery after it had matured during the period (roughly) 1500 to 1800.

The process of eviction of people from the land is popularly known in England as “the enclosures” and in Scotland as the “Highland clearances”. To South Africans, one can say that the book describes processes of dispossession that are familiar in South Africa even up to the present time. In the case of the Highlands of Scotland, one can also read that game parks (called deer forests) were replacing settlements of people from two centuries ago. The same thing is happening today in South Africa under cover of “green ecology”, and not only with game parks, but also with golf estates and the like.

With Chapter 27, it is not necessary to understand every local term, or remember every local event. What is applicable still is the class struggle that underlay it all, the victorious bourgeoisie that came out on top, and the great, dispossessed, working proletariat that was left as the principal basis for capitalist extraction of surplus labour from then onwards, but also as capitalism’s inevitable gravedigger.

Basics

In response to yesterday’s CU revival, Comrade Alroy Taai wrote:

“Dominic, this is great news! A little request: many youths (and some older comrades) that has not been exposed to the classics need to start first with some basic material on things like dialectical and historical materialism. Also the basics on colonialism. Could you assist with developing a course for ‘first time users’?”

Well, the gap that the CU is filling for the time being is the classics gap, and one of the reasons why the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and others do survive as classics is because they are simply the best, and literally as simple as they can be. Nevertheless, Cde Alroy’s suggestion is well understood, and the CU will assist.

The first assistance is to give an introduction to the day’s main (“backbone”) text in the blog. This I did not do yesterday, but I will try do it from now on, sometimes below the links, like today (scroll down). I have done a short intro to the chapters from Capital on Wages (and what could be more basic to capitalism than wages?) that were posted yesterday, plus another short intro on the next part, posted today, on the Accumulation of Capital (also basic).

In fact, Comrade Alroy, Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1 is very basic altogether, and Marx takes care to put the important bits into simple language, as I will try to demonstrate in my intros, and he moves slowly, and in a carefully planned way through the material, and when he thinks it necessary he repeats. He does also deal with colonialism, in the very last chapter of Capital, Chapter 33.

The second is to offer, today, the CU “conspectus” of Tony Buzan’s “Use Your Head”, which is a very good guide on how to study (that is any study, whether CU, Matric, University, Post-grad, Professional, or any other). Among the advice it gives is that you should always skip over parts of a text that you don’t understand. Later on, we will come back to “pedagogy” as such, which is the theory of teaching and learning, with a particular stress on how to get profound ideas into the dialogue of ordinary people, because that is what, as revolutionaries, we have to do.

Third is to give you a quick way in to the scheme of thinking in Engels’ “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” that was posted yesterday, in the shape of Lenin’s “Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”. Lenin tries to say as much in eighteen hundred words as Engels said in sixteen thousand words, using a very similar layout.

Fourth is to commit the CU to posting a “course” on the “basics” soon (it is already in draft).

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 23 and 24, Accumulation of Capital (14246 words)

CU additional posting:

1913, Lenin, Three Sources & Three Component parts of Marxism (1838 words)

1974, Tony Buzan, Use Your Head (4174)

Note that nearly all the Marx, Engels and Lenin texts of the CU have been downloaded from Marxists Internet Archive, which is a vast store of revolutionary literature.

Intro to Capital Volume One, Chapters 19, 20 and 21 on Wages (posted yesterday).

Marx begins by saying that the "value of labour… is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth”. The commodity that is exchanged by the worker for money is not labour, but labour-power. After that, the entire product of the worker’s labour for the contracted time belongs to the boss. The product of the worker is greater than the payment given for the worker’s labour-power. The difference is surplus-value. The extraction of surplus-value from workers in this way is the defining characteristic of capitalism.

Through the three given chapters on wages Marx continues to discuss this basic point in different ways. The minimum price of labour power is that which is sufficient to keep the worker going until the next day. Or, it may be calculated over a worker’s lifetime, as Marx demonstrates here, and divided out to give an average day-rate. In all cases, including piece-work, the capitalist pays only for labour-power, and at the minimum price that will ensures the return of the worker to the workplace, next day.

Marx finishes Chapter 21 by declaring that if, under piece-work, the workers think they can get more by producing more, the boss will remind them quickly of the true relationship, which is not payment for labour, or the product of labour, but only payment for maintenance and reproduction of labour power.

“The capitalist rightly knocks on the head such pretensions as gross errors as to the nature of wage-labour. [19] He cries out against this usurping attempt to lay taxes on the advance of industry, and declares roundly that the productiveness of labour does not concern the labourer at all.”

Intro to Capital Volume One Chapters 23 and 24, the Accumulation of Capital

“The conversion of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power, is the first step taken by the quantum of value that is going to function as capital. This conversion takes place in the market, within the sphere of circulation. The second step, the process of production, is complete so soon as the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and, therefore, contains the capital originally advanced, plus a surplus-value.”

Thus Marx describes the working of capitalism, and he goes on to describe this cycle as the origin of capital. As chapter 23 goes on, Marx describes the position of the working class in terms that are easy to understand today. This chapter of Capital speaks of what has in recent years been referred to as the “accumulation path”. Marx concludes Chapter 23 by saying:

“Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.”

And he begins Chapter 24 by saying:

“Hitherto we have investigated how surplus-value emanates from capital; we have now to see how capital arises from surplus-value. Employing surplus-value as capital, reconverting it into capital, is called accumulation of capital.”

Later on, Marx writes that the result of capitalistic production is threefold:

1) “that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker;

2) “that the value of this product includes, besides the value of the capital advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labour but the capitalist nothing, and which none the less becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist;

3) “that the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell it anew if he can find a buyer.”

This and the subsequent is material that is familiar and widely accepted today. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” says Marx.

Back by popular demand

The Communist University (CU) was last published as a blog on 19 July 2008. There has been constant demand for its return. So here it is.

The blog, just to remind you, feeds by e-mail to a list of over about 2250 CU e-mail subscribers. The blog has generally carried a selection of links to documents, which are archived at the CU wikispace web site.

Weekly CU discussions were held for more than five years (2003-2008) at different venues. With help, these can also be revived. This revival of the CU blog and e-mail distribution is done to facilitate the possibility of comrades coming together to discuss the documents it carries. Dialogue is the essence of the Communist University. Such dialogues can be convened anywhere, by anybody.

YCL

In November 2007, a few weeks prior to the Polokwane ANC Conference that elected Jacob Zuma President of the ANC, the YCLSA Discussion Forum took off. It has kept going vigorously. It has about 900 subscribers plus a large number of non-subscribing readers.

At the same time (November 2007) a distribution group for the SACP’s “Umsebenzi Online” was set up which has since been grown to about 9000 effective subscribers. If you need help getting on to this or other lists, please e-mail me at dominic.tweedie@gmail.com.

There is a clear demand for political documents, and most especially for the “classics”, on the YCL forum. There has been no other steady stream of such material, other than the CU. So the CU mailing will now be sent to that forum, so as to stimulate dialogue there, and so as to adopt the YCLSA Discussion Forum as a de facto e-mail discussion forum of the CU.

Comments on the CU posts can also be published at the blog at http://domza.blogspot.com/.

Backbone

The backbone content for now and for a year or so will be a revival and re-examination of the “generic” programmes of the CU, with a view to building a simple selected resource bank of classic political education material, which will then be made permanently available on the Internet and other media.

The first of this “generic” backbone material will be the remaining five parts of the CU “Ghost Course”, the “Spectre of Capital, Volume 1”, which we did not quite complete last year. This is a 24-part “easy reading” breakdown of Karl Marx’s greatest work: “Capital”. Today’s part consists of Chapters 19, 20 and 21 of the book, all of which are about wages.

For a bonus I am also putting in Engels’ great summary called Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 19, 20 and 21, Wages (7291 words)

CU additional posting:

1880, Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (16229 words)

Note that nearly all the Marx, Engels and Lenin texts of the CU have been downloaded from Marxists Internet Archive, which is a vast store of revolutionary literature.