Struggle

Value, Price and Profit is a classic of Marxist literature. In our “ghost” or “distance learning” course called “The Spectre of Capital, Volume 1”, it is the last of the “precursors”, which is to say our selection from the pathfinding texts that went before the first volume of “Capital”.

Value, Price and Profit is something like a “mini-Capital”. It helps people to begin to grasp basic concepts that will be elaborated fully in Capital, such as Surplus Value. Like many of Marx’s works, it is an “address”. It was given to a live audience, in fact to an audience of workers, two years before the publication of the first printed edition of Capital Volume 1.

This time next week we will be distributing part of Chapter 1 of Capital itself.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) we will be meeting as Communist University in COSATU House at 17h00 to begin the set called “Can we do without a Communist Party?”

The only other item today is the Sunday Independent front-page report of the treatment in court of the large number of Zimbabweans rounded up in the raid on the Johannesburg Central Methodist Church last week. All were kept in custody. Read the shocking details in the linked document.

The SACP Johannesburg Central Branch met yesterday and decided on an emergency resolution in relation to the raid and the arrest of the Zimbabweans, requiring the BEC to establish the facts and to alert the Party to this great mess.

The Branch decided on a POA and also that Cde Dinga Sikwebu will open a discussion at the next BGM (2 March 2008) on the post-Polokwane ANC National Conference situation from the party’s point of view. The next following general meeting (6 April 2008) will be dedicated to discussion of the SACP Special National Congress expected in May 2008.

Don’t forget to check the Coming Events.

Click on these links:

Value, Price & Profit, abridged, Karl Marx, 1865 (6563 words)

‘Circus in court’ for arrested in church raid, Jeremy Gordin, Sindy (778 words)

Coming Events