(This was posted to the Introduction to Marxism mailing list, an online class. For more information go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxism_class/.)
Over the next couple of days, I am going to be posting excerpts from Marx's Capital Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value with some discussion questions. Based on the lack of response to my last posting on Part II, I am surmising that it has not been smooth sailing. I would urge having some patience since we are going to be moving on to more accessible aspects of Marxist thought but I do think that it was important to try to read and understand the bedrock of Marx's economic analysis. After covering the highlights of Part III, we will take a look at some selected topics in Marxist economics that might seem to have more immediate relevance to the headlines in today's newspapers since they look at the problem of falling rates of profit, economic crisis, etc. In considering how to introduce Part III of Capital, Volume One, it dawned on me that it might help to compare the capitalist economy to the economies that preceded it historically. Rather than getting bogged down in the formulas that Marx uses to illustrate the creation of surplus value, which go to the very heart of the exploitation of labor, I thought it might make sense to look at how labor was used in societies that preceded the one that we live in today. From the very beginning of mankind (I hope that feminists understand that I am using the word not in the sense of male, but simply to denote Homo sapiens), we have used tools to shape nature into usable goods. Arguably, this practice preceded us since Jane Goodall's field studies of chimpanzees that revealed a kind of tool-making. "One day in October of 1960, Jane Goodall found a chimp that she had named David Greybeard squatting on a termite mound. Not wanting to startle him, she stopped some distance away and could not see clearly what he was doing. He seemed to be poking pieces of grass into the mound, then raising them to his mouth. When he left, she approached the mound. She inserted one of the abandoned grasses into a hole in the mound and found that the termites bit onto it with their jaws. David had been using the stem as a tool to "fish" for insects!" full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/the-production-of-absolute-surplus-value/
