14th September CU Johannesburg Live Session 17h00 - 18h30 21 Kruis Street, Johannesburg (3rd Floor, CEPPWAWU Regional Office Boardroom; parking entrance is in Anderson Street) The CU meets this evening, 14th September 2016. In this ninth week we take Chapters 23 and 24 for discussion in our live session. See the re-sent intro, below, plus the intro to Chapter 25 on Unemployment. Marx's Capital Volume 1, Part 9 Reproduction & 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. . The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, C23, Simple Reproduction <http://studycircle.wikispaces.com/file/view/15091a%2C%20Marx%2C%20Capital%2 0V1%2C%201867%2C%20C23%2C%20Simple%20Reproduction.pdf> , and C24, Conversion of Surplus Value to Capital <http://studycircle.wikispaces.com/file/view/15091b%2C%20Marx%2C%20Capital%2 0V1%2C%201867%2C%20C24%2C%20Conversion%20of%20Surplus%20Value%20to%20Capital .pdf> . Unemployment Chapter 25 of Marx's Capital, Volume 1, called The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm> , is about the effects of Capital on the workforce. Section 3 <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S3> of Chapter 25 is concerned with what we nowadays refer to as Unemployment. Marx argues very directly and very convincingly in this section that unemployment is a necessary, constant, conscious and deliberate part of the capitalist system. He writes: "The over-work of the employed part of the working-class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working-class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists". In the light of what Marx says here, it can be argued that all protestations from bourgeois democrats that they are intending to provide "jobs" for all of the unemployed are false. Early in this chapter, Marx writes: "[The] accelerated relative diminution of the variable constituent, that goes along with the accelerated increase of the total capital, and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase of the labouring population, an increase always moving more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relativity redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population." In other words, whatever may be the intention, it is capitalism itself that creates unemployment. The stories about the birthrate being too high, the immigration too much, the rand too high, the interest rate too high, et cetera, are wrong. The truth is that unemployment is intrinsic to capitalism, as much as employment is. Although we are obliged to do everything possible to increase employment and to reduce unemployment, yet there is eventually no escape from unemployment within the capitalist mode of production. What is required, as Marx wrote in "Value, Price and Profit", is "abolition of the wages system", and the wages-system's replacement with another mode of production. Picture: A South African mine worker (AP). . The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, C25, Section 3 on Unemployment <http://studycircle.wikispaces.com/file/view/15092%2C%20Marx%2C%20Capital%20 V1%2C%201867%2C%20C25%2C%20Section%203%20on%20Unemployment.pdf> . __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 14120 (20160914) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/yclsa-eom-forum/000c01d20e86%2445df14e0%24d19d3ea0%24%40com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
