Week 9. Rühle parts 14 to 23, and last 4 paragraphs of part 24; Marx chapters 16 to 25 and 32.


In order to make more time in this course to study difficult and basic parts of Capital such as chapter 1 more fully, a lot of material is telescoped into this week. To help, with most discussion points a reference to one of the more relevant passages from Rühle is given. (Other passages may be relevant, too).

1. How does Marx define productive and unproductive labour?
(See start of part 14, or chapter 16).
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2. Which are unproductive?
a) A nurse in an NHS hospital
b) A nurse in a private hospital
c) A station supervisor on the London Underground
d) A bank clerk.
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3. What is the value of labour?
(See start of part 17, or chapter 19).
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4. In Capital (a passage not included in Rühle), Marx writes:
'Hence we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists'.
(See part 17, or chapter 19).
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5. Which is better for the worker, time-wages or piece-wages?
(See parts 18 and 19, chapters 20 and 21).
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6. What does the process of capitalist production, repeated week after week, year after year, yield for the workers? And for the capitalists?
(See part 21, chapter 23).
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7. Why does capitalism have a constant tendency towards mass unemployment?
(See part 23, chapter 25).
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8. How does capitalist prepare the way for socialist revolution?
(See end of part 24, chapter 32).
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