A week or two ago I started reading Marx’s Capital again. For ten years now, I’ve been picking up my copy of Capital and for a week or two I’ll diligently work my way through those opening chapters until one morning, I wake up and I think, What does all this writing about economic theory have to do with my life? While economic conditions probably shape every aspect of my life whether I like it or not, all I want to do is read and write novels and make decent beer for people to drink. (There’s other stuff I like to do also, but you get the idea.)
Like I said, I started reading Capital again and the wheels started turning in my head. Marx starts off writing about commodities and labor. The labor theory of value. That seems pretty straight-forward. Only human labor creates value. Machine labor doesn’t add value. But does that mean that machine labor is bad? No. Even artisan brewers use pumps and burners to make beer. Pots and pans can even be considered machines, I suppose. Which raises a question about tools which require human labor to function and machine which replace human labor.
Alright, you should have an working idea of what sort of things were going through my mind when I started reading Capital again. In order to give my reading of Capital some shape, some goal, some motive, why don’t I apply the ideas discussed in Capital to the operation of our small brewery?
Given that this is a blog, I’ll proceed in typical blog-fashion and declare a grand project to read Marx (and maybe not just Capital, but I’d like to dip into the Grundrisse) and view Marx’s economic theory through the lens of a small artisan brewery.
Just to start: our brewery appears to be a capitalist enterprise, but it’s too small to compete and we’re not trying to make a profit, we’re just trying to cover the bills. We joke around and say that our brewery is a worker owned and operated collective, but maybe that’s not such a joke. It might actually describe what we are. While we produce a commodity, we don’t think of the beer we make as an instrument for generating profit. We make beer because we enjoy making it and are proud of what we make. We really are trying to make the world (our community) a better place to live in. And to make beer on such a small scale requires lots of human labor. We can’t rely on mass production to increase our surplus value.
That should get us started. Feel free to read along. Grab a growler of craft beer and crack open your copy of Marx.
2 comments:
Seems to me your brewery is an example of a private enterprise and as such while you work, you do not labor. The issue is if your work is a commodity (as labor) not whether your beer can be bought and sold.
It's interesting to make a distinction between work and labor and we'll see where that takes us. While our brewery is a private enterprise, as you say, we still experience capitalist pressures. The pricing of our "commodity" is not determined by the cost of production, but by the market price which is low because the big breweries make use of machine labor and large volume production.
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