Forum Post: A formation program

Hi people of Occupy. There are a formation program inside occupy? Its important to have it, cause people need have political knowledge to have better analysis of reality and problems. In that direction, Id like to bring us a silly book about economy to understand how workers build up entirely this society and their riches. Is a very basis book to help people understand and analysis the economic system.

http://readingfromtheleft.com/PDF/Mandel-EconTheory.pdf

Non pdf version: http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1967/intromet/ch01.htm

"Thereafter, the labor of the producers can be divided into two parts. A part of this labor continues to be used for the subsistence of the producers themselves and we call this part necessary labor; the other part is used to maintain the ruling class and we give it the name surplus labor.

Let us illustrate this by the very clear example of plantation slavery, as it existed in certain regions and periods of the Roman Empire, or as we find it in the West Indies and the islands of Portuguese Africa starting with the seventeenth century, on the great plantations which were established there. In these tropical areas, even the slave’s food was generally not provided by the master; the slave had to produce this himself by working a tiny plot of ground on Sundays and the products from this labor constituted his store of food. On six days of the week the slave worked on the plantation and received in return none of the products of his labor. This is the labor which creates a social surplus product, surrendered by the slave as soon as it is produced and belonging solely to the slavemaster.

The work week, which in this case is seven days, can be divided into two parts: the work of one day, Sunday, constitutes necessary labor, that labor which provides the products for the subsistence of the slave and his family; the work of the other six days is surplus labor and all of its products go to the master, are used for his sustenance and his enrichment as well." from the book