Format
-
Reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. This will repeat yearly until communism is achieved. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included, but comrades are welcome to set up other bookclubs.) This works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46 pages a week.
-
I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Discuss the week's reading in the comments.
-
Use any translation/edition you like.
Resources
(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)
-
Harvey's guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
-
A University of Warwick guide to reading it: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/worldlitworldsystems/hotr.marxs_capital.untilp72.pdf
It will be discussed especially in chapter 3, which is notoriously one of the most difficult chapters of vol 1. The first three chapters lay the foundation, then the rest is the consequences.
For now I will just say that money as you mention it having minimal labor cost is just a token for an underlying money commodity. How this exactly works today with respect to fiat currency is beyond the scope of volume 1 but is an active area of discussion in Marxist scholarship.
Edit: on second thought I don’t remember if Marx directly talks about token money as such in chapter 3. But he does talk about it in his 1859 critique of political economy which was the precursor for Capital.
Try to understand the money commodity first, and then all the various functions of money (money of account, money as a measure of value, etc.) all explained in chapter 3.
Nice, I'll keep that in mind. For now, I'll think of money as mainly gold coins or something similar which actually would have a labor expenditure corresponding to its value.