We are 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.
Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'
Discuss the week's reading in the comments.
Use any translation/edition you like. Marxists.org has the Moore and Aveling translation in various file formats including epub and PDF: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
Ben Fowkes translation, PDF: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D
AernaLingus says: I noticed that the linked copy of the Fowkes translation doesn't have bookmarks, so I took the liberty of adding them myself. You can either download my version with the bookmarks added, or if you're a bit paranoid (can't blame ya) and don't mind some light command line work you can use the same simple script that I did with my formatted plaintext bookmarks to take the PDF from libgen and add the bookmarks yourself.
Resources
(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)
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Harvey's guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
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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
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Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/
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The absurdity he first mentions (as self-evident) is the idea of a linen coat as the universal form of abstract labor. We don't go around saying everything literally in terms of the number of linen coats it's worth. "Yeah these headphones were pricey - 2.5 linen coats!" But he then proceeds to say that the existing universal forms like gold are just as absurd in the same way, just not self-evidently (it's normalized for us under capitalism). "Yeah these headphones were pricey - $125!" Why is that abstraction "expensive"? We compare it to our own wage labor price and the prevailing wage labor price, implicitly. Capitalism teaches workers this by their nature of being wage laborers. Capitalism teaches the owner class this through the drive to maximize the volume of profits, abstracting all of their inputs to production as the commodity and its price, including, per Marx, the most miserable commodity (the worker). The universal exchange form represents the abstraction of profit maximization through the capitalist mode of production: the drive to minimize the cost of inputs is quantified through it.
This is an incredible abstraction given what is going on behind the production of even one commodity, turning it into just one number to maximize lest you perish. As a wage worker, your labor price and everything you work with at your job is just a number to be minimized to the owner, if the owner wants to "succeed". This naturally leads to a stark class antagonism. Marx is laying the groundwork for this via the establishment of what a commodity is and how strange of a thing it truly is under capitalist production.