Welcome to baby Marxist rehabilitation camp.
We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly until communism is achieved.
The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week.
I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.
We currently have 58 members!!! I expect a certain drop-off rate, but I'll be thrilled if a dozen or couple dozen read it.
If you've made it this far, you've already read ¹⁄₁₈ of Volume I. The first three weeks are the hardest, after that it'll be quite easy, and only requires 20 minutes a day (endurance is key).
Just joining us? It'll take you about 2-3 hours to catch up to where the group is. You can do that on one long bus ride.
Archives: Week 1
Week 2, Jan 8-14, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 2 'The Process of Exchange', PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 1 'The Measure of Values' PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 2 'The Means of Circulation'
In other words, aim to get up to the heading '3. Money' by Jan 14
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/
Yes, Marx is referring to the buying and selling of land.
Theoretically he's correct; the buying and selling of land results from some of the highest degrees of development of the money-form. Generally it is the last thing to be commodified because the idea of 'owning' it in the liberal sense (where things are the possession of one person and that one person has sole authority over its use, sale, etc) is so completely absurd.
Generally land is considered to either own the people or is considered to be some form of collective property (e.g. of a peasant village or family among whom the land is redistributed periodically) or the property of god on whose behalf the king and his nobles manages things and hence none of them have unlimited rights over it.
Historically, Marx is a bit off. The development of bourgeois society in Europe began much earlier than he thought, particularly in England (where, by 1200, this sorta land ownership was being practiced in some areas, by 1400 it was widespread and a large class of agricultural wage-labourers had arisen). I haven't done enough investigation myself yet, but I get the impression from what I have read that Rome's property-laws were closer to bourgeois absolute property, which makes sense because it too had a very developed money-form (as Marx alludes to with his Apocalypse quote).
In terms of his point about nomadic peoples, I think he's correct, but only in cases where the nomadic peoples exist alongside settled city people. Marx's big issue (and the thing that makes anthropologists think they're proved him wrong on e.g. origin of money) is that his historical research is restricted to the last ~3000 years, and doesn't have much in the way of archaeology or history to go on. So the examples of nomadic peoples Marx has at hand are 1. pastoral peoples between egypt and mesopotamia 2. steppe/pastoral nomads around europe and maybe china 3. biased accounts of fur-trading natives in north america. In all cases these sorta nomadic people do seem to create money systems, but without impulse from the cities this doesn't happen. Trade still occurs, but it becomes ritualised, focused on use-values, turns into gift-economies, etc.