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.
Congratulations to those who've made it this far. We are almost finished the first three chapters, which are said to be the hardest. So far we have just been feeling it out, now is when we start to find our stride. Remember to be methodical and remember that endurance is key.
Just joining us? It'll take you about 4-5 hours to catch up to where the group is.
Week 3, Jan 5-21, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 3 Section 3 'Money', PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 4 'The General Formula for Capital', PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 5 'Contradictions in the General Formula'
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/
I don't get the meaning of footnote 16 to Ch.5
It appears in a section where Marx is saying that profit can't come from selling at a mark-up, but I don't get how it fits in there.
If surplus value comes from selling at a mark-up, then that is equivalent to saying surplus value originates in the buyers who are able to perpetually buy things at a mark-up. This class would have a hoard of value that grows continuously, which is not offset from a loss somewhere else like Marx says about the towns of Asia Minor in the body text after footnote 16.
Wait, do I remember hearing there's an exception made somewhere in Marxist theory for monopolies/natural monopolies? Coz then it would make sense
An exception for what? Value creation? Surplus value is always surplus labor. Fiddling with prices never changes the amount of labor embodied in a commodity.
Maybe the confusing part is that Marx is agreeing with the Ricardians and dissing the Malthusians, not the other way around. Marx thought Malthus was an idiot but respected Ricardo.
What did he disagree with Malthus on?
This point is a big one. Marx wrote a chapter on Malthus in Theories of Surplus Value, and called this idea, the “vulgarised conception of profit upon expropriation,” an “absurd, stupid idea.” He also accused Malthus of plagiarizing his ideas in order to one-up Ricardo who was winning the race for top political economist at the time.
Malthus also had certain ideas about population which today are taken up by eugenecists and utopian economists, so that’s not going very well for him either. I don’t remember exactly in Capital but I think Marx brings up Malthus in the chapter on the industrial reserve army. In the same chapter of TSV Marx writes, “Malthus, ‘the profound thinker’, has different views. His supreme hope, which he himself describes as more or less utopian, is that the mass of the middle class should grow and that the proletariat (those who work) should constitute a constantly declining proportion (even though it increases absolutely) of the total population. This in fact is the course taken by bourgeois society.”
I’m sure there are other points, but I think Marx considered Malthus one of the vulgar economists.