Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (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. 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.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12

Week 13, March 25-31, from Volume 1 we are reading Chapter 22, Chapter 23, and Parts 1,2,and 3 of Chapter 24

In other words, aim to get up to the ridiculously long section-heading by Sunday. (The Circumstances which, Independently of the Proportional Division of Surplus-Value into Capital and Revenue, Determine the Extent of Accumulation, namely, the Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power, the Productivity of Labour, the Growing Difference in Amount between Capital Employed and Capital Consumed, and the Magnitude of the Capital Advanced)

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.

Audiobook of Ben Fowkes translation, American accent, male, links are to alternative invidious instances: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9

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

  • Engels' Synopsis of Capital or PDF

  • Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/

  • Kolibri [she/her]
    ·
    8 months ago

    So from this footnote in chapter 24, isn't this one of main things in dialectics? negation? I'm assuming so because of that last part "“Determinatio est Negatio.”

    He is as much at home in absurd contradictions, as he feels at sea in the Hegelian contradiction, the source of all dialectic. It has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make the simple reflexion, that every human action may be viewed, as “abstinence” from its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking, abstinence from standing still, working, abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence from working, &c. These gentlemen would do well, to ponder, once in a while, over Spinoza’s: “Determinatio est Negatio.”

    • quarrk [he/him]
      ·
      8 months ago

      I'm a casual philosophy learner, but afaik Hegel was significantly influenced by Spinoza especially regarding the topic of negation. Here's a paper by Yitzhak Y. Melamed on Spinoza's famous line et determinatio negatio est and its relation to the systems of Kant and Hegel. Again, I'm a casual learner myself, but I found it to be accessible. If there are any philosophers here then I'd be interested to hear more on this.

      Spinoza's view is that an object is not determined (defined) by what it is in the positive sense, but by what it is not or negates. This idea underlies the truism that there is no light without dark and vice versa. Spinoza was trying to answer the question, why does the world present itself as a collection of innumerable and heterogeneous objects? What causes this differentiation? If this mechanism can be understood, then we might be able to work in reverse to discover a single underlying essence or idea for everything. I believe Spinoza understood this single thing to be God; and so did Hegel, in his own way.

      As Melamed writes, "while Hegel does credit Spinoza with the discovery of this most fundamental insight, he believes Spinoza failed to appreciate the importance of his discovery."

      I believe Marx writes somewhere (perhaps in German Ideology or Grundrisse?) that the historical origin of human contemplation (consciousness) lies in the recognition of the self, distinct from everything else or other, as opposed to an unconscious perception of the world as one undifferentiated whole.

      This discussion might give some new insight into Marx's afterword to the second German edition of Capital vol 1:

      Afterword

      My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

      The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre ‘Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

      Hegel's system recognized and placed principal importance on negation. Marx accepted the way in which Hegel's system works, but he rejected the object to which Hegel applied his system. Instead of investigating the determination of concepts, Marx investigated the determination of material things and processes, e.g. capital. The task in Capital is to understand how the manifold forms of capitalist society (value, price, profit, surplus value, etc) are determined.