Hop in, comrades, we are reading Capital Volumes I-III this year, and we will every year 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. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.
31 members! Excited to see this taking off, and proud of us for making it thus far. We have now read ¹⁄₁₈ of Volume I. The first three weeks are the densest, onwards it's smooth sailing and only needs about 20 minutes a day. We're gonna make it, comrades!
Week 2, Jan 8-14, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 2 & Chapter 3 Sections 1 & 2.
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: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=AA342398FDEC44DFA0E732357783FD48
(Unsure about the quality of the Reitter translation, I'd love to see some input on it as it's the newest one)
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. Also, please let me know if you spot any errors with the bookmarks so I can fix them!
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/
2024 Archived Discussions
If you want to dig back into older discussions, this is an excellent way to do so.
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2025 Archived Discussions
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 ) (Note: Seems to be on hiatus for now) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.
I really appreciate your comments, and I like the idea that is by the concrete formation of money in exchange, that the abstraction of value becomes real (if I'm understanding that correctly).
I don't know if this is a term Marx uses, or if I got it from Harvey, or etc., but I like to think of it as a real abstraction. As in, the actual real act of exchanging of commodities through money is what is doing the abstraction. Abstract labor is a real abstraction because Capitalism makes this abstraction. Value becomes a real abstraction because of the concrete nature of exchange.
Perhaps I have some misunderstanding of myself, though.
What you have been writing reminds me of an article I've read by Ian Wright. I'd like to share it, and get your or other's opinions on it.
Ian Wright - What is Abstract Labour and Who Does the Abstracting
The article is about seeing Capitalism as a control system which controls, regulates, and does the abstracting through feedback loops. He later compares capital to an egregore, which is a fun analogy (and why the blog is called Dark Marxism in the first place).
The details get more into what Capitalism is as a system, and we aren't at that point yet in Marx's work. Capital is what creates exchange value, and is what makes abstract labor. If already familiar with capitalism, then the description is not new, but the recontextualization of thinking of it as a control system, or even an egregore is still illuminating.
Wright starts by sharing your concern
While your solution is to go forward with finding how money concretely makes this abstraction in exchange, Wright takes a similar approach but also goes beyond exchange and talks about capital's profit maximization as the abstractor which makes abstract labor a real abstraction.