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.
Adding on to my previous comment, there is a well-known refutation of the model used by Ian Steedman which Ian Wright invokes in his category-mistake paper. Andrew Kliman and Ted McGlone published this refutation in their paper on the temporal single-system interpretation (TSSI). You can see that Equation 2 in Wright's paper, his definition of standard labor values, is the same as Equation 3 in the TSSI paper. So, the refutation is quite directly targeted at the interpretation used by Wright, which he uses to justify his modification of Marx's theory.
Fun fact, the partner of Radhika Desai — frequent contributor to Geopolitical Economy Report on YouTube — is Alan Freeman. Freeman is an associate of Kliman and has also long argued in defense of the TSSI.
Hey no worries! I enjoy these comments, they get me thinking. Especially because while I am aware of TSSI, I haven't studied it in depth as much as I have Wright's work. I consider myself still learning off of this, so taking time to give Kliman's work more thought is just a continuation of my own learning. I will admit, that I have some gut feeling that the labor theory of value should, and can, be a quantitative theory which also can explain value and price formation. And maybe it turns out I'm completely wrong, but I'll just keep reading and learning and seeing where it leads. In fact, this is something that excites me about this reading group. I'd like to go through Capital with others here with these debates in mind. My own understanding of Ian Wright's work also comes from Shaikh's interpretation of how the Transformation Problem is to be interpreted in his paper "Neo-Ricardian Economics: A Wealth of Algebra, A Poverty of Theory" (its title continuing the Marxist trend of being snarky and sarcastic lol). In it, he does criticize neo-Ricardians dismissal of value and the LTV, and he argues that the correlation between surplus value and profit is preserved if one considers not just the circuit of capital, but also the circuit of revenue - considering the surplus value that is consumed by capitalists when they purchase consumption items. Shaikh also reiterates this argument in his lectures for his book Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. This is essentially (as I see it) what Wright's capitalist consumption matrix C is measuring in his "super-integrated labor-values." Of course, the difference in our understanding sounds like it comes down to how quantitative vs qualitative Marx's theory of value should be, and whether the entire input-output framework is the right way to approach this.
I definitely get what you mean, though, by writers which tend to "modernize" Marx. I often get a bad taste in my mouth by them too, and usually some alarm bells go off. Given that, I think my STEM-bias though makes me inclined to think that the LTV can be quantitative, though, and that "the numbers should work out". And Wright's explanations make sense to me given that mindset. But, like I said, I need to give TSSI a fair investigation too. It's just sometimes not fun going through years of (often harsh) debates back and forth between the various interpretations of Capital.
This is fun, though. And, like I said, I'm excited to keep these debates in mind as we continue reading!
I'll give more thoughts as they come to me. And feel free to share your writings on Marx's value theory being more valuable as a qualitative theory.
Thanks for your responses, I really appreciate them
. I don't have more to add at this point either. I'm sure there'll be more to discuss as we continue reading, and as I read the TSSI papers as well. I'm looking forward to it!