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)

  • 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/

2024 Archived Discussions

If you want to dig back into older discussions, this is an excellent way to do so.

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 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40 – Week 41 – Week 42 – Week 43 – Week 44 – Week 45 – Week 46 – Week 47 – Week 48 – Week 49 – Week 50 – Week 51 – Week 52

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.

Week 1

  • Sebrof [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    19 hours ago

    Importance of Money in Making Value Real

    Continuing in the vein that @quarrk@hexbear.net was discussing much earlier, it appears there are sections where Marx a points out the importance of money (and hence of exchange) in “making” value. Concrete exchange/money must happen to "complete" the earlier abstraction of abstract value as the source of value. Correct me, here, if I'm misinterpreting what you said earlier.

    To the owner of a commodity, every other commodity counts as the particular equivalent of his own commodity… there is in fact no commodity acting as universal equivalent, and the commodities possess no general relative form of value under which they can be equated as values… They can only bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore as commodities, by bringing them into an opposing relation with some other commodity … the universal equivalent. (pg 180)

    And later on page 182-183 (of the Penguin edition)

    Commercial intercourse… never takes place unless different kinds of commodities… are exchanged for, and equated as values with, one single further kind of commodity.

    This further kind of commodity, is the universal or social equivalent. Which is money, or the money-form.

    A question for you nerds: What does Marx mean by money vs the money-form, or value vs the value-form?

    From Soviet political economy (Kozlov, and other similar textbooks), they provide the following:

    “The social labor embodied in a commodity appears as value,” while “the expression of the value of a commodity by equating it to another commodity is called the form of value.”

    And this is where Marx’s earlier discussion (in Chapter 1) gets into the various forms of value: (a) The Accidental Form which contains the relative and equivalent form, (b) The Expanded or Total Form, (c) The General Form, and (d) The Money Form.