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]
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Money Value, Real Abstraction

    More on the thought of money and value, and value being this “real abstraction”. I noted a passage toward the end of the chapter where Marx talks about the requirements a commodity must have in order to function as the universal equivalent. What I thought was interesting is that a money commodity must have similar properties to value in order for money to make the real abstraction. For a commodity to function as the form of appearance of value, it must have a homogenous and uniform quality just like abstract labor.

    Only a material whose every sample possesses the same uniform quality can be an adequate form of appearance of value, that is a material embodiment of abstract and therefore equal human labor.

    And, just like how the only difference between magnitudes of value is quantitative, not qualitative, money must also be “purely quantitative differentiation… divisible at will, and … possible to assemble it again.” (pg 184)

    There is also a discussion where Marx says that the fact that money can be replaced by symbols gives rise to a mistaken notion that money itself is just a symbol.. While at some level, it is true that every commodity is a symbol “since, as value, it is only the material shell of the human labor expended on it”, we must not go too far with this idea else we may err and say that the “social characteristics assumed by material objects” are arbitrary products of human reflection. This, to me, reiterates that money and value represent a real social relation. We can’t say that it is purely a product of human imagination. It has an “objective” reality of sorts by the fact that it is not purely subjective or a product of our thoughts or will. It is a real abstraction, an objective feature of commodity exchange, and is determined by the labor-time required for production of the commodity.

    A comment by Shaikh in the article I mentioned above about this abstraction.

    It is important to stress here that the abstraction process described above is a real social process. Abstract labor is the property acquired by human labor when it is directed towards the production of commodities, and as such, it exists only in commodity production. The concept of abstract labor is not a mental generalization that we somehow choose to make, but rather the reflection in the thought of a real social property. This in term means that abstract labor, and hence value too, are real.” “Neo-Richardian Economic, A Wealth of Algebra, A Poverty of Theory” pg. 70.