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 noted that "rebound effect" when I read it as well. I related it to what I've read about cybernetics and complexity science as an examples of Ashby's Law, and I recently shared some notes about cybernetics in a discussion @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml and I were having about complex systems.
It's possible this is a stretch and these are my quack pet-theories, so be forwarned, but I see parallels with what Marx said to Ashby's Law of Variety in cybernetics. If viewed from this perspective, it is as if that once a community (system) becomes exposed to commodity exchange (from an environment), it is confronted with a system of higher "complexity" or "variety", and this forces an adaptation (or "extinction") of the previous non-commodity modes. Commodity exchange is able to encode more information and can increase the scale and efficiency of the production of use-values by having a "rebound effect" on the communities division of labor. That isn't meant to be a moral judgement, though. Commodity exchange isn't "good" or "better" than the pre-commodity systems, but commodity exchange allows for an increase in information encoding, and so societies that adopt to it are then able to further reproduce. This is how I interpret Marx when he says that exchange bursts local bonds and expands more and more.
Now, this may sound like some Hayekian market triumphalism ("only the Holy Market can encode all economic information, kneel before my prices!"), but Ashby's Law would be no stranger to cyberneticians like Stafford Beer who worked on Project Cybersyn and tried to build these planned economies. Someone like Beer may just respond that once we are able to design a planned economy that can "outcompete" the market, then planned economies will be that which rebounds and bursts through their local bonds. Quantity transforming to quality.