We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. This will repeat yearly 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.
Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'
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: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D
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.
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/
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We intuitively think about commodities from the perspective of single units because we deal with unit prices when we enter the market. So the natural first question is: how much does this single banana cost? What is its value?
In Capital you should think about it from the aggregate level and not the individual level. What is the total social labor required to produce all bananas for society? Let's say it is 1 million labor-hours to produce 1 billion bananas. Then, on average, each banana contains in it 1/1,000 of a labor-hour, or 3.6 labor-seconds1. Nowhere in this procedure did there arise a consideration for how it makes the producers feel, or what they ought to earn, or whether society should produce that many bananas.
Value is independent of supply and demand. Value depends only on the labor time needed to produce a commodity, or in other words, it depends on the state of technology at a given time and place.
So the value of one banana is 3.6 seconds, but that does not guarantee that the supply will meet the demand. The price of a banana may therefore exceed its value. It is quite possible that, say, there are not enough laborers willing to tame lions or clean shark tanks, and the prices for those labor-powers exceed their values.
1Important caveat: You cannot directly compute value in terms of physical labor like this because value consists of abstract labor, not concrete labor.
Thanks I think I need to sit tight. In liberal economics, I think the value of a commodity is simply "What the market will pay," which is easy but unsustainable way to run a market place because of differences in information and the baked in incentive to hoard capital to produce commodities at lower prices / monopolize to charge higher prices than the market. I am looking to find a solution to the latent hoarding issue but I don't know if Marx ever solved it
That is something Marx will talk about a lot, in detail, later in the book, especially in "Part VII: The Accumulation of Capital." He actually gives a down-to-earth, simple example of one business owner who has X amount of profits, spends Y amount on himself, to buy a house, diamonds for his wife, toys for his kids, dinners at fancy restaurants, etc., and then invests X - Y = Z back into the company. Modern corporations are much more complicated than this, because they have thousands of investors, or even millions somtimes, if we consider Vanguard-esque retirement funds. But yeah, Marx basically sees most industries as naturally tending towards monopolization. That is one of the main differences between Marxist and liberal/libertarian economics. You can't compete your way out of this problem.
Furthermore, many Marxists in the past 150 years have predicted that this tendency to ever-more monopolization and increasing "economies of scale" for large corporations will lead to a race to the bottom, with rates of profit continuously falling across the board. Some Marxists even believe falling rates of profit will be the main thing triggering the next big worldwide war/revolution, although that is a hotly debated topic.