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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No, the labour theory of value is only a thing in a society wherein the capitalist mode of production prevails. A communist society would be dealing with pure use-values while in a feudal society (not in the market-interstices) the focus was also use-values, not on value or its reflection exchange-value.
The quote you are commenting on specifically notes that the universal form of labour, independent of social development, is labour as creator of use-values. This labour is a constant for human society, whereas labour as a producer of value is specific to a world where the commodity-form is generalized.
The labour theory of value also doesn't acknowledge all work as labour, e.g. the persistent denial even to this day by many that housework, childcare, etc, is labour.
Marx seems to be of two minds on the LToV in Capital; sometimes he seems to actually genuinely believe that there is something fundamentally unique about human labour or that reproduction of labour-powers can be excluded from his analysis because family is a natural sphere, and sometimes he seems to be simply accepting the bourgeois definition of 'real' labour as a given for purposes of criticising it on its own terms and sees the concept of commodity-value as a purely social thing with "not an atom of matter".
That's a funny mistake. I guess that's why it is called the "labor theory of value" rather than the "labor theory of use-value."
In truth, Marx never calls it a labor theory of value. Some Marxists will say that it is more aptly described as a value theory of labor, because labor is the constant, value is the historically contingent.
This is interesting, who writes about it like this?
Diane Elson, The Value Theory of Labour. I think there are others but maybe I'm misremembering. Actually it might have been David Harvey who originally said it, in that case take it with grain of salt.
Thanks, I'll give that a read.
Reading capital is haunted by a specter, the specter of Harvey