Welcome to baby Marxist rehabilitation camp.

We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly until communism is achieved.

The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ 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.

We currently have 58 members!!! I expect a certain drop-off rate, but I'll be thrilled if a dozen or couple dozen read it.

If you've made it this far, you've already read ¹⁄₁₈ of Volume I. The first three weeks are the hardest, after that it'll be quite easy, and only requires 20 minutes a day (endurance is key).


Just joining us? It'll take you about 2-3 hours to catch up to where the group is. You can do that on one long bus ride.

Archives: Week 1


Week 2, Jan 8-14, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 2 'The Process of Exchange', PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 1 'The Measure of Values' PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 2 'The Means of Circulation'


In other words, aim to get up to the heading '3. Money' by Jan 14


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)

  • 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/

  • Kolibri [she/her]
    ·
    11 months ago

    I was not expecting Marx to randomly cite a bible passage

    • ComradeRat [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Marx's use of the Bible is honestly really interesting. Expect to see more of it through Capital (and even more the earlier in his writings you go). It is inarguably the single largest literary, theoretical and philosophical inspiration Marx has throughout his life. Marx's library contained at least one copy of the Bible when he died, so it's also likely that it (like Hegel) was something he came back to time and time again.

      Some more Marx-Bible facts:

      In his early articles for the Rheinische Zeitung he refers, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to both himself and other journalists as prophets and false prophets.

      He closes his "Critique of the Gotha Programme" with a quote from the Bible identifying himself with Ezekiel.

      He taught his daughters about Jesus as "the carpenter who the rich men killed", reciting his own version of the story himself.

      According to the memoirs of German socialist Max Beer (who met Eleanor Marx), Marx rarely had much to say about religion in her memory except, when her mother and sister started going to Mr. Bradlaugh's secular Sunday services. This led Karl Marx to dissuade his wife and daughter from going there. Beer quotes Eleanor as saying: "[Karl Marx] told mother that edification or satisfaction of her metaphysical needs she would find them in the Jewish prophets rather than in Mr. Bradlaugh's shallow reasonings".

      Some Jewish socialists have actually claimed him for the Jewish prophetic tradition, for example Abraham Shiplacoff's speech in the 1910s said (originally in Yiddish):

      Marx was a prophet, no less so than Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. With honest conviction and courage he proclaimed the economic liberation of humanity. He appealed to the workers of the world and inspired them with his conviction that they are destined to fulfill the great task of abolishing poverty, thus putting an end to wars between nations and classes, and, in doing so, realize the great thousands-year-old dream of human brotherhood.

      Marx's constant references made me curious so I looked into it, and the Bible has a shocking number of condemnations of poverty/oppression and outright critiques of markets, class, urban/rural divide, and so forth. The commodity-fetishism section from last chapter is especially neat because Marx secularises prophetic condemnations of idol worship, even using the same phrases (e.g. "work of their hands").

      • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        reciting his own version of the story himself.

        The only good part of a christian upbringing is retelling the stories with all the hocus pocus ripped out and filling them with cuss words.

        • Beaver [he/him]
          ·
          11 months ago

          That's why I always love the story of the cleansing of the Temple. You don't need to believe in the supernatural to understand why Jesus would go absolutely apeshit on a bunch of loan sharks.

    • Stoatmilk [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      If Marx was writing today, Capital would include stuff like "If by means of increased productivity the socially necessary labor needed to produce a pair of jeans is halved, then the value of those jeans also falls by half, as if Thanos had snapped his fingers at it."

    • quarrk [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Marx wrote about religion and especially Christianity a lot in the 1840s. Mostly about how it is an alienated form that dominates over the people whose minds produced it. Sound similar to commodity fetishism?

      This footnote excerpt from ch1 is relevant to the money discussion in ch3. Marx was not a fan of utopian socialist proposals of labor money, or alternative money that avoids the pitfalls of abstract labor by counting directly as social labor. Eg. if you work for 1 hour you get a 1-labor-hour token.

      ”It may therefore be imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character [of money] impressed upon them, just as it can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together.”

      • Vampire [any]
        hexagon
        M
        ·
        11 months ago

        ”It may therefore be imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character [of money] impressed upon them, just as it can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together.”

        I took that quote to mean you can't use everything as commodity-money, you have to set one aside (gold). How is that quote against labour-tokens?

        • quarrk [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          [Edit: By labor money I mean something slightly different from the labor tokens mentioned in the Gotha Critique. Labor money would be a form of money within commodity production and private property, whereas the labor tokens mentioned in Gotha are referring to a post-capitalist society in which commodity production (i.e. private property) has been abolished.]

          The rest of the footnote makes it clearer, as well as other writing in Grundrisse and Poverty of Philosophy. The so-called utopian socialists wanted to keep commodity production while eliminating money, whereas Marx thought that money is necessarily produced by commodity production and can't be done away with while keeping commodity production. So the connection between the Pope quote and labor money is simply that contemporary advocates for labor money wanted a situation in which all commodities could behave as money, which is what abolishing money effectively tries to do.

          Full quote, bold added:

          It is by no means self-evident that this character of direct and universal exchangeability is, so to speak, a polar one, and as intimately connected with its opposite pole, the absence of direct exchangeability, as the positive pole of the magnet is with its negative counterpart. It may therefore be imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character impressed upon them, just as it can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together. It is, of course, highly desirable in the eyes of the petit bourgeois, for whom the production of commodities is the nec plus ultra of human freedom and individual independence, that the inconveniences resulting from this character of commodities not being directly exchangeable, should be removed. Proudhon’s socialism is a working out of this Philistine Utopia, a form of socialism which, as I have elsewhere shown, does not possess even the merit of originality. Long before his time, the task was attempted with much better success by Gray, Bray, and others. But, for all that, wisdom of this kind flourishes even now in certain circles under the name of “science.” Never has any school played more tricks with the word science, than that of Proudhon, for “wo Begriffe fehlen, Da stellt zur rechten Zeit ein Wort sich ein.” [“Where thoughts are absent, Words are brought in as convenient replacements,” Goethe’s Faust. See Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty]

          The pope quote in Capital was probably borrowed from a section in Grundrisse ~10 years earlier, in a discussion on labor money

          "Let the pope remain, but make everybody pope. Abolish money by making every commodity money and by equipping it with the specific attributes of money."

      • ComradeRat [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        11 months ago

        This is true elsewhere, but in interest of pedanticness I gotta point out that the Apocalypse quote is Marx using it's theoretical arguments to support his own, and in doing so (and a few other places in the book), he draws attention to Rome's similarity to English capitalism. Rather than dunking on Christians, here Marx is making an attempt to weaponise christians/ity against capitalism