Good work so far, crew. We are approaching being ⅓ of the way through Vol.1 and ⅛ of the way through the 3-volume work; we'll cross those marks this week.
Last week we looked at the political struggle between labour and capital, how it played out in real life. We saw how abstract principles of economics lead to lung problems in children.
Don't forget that this is a club: it is a shared activity, it's not only reading, it's something we do together to also build camaraderie. So engage in the comments.
The overall plan is to read 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. 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.
Just joining us? It'll take you about 13 hours to catch up to where the group is. Use the archives below to help you.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6
Week 7, Feb 12-18, we are reading from Volume 1: all of Chapters 11, 12, and 13, and then the first 2 sections of Chapter 14
In other words, aim to reach the heading 'The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture: Heterogeneous Manufacture, Serial Manufacture' by Sunday
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.
Audiobook of Ben Fowkes translation, American accent, male, links are to alternative invidious instances: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9
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/
I'm glad you found that Engels letter interesting too! I discovered it while looking up the Darwin letter for that comment. It gave me a lot to think about too. Especially since my background is in the natural sciences, I never heard that kind of critique of Darwin.
#4 in the letter echos a lot of what Marx wrote. For example Marx's 10th thesis on Feuerbach: "The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity." (By civil society, Marx means bourgeois or capitalist society.) The common thread of all of Marx's work is the scientific study of humanity. This means grasping the "differentia specifica" (to quote footnote 33 in chapter 1 of Capital) of the major epochs of human history, as differentiated by the actual mode of existence of each epoch — mode of existence, for humans, being determined by mode of production, like Engels says. In addition to understanding the historical specificity of social laws e.g. the law of value, it is important also to understand those things which differentiate humans from animals. In all, this letter is great for summarizing a lot of these ideas of Marx and Engels and later socialists.
Kind of similar to this letter is Marx's July 1868 letter to Dr. Kugelmann, which I have posted in the past. It also discusses human history in this sort of abstract materialist way.
A small note on Engels' point #1: the term "one-sided" is a term also used by Marx in various places, having roots in the Hegelian dialectic and its attempt to eliminate one-sidedness in thought, by contemplating concepts from many sides based on their immanent characteristics. That is what Marx does in Capital, and since it is a general attitude of thinking (much like science is also an attitude) it is no wonder that Engels catches this one-sidedness in the early apprehension of Darwin's theory in Malthusian, Hobbesian, generally bourgeois interpretations of Darwin's work.
Finally, if you liked this letter, then you would probably like Marx's The German Ideology (for which the Theses on Feuerbach were preparatory notes) or Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.