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.

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: 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)

2024 Archived Discussions

If you want to dig back into older discussions, this is an excellent way to do so.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40 – Week 41 – Week 42 – Week 43 – Week 44 – Week 45 – Week 46 – Week 47 – Week 48 – Week 49 – Week 50 – Week 51 – Week 52

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 [email protected] ) (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.

N/A

  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    5 days ago

    Appreciate the write up! I agree with the outline you give here. It’s a good summary of the first couple sections of chapter one.

    I think the question remains, however. I don’t think the third thing argument leads, by internal necessity, to abstract labor as the common social substance of commodities. There is a leap being made here that can’t be made without an additional, external consideration or constraint. In other words, we can’t derive abstract labor as the substance of value merely from the exchange of two commodities.

    There is a third thing, yes, and it’s something which abstracts from the particular material properties of each commodity in the relation; but that third property, from this limited perspective, could be anything one may speculate as common among commodities. One such common property would be that commodities are all abstractly useful: every commodity has utility, regardless of which use it satisfies. So how can it be justified for Marx to set apart labor as the sole determinant of value?

    I have researched more since I posted this question, and I have found an answer I can accept in I. I. Rubin’s lecture on abstract labor.

    I can explain more if needed, but the basic conclusion is that the identification of labor as the third thing can only happen through additional analysis which accounts for the specific character of labor in capitalism as social labor whose division is mediated through exchange value. You mentioned this part already, but I think it is theoretically significant that the third thing argument is not, in itself, a proof that the third thing is labor. (Rubin argues that Marx himself did not intend this as a proof of such.) There are additional points I can make about the necessity of money in Marx’s argumentation, specifically in the assertion that each commodity is replaceable by any other in actual fact, not ideally or hypothetically. This subtle point about money is explained by Rubin but also by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value.

    Rubin excerpt

    [I]t is the concrete structure of commodity production which forms the starting point of all Marx’s reflections and in no way the purely logical comparison of two commodities.

    Marx thus starts out from the fact of the universal equalisation of all commodities with each other, or from the fact that every commodity can be compared with a vast number of other commodities. Nevertheless this assumption alone is not adequate for all the conclusions Marx draws. There is another tacit assumption underlying these which Marx expressed elsewhere.

    The second assumption consists in this: we assume that the exchange of a quarter of wheat for any other commodity, is an exchange which is governed by a known regularity (Gesetzmässigkeit), and the regularity of these acts of exchange is due to their dependence on the process of production. We have to reject the notion that the quarter of wheat can be exchanged for any random quantity of iron, coffee etc. We cannot agree with the assumption that the proportions of exchange are laid down each time in the act of exchange itself, and so have a completely accidental character. We maintain that all these possibilities for the exchange of a specific commodity with another, are governed by a determined regularity which is based in the process of production. In this case Marx’s whole argumentation takes the following form:

    Marx says: let us take not the accidental exchange of two commodities wheat, and iron, but exchange in the form in which it actually occurs in commodity production, and then we will see that each object can be universally equated with all other objects; in other words, we can observe countless numbers of proportions of exchange of a given product with all others. But the proportions of the exchange are not accidental, they are regular, and their regularity is determined by causes which are grounded in the process of production.

    Thus we reach the conclusion, that independently of the fact that the value of a quarter of wheat is expressed on one occasion as two pounds of coffee, on another as three chairs etc., the value of a quarter of wheat remains one and the same in all the different cases. If we were to assume that a quarter of wheat has a different value in each of the infinite number of proportions of exchange — and Bailey’s assertions amount to this — then we would be acknowledging that complete chaos reigns in the phenomenon of price formation, in that sublime phenomenon of exchange of products, through and by means of which a universal inter-relation of all modes of labour is established.

    • Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      19 hours ago

      I wanted to thank you for your response, and ask some more questions. But I think you’ve mentioned them in a separate post. You’re also on to the next chapter already! dog-screm Sorry I have nothing to respond with at the moment, but I wanted you to know I wasn’t ignoring your response! I got to get to reading.