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.
Congratulations to those who’ve made it this far! We are almost finished the first three chapters, which are said to be the hardest. If you made it through with us now, it’s extremely likely that you’ll stick the rest out. Let’s keep it up! Proud of y’all!
Week 3, Jan 18-25, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 3 Section 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5.
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)
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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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Hey everyone, it’s time to come discuss Capital again!
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Still catching up on chapter one! It is… Dense lol. Looking forward to when I eventually catch up though.
Dense
Yeah, lol. That’s Marx and Engels for you (and so much of theory in general).
I’m always a little paranoid that I’ve forgotten someone, or put someone on one of the older lists but not this one. I think it’s all good though.
So I’m listening to “When McKinsey comes to town,” one of my take aways is the point of capitalism is to keep the money moving. McKinsey gets paid to solve problems for companies and even industries in direct competition with each other. But the solution is always buying and selling more stuff. Something that was touched on in the series of C-M-C s.
Isn’t a lot of their solutions just lay off people?
I’m still a bit behind. I’m wrapping up Chapter 2 and have had to spend a lot of time in Chapter 1. I think I’m finally starting to get Chapter 1 but I feel like I’ll have to revisit it in a few months to really anchor what I learned.
One of the thing that jumped at me having read about diamat, was how I believe in Chapter 2. Value is approached from a dialectical perspective. The use value and the exchange value are contradictions contained in the commodity (unity of opposites). If I want to realize the exchange value I would have to “alienate” from my pov the use value and vice versa, making them clearly exclusion of one another. These contradictions forces the appearance of the exchange which brings selling/buying as the contradictions. The synthesis of it is money which creates new contradictions (C-M-C’ vs M-C-M’).
time to plug one of my favorite articles but hopefully not for the last time: Marx on Capital as a Real God
about the reitter translation, i’ve been reading it along with the aveling one. it’s been useful to me in understanding some of marx’s wording and biblical references. it helped me understand what the hell he was talking about when he said all that shit about circumcision. from the translator’s note:
Marx is playing with a prominent stereotype, namely, that Jews have a special connection to commerce, something he does elsewhere in Capital and beyond it, too—for example, in his essay On the Jewish Question (1843). But he is also making a point about capitalism by way of a New Testament analogy, and thus suggesting that capitalism and Christianity share basic conceptual structures. This, too, Marx does elsewhere in Capital. The high point of such analogizing comes in the present chapter, where Marx uses the doctrine of the Trinity to explain the ontological relation between capital and surplus-value. The line about the circumcised Jews refers to Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 2:25–29 (KJV): “For circumcision verily profiteth, if thou keep the law: but if thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision. Therefore if the uncircumcision keep the righteousness of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be counted for circumcision? And shall not uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who by the letter and circumcision dost transgress the law? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.” Thus the capitalist resembles Paul. For the capitalist knows that every commodity may be saved by Christ/capital, which cares only about what is in the commodity’s soul/value, not its outward adherence to any law/use-value.
The notes about biblical, literary, and renaissance references are good in Reitter. I find that the flow is such that I’m able to mentally summarize paragraphs rather than summarizing sentences like in Fowkes.
This made me think about generative AI as something of a “golden spindle:”
“The capitalist might dream of using gold spindles instead of iron ones, but the only labor that counts toward the yarn’s value is socially necessary labor- that is, the labor time needed to produce iron spindles.” (P. 163 in Reitter, about halfway through chapter 5)



