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)
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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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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 !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) (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.
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Got through with the Reitter translation… let me give a general overview so people can let me know if this translation is wildly different or has missed something vital.
Marx goes through a series of equations representing trade. In Reitter it’s linen and coats. 1 coat = 20 yards linen (for example). Later, this generalizes to more commodities 1 coat = 20 yards linen or 1 coat = 40 loaves bread or 1 coat = xyz. One for each commodity. Finally it generalizes to a form 1 coat = {20 yards linen, 40 loaves bread, …}. These equations are meant to represent the historical development of the commodity. The first represents a simple sort of barter, the second a more commodity based society, and the third the introduction of a money commodity.
In explaining this, Marx makes it clear that the equating of commodities is really the equating of abstract labor. And an interesting duality: the “exchange value” of something is expressed in terms of the “use value” of something else! I don’t believe Marx said that exchange and use values are dialectically opposed.
So far so good anyway. Felt pretty comfortable in Reitter translation – I avoided all the historic footnotes which just confused me :-/
Personally, and comrades please correct me on this, I don’t think dialectics needs to apply to Use-Value and Exchange-Value with each other, rather, all commodities are Use-Values and therefore when compared to other commodities have an Exchange-Value. These forms of “value” aren’t opposed or conflicting in any real way, they don’t form a contradiction, they are merely aspects of commodities. The closest to a dialectical relationship would be shifting from production based on exchange to production based on use, though that’s not quite dialectical IMO. There is absolutely Dialectical Materialism at play here, but more in the sense that exchange only exists in motion and thus exchange-value only exists in a moving economy, not just the mere presence of a use-value.