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 15-21, 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/
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 !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.
I also am hoping others comment too. I am the process of writing up notes for my own understanding. But they are not yet complete (are notes ever complete), and so I’m stuck in this liminal space where I feel like I’m stuck between posting small thoughts or interesting tidbits that spring to mind, and wanting to post something more “polished”
Yes I already found the notes to be tricty this week as it is evolving more into argumentation. So I didn’t post them this week.
I suppose I am still waiting for some sort of lighbulb moments that do come when I am doing the reading, but then don’t feel so important later on. I don’t want to make many assumptions yet either, because it seems to still be in the build up-phase.
I had many thoughts about the petro dollar and the chapters this week for example that I can’t quite articulate yet.
I’d love to look forward to any notes of yours, especially on the petrodollar.
I know that someone on hexbear made a thread a while back asking for essays on the petrodollar, but it didn’t get much traction. The only response was about how the petrodollar is overblown is a concept and doesn’t really exist? Idk enough to say one way or the other… but the thread got me to do some searchong and I did find an article from the Historical Materialism journal that discusses the dollar and it’s relation to the oil commodity. This stuff is beyond my level, though, so it’d take a lot of time for me to go through it and actually get something out of it. I think I just read the abstract and placed it on my to do list.
So any notes to aid in understanding or get the gears going would be welcomed if youd like to post them later!