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
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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.
As I read the first part of this chapter (about gold and formation of money) I was thinking in my head about how fiat currency is basically not different than debased gold. The later part of the chapter talked about how money becomes a credit system (which leads to potential boom and bust systems). Anyway, I’m feeling that after reading capital, you can probably just toss Modern Monetary theory into the garbage (I noticed others said similar things reading chapter 2).
I found the idea that things that don’t have “value” (because they’re not produced by labour – like titles, or land) can acquire prices to be very intriguing (and unexpected). The history of “money names” (e.g. pound sterling [silver]) becoming totally divorced from their modern quantities due to debasement.
I had to reread what he said about money serving too roles – measure of price and standard of value. Read that over half a dozen times, but it makes sense to me now. I paid attention when Marx said that the “use-value” of gold (as money) becomes equal to it’s exchange value (gold can of course, be used for other things, but one thing it is used for, is exchange). This is a dialectical unity.
Just a whole lot in this chapter that was interesting. For example, that the quantity of gold in circulation would be tied to the speed of transactions and the amount of commodities — and not the reverse (e.g. gold being added won’t increase the amount of commodities nor speed up transactions).
I don’t know much about MMT, but I would pump the brakes a little bit. I don’t think chapter 3 of Capital says everything there is to say about money as it exists today. Marx does a good job showing the essence of money and how money is indispensable within capitalist society. Yet this analysis doesn’t constrain money from developing into an ever more complex and obfuscating form, partly detaching from value and taking on a life of its own. Capitalism did not emerge from thin air but out of older forms of society. The money form which we see today has a sort of genetic heritage which can be traced back precisely to precapitalist forms of money. Modern money is a bastardized form of primitive money which capitalism has reappropriated for its own purposes.
Money could, through the course of historical development, acquire new functions which adhere themselves, like parasites, to the relatively simple form of money laid out in Capital. This is probably what you mean by saying fiat money is like when a money commodity debases itself; the next logical question, then, is precisely how this debased form of money works, all the while understanding that money also must satisfy its functions as measure of value, as store of value, as medium of exchange, and as means of payment.
In this way there could be things to learn from heterodox theories like MMT. To what extent can fiat money diverge from real production before the law of value asserts itself and forces a monetary crisis? Why does fiat money arise in the first place? Does fiat money help capitalism, or accelerate its demise? It seems to me that, regardless of whether mass-printed money actually adds value in circulation, it might not really matter as long as people treat it as though it is rooted in real commodities. This would mean that a government could actually print new currency and stimulate the economy as though it had actually created new value. This would heighten the likelihood and severity of a monetary crisis, but can that be deferred arbitrarily far in the future with clever policy?
There’s a lot I don’t know about this topic. I believe Michael Hudson is a proponent of MMT — though not necessarily in all its variations — and I believe he has a pretty strong grasp of Marx, having read all volumes of Capital including “volume 4” Theories of Surplus Value.
This is motivating me to give Michael Robert’s critique of MMT a better read, but also see what the other Michael, Roberts, has to read. Because I pretty have these same questions and general confusions about how or where MMT meets Marx
Great points. I can’t wait to see how the argumentation of land and other things with no labor value becomes capital or tools of capital accumulation.
I also found the points he makes about temporality, speed and time very interesting, because to my understanding one of the common critiques of Marx (and later Lenin) is a supposed lack of attention to temporality. It’s however very clearly built into the analysis from early on.