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/
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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.
From reading the comments here, I also would like to apologize for posting anything too esoteric, or boring, or just turned people off. I’ll post some of my thoughts here, and a lot of them are just my questions about money, paper money, and what applies to today. I saw that @blackbread@lemmygrad.ml and @quarrk@hexbear.net were talking about MMT and paper money too. I have nothing to add, but just more questions lol.
Though, I did think about the possibility that paper money today may have taken on forms that Marx didn’t originally discuss explicitly? But even if so, Marx would analyze fiat money through contradictions of the money-form. I’m not knowledgeable enough about this, so any thoughts would definitely be helpful. But I kept a quote about contradictions from the beginning of Chapter 3 in mind when thinking about money today and whatever contradictions may exist between fiat money and money as a measure of value:
Whatever tensions exist between commodities, value, and money that fiat money aided in, it hasn’t gotten rid of the tensions - It just moves them to a new arena.
Chapters 4 and 5 are nice and relaxing reading compared to Chapter 3 imo.
In Chapter 4 we see M-C-M’ for the first time. The big idea in this chapter is capital as a process of self-expanding value.
And we have the general formula for capital, M-C-M’
In Chapter 5, Marx explores where this increment of surplus value ($\Delta$ M) comes from. In equilibrium, or pure exchange, only equivalent values are exchanged. And while prices can diverge from values, this arbitrage can’t provide a constant and reproducible system of surplus extraction, arbitrage can’t provide a system for aggregate surplus value. If looking at only arbitrage in circulation, a gain ‘here’ is offset by a loss ‘there’
Arbitrage causes a change in distribution, but not a change in total value - no aggregate surplus value.
So the source of surplus value cannot exist in circulation, the source must be “something in the background which is not visible in the circulation itself”
So, as others have said, it feels like the build up to the arguments we are expecting.
Chapter 3, though, that’s a lot to digest. I think my brain has some sort of block where it freaks out about money, and I just expect that I can’t understand it. But, overall it wasn’t too bad. A lot of information, though. And I would like to hear what others, especially those fond of MMT, would say about Chapter 3. I feel as if I have these two “competing” ideas about money floating in my head. On one side, we have this Graber-esque/MMT idea of debt arising first, and money coming out by taxes of the state. And on the other side, there is a Marxist critique (along the lines of the Michael Roberts article I shared) that is closer to the ideas in Chapter 3.
Along the lines of these critiques, money still must have value and MMT throws out too much of the theory of value. The state can’t set the prices through taxation, because prices are “an exponent of value,” the “money-name of the labor objectified in a commodity” (Marx) and value isn’t something subjective and controllable by our wills - it has an objective existence. A state can set the standard of price, I suppose, but not prices, not the measure of value?
Marx actually seems to throw some critiques at these proto-Chartalist, proto-MMT theories of money, and there is a good section on paper money that I’ll need to go back to. This is a section before part 3 of Chapter 3, so it may be best to discuss it in the previous thread. Essentially, Marx critiques this idea that because the money commodity can be replaced by symbols (paper money) in circulation it implies that it is superfluous as a measure of value.
Marx also mentions that paper money can be thrown into circulation and act effectively only if the issuance of paper money is restricted to the quantity of gold which would have been in circulation, and “only insofar as paper money represents gold, which like all commodities has value, is it a symbol of value.”
I’d be interested in hearing how, or if, the present American dollar works under this framework Marx presents.
Going on a bit about paper money, Anwar Shaikh in his book Capitalism has a whole chapter about money, and goes through the history of how tokens and paper money came about in England and in Massachusetts through further and further abstractions of gold commodity money. People used gold and when they deposited their gold to banks and goldsmiths and got receipts, then these receipts became banknotes and served as paper money, etc.
The vibe I got form Shaikh is that these “abstract” versions of money are like a network or spider’s web that sprawls out from the original use of gold. And as long as there is no crisis these “abstractions” or “symbols” work as money in the local economy’s circulation. But when crises hit the more abstract versions of money are the first to fall, and the network starts to “collapse”. People want more “real” money during the crisis, so they dump their local bank’s deposits to get the city bank’s deposits, and they may further dump those to get their original gold back.
Eventually, gold as the measure of value reasserts itself. And again, I wonder about how this plays out in our world today.
My opinion is that fiat money can and does do its own thing, but within certain bounds that are enforced by the law of value. Money, even by fiat, must in the last resort always point to actual value, a real commodity with embodied labor. Otherwise it cannot function as a store of value and the economy collapses. However, there is a non-trivial span of time in which this detachment can exist before a crisis. So in this span of time, the ruling class gets to set in motion more capital than really exists as money. Money becomes more and more credit money, ie expected future money. Money in hand right now is therefore temporally linked to future production and earns its character of “burning a hole in one’s pocket.” Modern monetary policy exists in that squishy, speculative space of expected future value production. Therefore money (and the economy as a whole) must always grow exponentially lest a crisis occur.
I like that explanation, and this liminal gap in time where paper money can expand and be detached is what I had in mind when I was reading what Shaikh had to say about the history of paper money. And I also read that into what Marx, or was it Kozlov?, that said that paper money mist refer to gold for value in the final analysis.
So I like the explanation you gave. That’s my working theory I’ll use in the meantime. And from what I remember reading about Roberts’ critique of MMT he agrees that paper money is still bounded by the law of value. I’ll need to read it again to double check though
Thanks!
One last thing to mention is that I liked the list of the five functions of money that are presented in Soviet Political Economy textbooks, like Kozlov’s. It helps me keep the arguments in Capital’s Chapter 3 in order. These five functions are:
Something else from Kozlov (the Editor of a Soviet Political Economy textbook I mentioned earlier) that I’d like to share is its section on Critique of Bourgeoise Theories of Money, since this seems to be coming up with MMT. The following isn’t explicitly in Capital, it is mostly from Kozlov, but when reading Chapter 3 I was on the lookout for the below arguments.
Kozlov, writing in 1977, mentions that there are essentially three basic bourgeoise theories of money that Marx critiques. The 1.) metallist, 2.) quantity, and 3.) nominalist theories.
1.) The metallist theory of money claims that “gold and silver were money virtue of their nature, and that they had this property and would always have it, irrespective of the social structure.” Any other form of money apart from gold is “unnatural”. Marx’s critique is that money is a product of a long development of commodity production and its consequences. Objects of one kind or another become money when social relations require it, under definite social and historical conditions - the high degree of commodity production and exchange. Commodities, being an embodiment of human labor - value, need some expression of this embodiment. A need for a universal equivalent starts to evolve. And the gold commodity is a convenient material for fulfilling this function as universal equivalent. It has properties similar to value in that it can be divided up into smaller parts, it differs in itself only by quantity, it also is a product of human labor - gold has value.
2.) The nominalist theory of money claim that "money is simply a nominal unit of account, lacking any material content, a conventional token established by the state for measuring the value of goods… value has no value itself and, consequently, no inner connections with commodities either, and receives its force entirely form the state authorities.
So MMT theory and Chartalism fall under this category.
The critique Marx brings is that this nominalist theory “replaces objective economic laws and categories by legal concepts and norms. It reduces the essence of money as a historically determined social and production relationship to its outward and visible form, i.e. to the standard of price.” While the state can establish any standard of price (fix the weight of a metal to be the standard unit of money), it is not in a position to fix value. And Marx discusses how the paper money placed in circulation can only work if it replaces the same amount of gold that it displaces, and that it is gold, in the final analysis, that gives paper money its purchasing power.
There is an interesting tidbit in this book where the nominal theory of money is critiqued as justifying excessive issues of paper money and inflation, which “are additional ways of robbing and exploiting the working people.”
3.) The last bourgeois theory is the quantity theory of money, where the value of money is determined exclusively by the quantity of it in circulation. The book then offers a a critique of Ricardo who, apparently, tried to combine the labor theory of value with the quantity theory of money in his analysis of gold (I haven’t read Ricardo, so I’m just taking their word), as well as a dig at Keynes. We saw in Chapter 3 where Marx critiques the quantity theory of money in the part of Chapter 3 before section 3. Essentially, the quantity of money needed in circulation depends on the sum of the prices of the circulating commodities, and the velocity of money. But prices aren’t determined by the quantity of the circulating medium, as commodities enter the market first with a price and money enters the market with a value (because gold, being a product of labor, has a value and is the source of the value of paper money as well).
Does all this hold today? This is where I shrug my shoulders. Now fight, everyone!