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.
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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.
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!