We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. This will repeat yearly 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.
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: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D
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.
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 a word of encouragement to anyone struggling with chapter 1, the first three chapters (and chapter 1 especially) of Capital are notoriously heavy and hard to read. Marx and Engles both apologised for them! It’s not just you, you’re not lacking some quality, everyone finds the first 3 chapters tough. So don’t worry, go steady, get through them, especially if it’s your first Marxist reading. These chapters will make more sense retrospectively once you’ve seen how his arguments develop through the book(s). Some people (not me) even recommend reading the book out of order to get more from these chapters later on.
This is what I am trying to keep in mind. This is also a reason why I don’t really have much to say on it this week yet. I feel like thoughts are just starting to form. The parts about money for example are very thought provoking and have lead to some side-reading as well, but I can’t form any coherent thoughts from them just yet.
I am trying to take this as a sort of primer and trust the process, very much appreciate the comments here as they help in forming thoughts about it a lot.
Chapter 1 Section 3 kicked my ass lol