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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I finished part 1 and 2 of chapter 1 today. Thanks to the posters in the other thread. Helped me get my head around some key terms, like value, concrete and abstract abor, and importantly the dual character of labor and its implications which had eluded me before. This is my second reading, but like with any book like this, I retained little the first time around.
I put it down after getting to part 3 as I found it either much harder, it seems like it was written in a more obscure way than the first two. Will get back to it tomorrow.
Hoping to post some notes and questions before the end of the week.
I don’t know if anyone else feels like way, but the first chapter so far is so strange compared to other books I’ve read more recently on political economy, etc., because it starts with the most embryonic forms and works outward.
I read the relevant parts of Harvey’s companion afterwards and it was okay. Good to confirm my understanding, but there were some oddities like taking about Marx not following Hegel’s “synthesis” and then the next sentence explaining Marxs dialectical method which was pretty much a more accurate version of what Hegel actually does. And he doesn’t make as concrete how the Dual Character of Labour is important (Marx does this better) and differs from previous works in political economy.
A reminder to everyone reading. Read the footnotes, sometimes the criticism of previous economists like Smith are written in very clear terms which show what Marx is building from and at times subverting. Also they can be pretty funny.
Looking forward to reading this with all of you!
I would avoid Harvey altogether.
Me too.
Can I ask why?
I mean I don’t think he is awful. When I started out I listened to ALL of his lectures, I read his book Marx’s Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. There are a lot of Harvey lovers, a lot of Harvey haters. After having read Capital with my own eyeballs, I tend toward disliking his interpretation in certain ways, but I don’t hate him personally, nor do I find him disingenuous.
Harvey tends to caution against revolution and promotes democratic-socialist ideas. He makes some fundamental mistakes about volumes 1 which leads to him over-emphasizing volume 2. He doesn’t even really accept volume 3.
To summarize a lot of frankly overblown debates: Harvey has a shaky understanding of certain Marxist foundations, and this shakiness is the cause of a degree of reformist opinions that he has. One might even say liberal views that he hasn’t sorted out yet. I don’t care enough about the debate to know all the details, but what I can say is Capital became much clearer to me when I read it for myself and forgot some of what Harvey taught me (and Michael Heinrich, but that’s another story).
good answer thanks
One more note, this article gives an in-depth critique of Harvey’s book, coincidentally on precisely Harvey’s (mis)understanding of chapter 1. It’s a lot to read but I’ll just leave it here as a reference.
That was a good read. Thanks for sharing
This was great, thank you.
I probably will
Heinrich is better than Harvey in terms of understanding Capital. Add Michael Roberts as a chaser and you’ll be in a really good place imo.