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.
Week 1, January 4 - January 11, Volume 1 Chapter 1 ‘The Commodity’
This is the very first bookclub post, so get to know each other, ask questions about the basic premise, just keep mostly on-topic. This didn’t start on January 1st because I want it to start and end on the weekend. @'ing everyone mid-Thursday probably wouldn’t have gotten very many readers.
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.
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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Harvey’s lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWvnUfModHP9Ci8M1g39l4AZgK6YLCXd0
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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 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 ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there’s always next year.
N/A
The first half of chapter one is a struggle but the second half made a lot more sense to me. I think next week I’ll re-read chapter 1 to help it sink in and then read chapter 2. Essentially doubling the amount of reading but fuck it if I didn’t push through before reaching 100% understanding it’d take me a lifetime per chapter lol.
karl marx debunked the “marginal revolution” on literally the first page of capital
and the water-diamond thing a few paragraphs later. it’s wild how many of these economists’ “thought experiments” were destroyed by a guy who was already dead when they happened
Is it the talking point of how a glass of water is more valuable than a diamond in the middle of the desert so the whole theory of use-value and value is wrong?
it’s even dumber than that. the “paradox” is, since water is necessary for human life, why does it cost less than diamonds?
For this reading, I’m trying to really diagram out the categories as they are developed, to check if I really understand it. So I tried to implement the categories as data types in Haskell-ish pseudocode, but unfortunately this proved to be more tricky than I thought. Has anyone tried doing something like this, i.e. mathematically formalizing Marxian categories into something like a type system?
I found this really interesting thread on
/r/SocialistProgrammers, which seems to discuss something similar. However, I’m not trying to capture the full dynamism of Hegelian logic. I just want to take a snapshot of Marx’s categories at different points in the book for diagramming purposes, to show how the categories are connected. I imagine it could be visualized some way for pedagogical purposes.i don’t have anything to add rn but have you started doing this? or rather, did you manage to work out a way of doing this that proved useful &c?
I didn’t make much progress after this post, and I started to think that it would be too complicated. For example, I got into the section of Ch 1 about the simple commodity form and the development of the money commodity. Trying to formalize this would be quite tricky because I don’t even know how one would go about making types for this:
- In an exchange relation of commodity A with commodity B, the relative form of A is pure value, while the equivalent form of B is the physical embodiment of abstract human labor.
- The expanded form of commodity A with all such commodities B means that the physical body which represents abstract human labor (equivalent form) takes on as many different forms as there are commodities B.
- Flip the directions: Represent all commodities A using the same equivalent form commodity B, so that a single commodity B becomes the physical embodiment of abstract human labor in the exchange with all such A.
- The money commodity is the commodity B which is used in practice, e.g. gold or silver.
I think it would need some kind of “Exchange” type which includes a Relative field (type Commodity) and an Equivalent field (type Commodity). There could be some function ConvertToEquivalent which takes the “internal” value of labor-time in the Relative commodity, and returns a new commodity with the same internal labor-time expressed as a different commodity (the Equivalent). This would be steps 1 and 2.
To develop step 3, add a function ExchangeValue which simply takes 2 commodities and divides their internal value (units of labor-time) and returns a unitless ratio.
The part I have not figured out is how to really express the concept of socially necessary labor-time. Intuitively, this should be some kind of function which takes information external to the commodity, maybe some kind of lookup table for the SNLT of all commodities at a given snapshot in time. But I wonder if there is some more elegant way to calculate this lookup table using purely the information in the type system, rather than just axiomatically assuming it?
This is where I start to feel out of my depth, but it does help me try to clarify it for myself!
maybe i’ll come back to this in a few days and feel totally stupid but is socially-necessary labor time not already embodied in the exchange-value of a commodity? in other words, the amount of abstract human labor represented as exchange-value can only ever be the amount of labor that is on average necessary to make the use-value contained in the commodity (absent confounding factors ofc)
You’re absolutely right, yes I think with all things held constant (intensity of labor, technology, stable environment, etc) then the socially-necessary labor time should be constant. I was thinking it’d be cool if, in this code implementation, the SNLT could be calculated for a given commodity using its entire supply chain. So each commodity keeps track of its inputs and the labor added when converting the inputs into the commodity. The SNLT for a commodity would be calculated recursively by summing the added labor plus the SNLT of all of its inputs.
Commodity: 1 apple pie
- Added Labor = 30 min
- Inputs = {1 apple, 100g sugar, 250g flour, 5g cinnamon, 20g butter}
- SNLT = 30 min + SNLT(Inputs)
Commodity: 100g sugar
- Added Labor = 5 minutes (idk made up)
- Inputs = {some fraction of a combine harvester, water, things needed to process sugar…}
- SNLT = 5 minutes + SNLT(Inputs)
Commodity: 250g flour
- Added Labor = 1 minute (at industrial scale)
- Inputs = {some fraction of a flour mill, seeds, pesticide, …}
- SNLT = 1 minute + SNLT(Inputs)
and so on. As I write this, I’m realizing this would lead to some chicken-and-egg problems, similar to how the process of making yogurt involves taking some yogurt, adding milk and heat to get more yogurt. I’ll have to think about this.[1]
But with this model, it would be possible to interrogate the data and maybe build some graphs.
But I’m not just interested to build graphs, I was also hoping it’d help me better understand what is “simple average labor.” Marx says that human labor in all its particular kinds is abstracted into abstract labor of an average intensity and skill. Are we able to more precisely define what that means? I feel like a formalization could help give precision on things like that. For example, can “skill” be quantified? Could we tell if the average skill increases or decreases over time? That could have relevance in later chapters when Marx talks about de-skilling, maybe this would be a neat connection.
edit: I think this can be solved if I don’t calculate SNLT recursively like this. If all the inputs can be assumed paid with money, the universal equivalent, which is also a form of value. The inputs are from a previous production process, and the labor time of the inputs is “forwarded” as dead labor to the next production process. Looks like I need to refresh myself on Kliman and also Chapter 8 of volume 1. ↩︎
noooo I’m already behind
not sure I’ll manage to finish chapter 1 in time, but hopefully I’ll be caught up through chapter 2 by the end of next week’s thread. I guess ideally I’d be done with chapter 3 in time for week 3’s thread, but that seems like wishful thinking (I do hope to eventually be ready with a comment by the beginning of each week). Also chapter 1 is gonna be the longest slog both because I’ve heard it’s difficult and because I’m reading all the (checks) four separate forewords/prefaces/introductions that are in my edition (I’m using the new Reitter translation). So if I can power through this, I can go the distance!
edit: locked in today and powered through all the prefaces, so I can tackle Chapter 1 tomorrow! Much excite
I’m behind too
I have no idea where the week went but fuck it I will figure it out somehow.You got this! It’s no big deal if you’re a bit behind at the start, anyhow—it is a year-long reading group, after all, so you’ve got plenty of time to catch up. The first few chapters are supposed to be the toughest, so don’t let that discourage you—just try to read a bit every day, and you’ll get there! I’ve been doing a half hour here, a half hour there, and I think I should finish chapter one in the next day or two. As soon as I can feel my eyes start to glaze over and notice I’m re-reading the same paragraph over and over, I know it’s time to take a break and do something else for a bit.
Hey everyone, Capital bookclub is starting from the top again! If any friends missed the last one, bring 'em on over here. Just participate anywhere in the current 2026 thread, whichever thread that might be, to be added to the notification list. DM or reply to this comment asking to be removed if you wish to be removed.
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add me please <3
add me to da list please
I’ll join! :)
add me to the list please! been looking at my copy of capital intimidating me from the shelf for far too long haha
I wish there was a better tool for these clubs. Lemmy doesn’t have a proper Watch feature for new comments, so it is not motivating to add a comment on day 6 of a thread, because no one will see it, let alone commenting on a past week’s thread.
Thanks oscardejarjayes for hosting this year!
You can try saving the post of the week you’re trying to keep up with.
Jerboa (android app) doesn’t mark new comments (not that I know), but the default Lemmy UI on the web does. It’s a bit of a chore, but it can work.
What’s the best translation?
Absolutely the Reitter translation. Also has a professionally-produced audiobook.
what’s up with the choice of edition? does it lose the edits engels made after marx died?
I don’t remember to be honest, but there’s an article or podcast interview somewhere in which the translators give their reasoning. All I remember is at the time I listened to or read it, it was convincing enough for me to buy it.
And after having read the translation itself, it’s the version I recommend because of the modernized language. Older versions I had to quasi-translate nonstandard wording to understand, like rereading paragraphs and sentences a few times to actually absorb anything. Whereas this translation just flows.
Yep! If it’s not on audiobookbay or somewhere else let me know and I can probably upload a file
