Welcome to baby Marxist rehabilitation camp.
We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly until communism is achieved.
The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ 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. So far we have just been feeling it out, now is when we start to find our stride. Remember to be methodical and remember that endurance is key.
Just joining us? It’ll take you about 4-5 hours to catch up to where the group is.
Week 3, Jan 5-21, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 3 Section 3 ‘Money’, PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 4 ‘The General Formula for Capital’, PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 5 ‘Contradictions in the General Formula’
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)
-
Harvey’s guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
-
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
-
Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/
Page numbers from Fowkes penguin translation, emphasis is mine
It isn’t a duality, it’s a series of reflections (commodity-value -> exchange-value -> price). Commodity-value is the socially necessary labour in a commodity, exchange-value is it’s reflection in another commodity and price is that exchange value in money. All three of them can differ from each other to some extent (particularly ‘commodity-value/value’, which can never be actually observed or measured except as seen in its reflection/likeness, exchange-value and the ). All three of these things’ ability to diverge from each other is necessary for the capitalist system to function on its laws of averages. Exchange-value is the equivalent of a commodity’s commodity-value in another commodity (e.g. the value of a shoe in ounces of gold). Price is a representation of the ratio in which a commodity can be exchanged for money.
Also very important to note (for feminism/ecological/ableism/etc critique) that Marx is laying out the standards of capitalist value, which doesn’t necessarily represent the actual work/labour exerted on a given thing, e.g. doesn’t represent the labour required to produce a forest cut down.