The overall plan is to read 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. 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.
Just joining us? It’ll take you about 17-18 hours to catch up to where the group is. Use the archives below to help you. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou!genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8
Week 9, Feb 26-March 3, we are reading Chapter 15 sections 2,3,4 and 5, from Volume 1
In other words, aim to reach the heading ‘The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery’ by Sunday
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.
Audiobook of Ben Fowkes translation, American accent, male, links are to alternative invidious instances: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9
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/
It was depressing for Marx to like cite off death counts in districts. Also that part of factory schools was really depressing, I can see why like Marx was critical.
When Marx started to talk about like machines and divison of labor, it sort of like reminded me of like, reproduction of capitalism? from like human labor divisions to like machine labor divisions more or less? and with this week reading it reminded me of like, how important things like oil are to capitalists. with like how much they can power with it.
also the part about like the limits of the workday, leading to improvements of machinery, leading to limits of the workday, remind me of like. tendency of the rate of profit to fall? and with this chapter it kind of reminded me of modern day stuff, like when people talk of AI replacing/taking their jobs. in which the push for that is to like, lower that relative surplus value more?
Section 5 was really good. The sections before were kind of a trudge
“When do they get to the fireworks factory???”