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.
We currently have 58 members!!! I expect a certain drop-off rate, but I’ll be thrilled if a dozen or couple dozen read it.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve already read ¹⁄₁₈ of Volume I. The first three weeks are the hardest, after that it’ll be quite easy, and only requires 20 minutes a day (endurance is key).
Just joining us? It’ll take you about 2-3 hours to catch up to where the group is. You can do that on one long bus ride.
Archives: Week 1
Week 2, Jan 8-14, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 2 ‘The Process of Exchange’, PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 1 ‘The Measure of Values’ PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 2 ‘The Means of Circulation’
In other words, aim to get up to the heading ‘3. Money’ by Jan 14
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/
There is definitely a disconnect between Marx’s view on fiat money and the modern view. That is mainly because Marx was writing in the mid-1800s, and up to that point, almost all fiat currencies had been horrible failures. They led to economic problems in revolutionary America and revolutionary France. Even the Confederacy tried to make its own fiat currency in Marx’s own lifetime, which hyper-inflated to worthlessness in less than three years. So, if it seems like Marx does not spend a lot of time talking about money disconnected from the gold/silver standard, that’s because it was a pretty rare and mostly unimportant novelty at the time he was writing. The USA did not fully abandon the gold standard until 1973. So, “modern monetary theory” definitely goes beyond Marx’s ideas of fiat currency, because Marx was more focused on production, wealth accumulation, and the capitalist system as a whole than the money which mediated it. To put it another way, there wasn’t a lot of “data” at the time about what a fiat currency behaved like in the long-term. And without that data, Marx couldn’t speculate or draw meaningful conclusions.
Marx doesn’t care about the gold-standard specifically (as he has repeatedly said). Modern fiat money is the USD which is a de-facto oil standard since the USD was until recently all that was used to buy and sell oil. Modern money is still money because of its association with a material use-value. This fetishism of the gold-standard is not theoretically sound. The whole point of Marx introducing money through linen, and only changing it to gold with this chapter, is to show that while metals have some qualities that lend themselves to being money, many other things can, have and will serve as a money-commodity.