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.
Congratulations to those who've made it this far! Over the harder stuff, now we are on track to take it easier and digest Capital. The reward for our efforts is significant.
Week 4, Jan 22-28, we are reading Volume 1, Chapters 6, 7 & 8
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: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=AA342398FDEC44DFA0E732357783FD48
(Unsure about the quality of the Reitter translation, I'd love to see some input on it as it's the newest one)
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)
-
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/
2024 Archived Discussions
If you want to dig back into older discussions, this is an excellent way to do so.
Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40 – Week 41 – Week 42 – Week 43 – Week 44 – Week 45 – Week 46 – Week 47 – Week 48 – Week 49 – Week 50 – Week 51 – Week 52
2025 Archived Discussions
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 ) (Note: Seems to be on hiatus for now) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.
Not directly related to this week's chapters but a question that came up when discussing Das Kapital irl: did you change your intuition / understanding about certain Marxist terms after reading it?
What motivates this question is that I previously thought that commodity fetishism meant something like "people ascribe magic to their possessions", and I believed it was very closely related to some moral condemnations of consumerism. After reading the term in the book, with the context around it, now it feels more like "the commodity form and its commerce superficially looks liberating, but it constrains us all in strange ways".
(Or maybe I just misread it again, who knows?)
What were your experiences with it? Did you go through something similar?
This is correct, except it’s not about consumerism.
In the 19th century, European scholarship on “primitive” societies was Eurocentric and racist. Using manmade talismans, dolls, and amulets, these societies attributed supernatural properties to objects which the literature referred to as fetishes. There is a degree of condescension here as the external observer sees through the fetish as a mere material object without real powers. It is easily concluded by the European intellectual that these societies are backward and irrational, unlike supposedly rational bourgeois society.
Marx analyzed bourgeois society from the same external standpoint. He found something analogous to the spiritual fetish: the commodity. The commodity, by all means a man-made object, is nonetheless regarded by bourgeois society as something which moves by its own accord, independent of the human will. Is this not the same as a fetish? Is not bourgeois society just as “backward” as any other?
Commodity fetishism is about two things. First, there are the perceived “magical” properties described above. Second, and more importantly, the commodity form generates its own fetish by obfuscating its true nature, by portraying human relations as relations between commodities. Commodity fetishism is not something that we can snap out of as participants. It expresses a reality of our conditions of life under capitalism, because indeed production relations are expressed through commodities. Rather than being irrational, it is quite rational to treat commodities as having minds of their own, although we know that they are really simple material objects.
The fetishism of commodities is the almost supernatural aspect of them that compels us to move in specific manners. You were partially correct originally, in that it's almost supernatural without analyzing commodity production and exchange.
"Alienation" is being reworked in my head as the reading advances.