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 9, Apr 16 - Apr 22, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 15 Sections 2-5
About a third of the way through Volume 1. If yoi've stuck this far, it should be relatively easy going from now on.
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)
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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/
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.
Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8
Hey odd question incoming.
I started a pet project for my local friend group of leftists where I am trying to take all the major theory texts and sort of ELI5 it for those that wanna learn but do t do well with dry reading. Basically it's geared towards ADHD and other ND leftists.
I did a test run with The Wretched of the Earth but decided to make the inaugural conversion be Das Kapital. Would you be willing to go over it and see if it all checks out once I have it done? I'm using AI to convert it and it's been a few years since I did Das Kapital so an extra set of eyes on it to see if it makes sense would be great.
Make sure you're using the actual text as an input. During last year's reading, I tried asking a few of the LLMs for chapter summaries, and they gave a lot of misleading summaries (sometimes even making the opposite point that Marx was trying to make). In particular, I found that LLM chatbots struggled to create coherent summaries of sections of Vol 2, even when working with the actual text.
I put it on the backburner and will check it later on. I've had to do this 3 times already because I saw it was getting shit wrong. The first red flag was when it was giving me chapter 35 of 33. I went and checked chapter titles and realized I needed to go back over it again. Then caught a few more issues and had to redo it again. I'm gonna work on a few other books before returning. And IceWallowCum suggested doing Value, Price and Profit since they are easier. So I wanna do that and Wage Labor and Capital since they are way more accessable.
Sure, I can check it! Maybe compare it to Nia Frome's An Extremely Condensed Summary of Capital too.
Oh good i need some cliffs notes. i muscled thru chapter 1 cuz i want to catch up to you guys. Dunno, thought i was gonna crest some hill and it'd get less dense but ch2 shows me there ain't no muslin (get it?) thru this thang holy shit. If anything i might need to go back to chapter 1 n make sure i get what he's saying, i feel sad like I'm in math class
My advice is to read 1-3 very carefully, then everything beyond is much easier to follow. Marx front-loads Capital. Take all the time you need to fully grasp 1-3, then go ham, it's largely interesting historical explorations of 1-3 and additions of new mechanisms gradually.
Thanks, i needed that! Starting to think the whole piece was like that and thought i can't do it
This i can do
You've got this!
Of course it's already been done before lol. If this one is better I might just use it instead.
But mine's called "The Very Fucking Short Version" and I love that lol.
Fuck yea, go deeper! Shorter! More condensed!
I'm not even being sarcastic, continuous iterative improvement is critical to the success of Communism. If the ideas reach a new audience by the advancement in Marxist educational tools, you will have played a very valuable role!
I actually am planning on doing this AI shortened version thing to a lot of what you have in your mega reading list. If it actually gets somewhere I can share them with you.
That would be great! Would be a nice inclusion, assuming it was hand-edited and affirmed afterwards.
I just finished Das Kapital but don't have the energy to go through it manually right now lol.
Haha, gotcha!
Marx had his own compact version of some of the major ideas in Das Kapital with Value, Price and Profit (the second half of it). Should be easier to convert that into some easier reading imo.
I think Engels made a smaller version of it too, but I haven't read that one
I'm planning on doing those as well since they are on my personal recommendation list in lieu of Das Kapital.