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.
31 members! Excited to see this taking off, and proud of us for making it thus far. We have now read ¹⁄₁₈ of Volume I. The first three weeks are the densest, onwards it's smooth sailing and only needs about 20 minutes a day. We're gonna make it, comrades!
Week 2, Jan 8-14, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 2 & Chapter 3 Sections 1 & 2.
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)
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
I really appreciate your comments, and I like the idea that is by the concrete formation of money in exchange, that the abstraction of value becomes real (if I'm understanding that correctly).
I don't know if this is a term Marx uses, or if I got it from Harvey, or etc., but I like to think of it as a real abstraction. As in, the actual real act of exchanging of commodities through money is what is doing the abstraction. Abstract labor is a real abstraction because Capitalism makes this abstraction. Value becomes a real abstraction because of the concrete nature of exchange.
Perhaps I have some misunderstanding of myself, though.
What you have been writing reminds me of an article I've read by Ian Wright. I'd like to share it, and get your or other's opinions on it.
Ian Wright - What is Abstract Labour and Who Does the Abstracting
The article is about seeing Capitalism as a control system which controls, regulates, and does the abstracting through feedback loops. He later compares capital to an egregore, which is a fun analogy (and why the blog is called Dark Marxism in the first place).
The details get more into what Capitalism is as a system, and we aren't at that point yet in Marx's work. Capital is what creates exchange value, and is what makes abstract labor. If already familiar with capitalism, then the description is not new, but the recontextualization of thinking of it as a control system, or even an egregore is still illuminating.
Wright starts by sharing your concern
While your solution is to go forward with finding how money concretely makes this abstraction in exchange, Wright takes a similar approach but also goes beyond exchange and talks about capital's profit maximization as the abstractor which makes abstract labor a real abstraction.
Adding on to my previous comment, there is a well-known refutation of the model used by Ian Steedman which Ian Wright invokes in his category-mistake paper. Andrew Kliman and Ted McGlone published this refutation in their paper on the temporal single-system interpretation (TSSI). You can see that Equation 2 in Wright's paper, his definition of standard labor values, is the same as Equation 3 in the TSSI paper. So, the refutation is quite directly targeted at the interpretation used by Wright, which he uses to justify his modification of Marx's theory.
Fun fact, the partner of Radhika Desai — frequent contributor to Geopolitical Economy Report on YouTube — is Alan Freeman. Freeman is an associate of Kliman and has also long argued in defense of the TSSI.
Hey no worries! I enjoy these comments, they get me thinking. Especially because while I am aware of TSSI, I haven't studied it in depth as much as I have Wright's work. I consider myself still learning off of this, so taking time to give Kliman's work more thought is just a continuation of my own learning. I will admit, that I have some gut feeling that the labor theory of value should, and can, be a quantitative theory which also can explain value and price formation. And maybe it turns out I'm completely wrong, but I'll just keep reading and learning and seeing where it leads. In fact, this is something that excites me about this reading group. I'd like to go through Capital with others here with these debates in mind. My own understanding of Ian Wright's work also comes from Shaikh's interpretation of how the Transformation Problem is to be interpreted in his paper "Neo-Ricardian Economics: A Wealth of Algebra, A Poverty of Theory" (its title continuing the Marxist trend of being snarky and sarcastic lol). In it, he does criticize neo-Ricardians dismissal of value and the LTV, and he argues that the correlation between surplus value and profit is preserved if one considers not just the circuit of capital, but also the circuit of revenue - considering the surplus value that is consumed by capitalists when they purchase consumption items. Shaikh also reiterates this argument in his lectures for his book Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. This is essentially (as I see it) what Wright's capitalist consumption matrix C is measuring in his "super-integrated labor-values." Of course, the difference in our understanding sounds like it comes down to how quantitative vs qualitative Marx's theory of value should be, and whether the entire input-output framework is the right way to approach this.
I definitely get what you mean, though, by writers which tend to "modernize" Marx. I often get a bad taste in my mouth by them too, and usually some alarm bells go off. Given that, I think my STEM-bias though makes me inclined to think that the LTV can be quantitative, though, and that "the numbers should work out". And Wright's explanations make sense to me given that mindset. But, like I said, I need to give TSSI a fair investigation too. It's just sometimes not fun going through years of (often harsh) debates back and forth between the various interpretations of Capital.
This is fun, though. And, like I said, I'm excited to keep these debates in mind as we continue reading!
I'll give more thoughts as they come to me. And feel free to share your writings on Marx's value theory being more valuable as a qualitative theory.
Thanks for your responses, I really appreciate them
. I don't have more to add at this point either. I'm sure there'll be more to discuss as we continue reading, and as I read the TSSI papers as well. I'm looking forward to it!
About five years ago, I read Ian Wright's paper about the "category mistake" in Marx, so I'm familiar with him. I also read the article you shared here, thank you.
Wright is not the first to use the term real abstraction. I believe it was first used by Alfred Sohn-Rethel of the Frankfurt School. Sohn-Rethel's work is intriguing — I have had his book Intellectual and Manual Labour in my to-read list after reading the introduction a few years ago. I am not knowledgeable enough about the precise usage of the term real abstraction to have an opinion on its validity as used by the Critical Theorists. Doubtless, Marx believed that abstractions (such as value) have a real, material presence in the world. This kind of abstraction does not exist merely in the mind, because in fact the abstract concepts are a reflection of material reality. Furthermore, it would not be possible to simply "think away" abstractions such as money without changing the basis for those abstractions.
I'm not quite sure where to place Wright. Is he a Sraffian? a neo-Ricardian? a "Critical Theorist"? It seems like he takes inspiration from each of these, but belongs to none. In any case, like those schools, much of Wright's effort is focused on correcting mistakes which he alleges Marx made, in order to "modernize" the Marxian theory or settle old debates. This honestly rubs me the wrong way and I have a hard time reading Wright for that reason.
I basically agree with the introductory third of Wright's article about abstract labor. He loses me when he says that capital is the "abstractor". The stuff about control also seems quite out of left-field, not motivated by anything inherent in the subject matter, but an assertion that he hopes will click with the reader. It would resonate with a certain STEM-minded person (such as myself), especially given his other work which is heavy on linear algebra. But it kinda falls flat for me. In his attempt to clarify Marx, he ends up more confusing.
As for Wright's linear algebra-based approach to Marx's theory of value, I think he has made an error due to misunderstanding the qualitative aspect of Marx's theory of value, which Marx emphasizes in several places as the most important advance over Ricardo and classical political economy. Wright, like Ricardo and neo-Ricardians (e.g. Sraffa) conceive of value almost purely quantitatively. The problem with modeling Marx's theory of value in terms of input-output models is that it conceives of value in terms of technical labor inputs; i.e., the value of a product is the sum of its concrete labor inputs. I can explain more if needed but I think it's clear that this is a serious departure from Marx, barely recognizable as Marxist and more properly termed Ricardian in my opinion. Marx was not interested in a quantitative theory of price formation. His focus was on a qualitative theory of value, because he recognized Ricardo's incomplete conception of value as what stalled Ricardo's progress.
I'm sorry if this isn't the response you were going for. I actually appreciate discussing Wright's ideas because spending 2-3 weeks pondering his paper, and ultimately rejecting it, helped me very much in clarifying my own understanding of Marx. I also don't mind if you disagree with what I wrote here. Thanks again for the reply and also I appreciate your input to these threads as well!