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
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!