Format
-
Reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. This will repeat yearly 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. Discuss the week's reading in the comments.
-
Use any translation/edition you like.
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
Is the value of money also treated later? Seems like money has an exhange value that in some manner should equate to the labor expended to produce it. But this labor quantity appears relatively low, and does not vary much between $1 and $100 notes. Does this constitute an exception (e.g. the value of the banknote is representative), or is the labor involved in making money somehow more complex than just the physical process of manufacture?
It will be discussed especially in chapter 3, which is notoriously one of the most difficult chapters of vol 1. The first three chapters lay the foundation, then the rest is the consequences.
For now I will just say that money as you mention it having minimal labor cost is just a token for an underlying money commodity. How this exactly works today with respect to fiat currency is beyond the scope of volume 1 but is an active area of discussion in Marxist scholarship.
Nice, I'll keep that in mind. For now, I'll think of money as mainly gold coins or something similar which actually would have a labor expenditure corresponding to its value.