We are 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.
Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'
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: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D
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.
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/
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I know we're going to get to money later but I'm really curious how it will work with the way money is treated now. As I understand it from this chapter money is basically just a commodity that has been agreed to be a universal equivalent, but it would seem to me that fiat currency is not, at least at first glance, able to fill that role.
Fiat doesn't take labor to produce, unlike gold or other precious metals; fiat is not a commodity in the sense we seem to be using it here, and the labor power that goes into creating money is negligible compared with the value it denotes. I'm pretty sure "commodification" is a later innovation but it seems like fiat currency would need to somehow convert people's abstract faith in human labor power into a commodity on its own or it couldn't actually be an equivalent as we are told gold is for the British pound in this chapter.
fiat money ≠ commodity money
Fiat money is not a product of labour (as the name suggests). A big theme of this chapter is that commodities are made by labour.
'commodity money' is a thing, like cigarettes in prison or grain-backed currenciees in the middle ages, but it's defined in contrast to fiat money
Okay. I'm sure it will be made clear, it just seems like, from this chapter, money being a commodity is a necessary attribute for it to fill the role of an equivalent. But maybe this is just describing how money emerges, first as a commodity and then as the contrasting realities of value develop it can be applied more abstractly?
A few thoughts.
First, just because government actors and economists have declared that commodity money has been abolished in favor of fiat money, does not necessarily make it so. I’m not saying that fiat money is not actually money, only that there is a dissonance between appearance and actuality, and modern (vulgar^1^) economists are the least capable of distinguishing the two. For example, chapter 1 section 4 on the commodity fetish^2^.
Second, the main purpose of money is to provide an independent existence of value apart from commodities. If this form somehow fully detaches itself from even a money commodity, it does not necessarily upset the law of value.
All that said I’m not that well versed on this topic, so someone else probably has a more detailed and current explanation.
1
Footnote 33:2
Gonna email this to Larry Summers everyday
Yeah from my (very limited admittedly) understanding of high level modern economies we're on a de-facto oil-standard (as opposed to a gold-standard)