Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ 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.

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 ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there’s always next year.

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, May 13-19, From Vol. 2, we are finishing Chapter 2 (in other words, reading parts 2, 3, and 4 of it), plus chapter 3 and Chapter 4

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/index.htm

Discuss the week’s reading in the comments.

  • Sasuke [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    6 months ago

    Capital, as self-valorizing value, does not just comprise class relations, a definite social character that depends on the existence of labour as wage-labour. It is a movement, a circulatory process through different stages, which itself in turn includes three different forms of the circulatory process. Hence it can only be grasped as a movement, and not as a static thing.

    – ch. 4, p. 185 in my penguin ed.

    i think this must be one of the key passages so far in our reading? i’ll try to come back and share some thoughts once i’m done with the chapter

    but, as someone with a degree in literature, one thing that strikes me immediately is that so much of so-called “marxist” literary analysis is just an alasysis of class relations—often focused on the bourgeoisie, and their cultural artifacts—and not the totality produced by the circulation of capital that marx is detailing here

    • Beaver [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      Yes, I think this is a key point being made so far, that it’s fundamentally incorrect to think of capital as a big pile of money, or as a machine sitting in a factory. Capital is not just the objects or social relationships, but it is the way these things are always transforming, always in motion (metaphorical and actually).