Welcome to baby Marxist rehabilitation camp.
We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. (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 until communism is achieved.
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.
Congratulations to those who've made it this far. We are almost finished the first three chapters, which are said to be the hardest. So far we have just been feeling it out, now is when we start to find our stride. Remember to be methodical and remember that endurance is key.
Just joining us? It'll take you about 4-5 hours to catch up to where the group is.
Week 3, Jan 5-21, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 3 Section 3 'Money', PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 4 'The General Formula for Capital', PLUS Volume 1, Chapter 5 'Contradictions in the General Formula'
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/
I'm trying to understand the why burying the silver makes commodities cheap:
India was exporting Australian gold in exchange for American silver, then burying the silver. Since money was forcibly scarce in India, it discouraged or slowed down exchange of commodities relative to nations that kept lots of Silver in circulation?
So the relative prices appeared low to a European who was used to reckoning the price of goods in Silver. Though to a domestic Indian buyer, the "cheap" price was normal because their wages and cost of living would be similarly low.
No, Marx is saying it doesn't. He is making fun of Vanderbilt who thought that.
Vanderbilt's theory is that price comes from the ratio of precious metals to commodities. Double the amount of silver (while keeping the stock of goods the same) and what used to cost 2 grams of silver now costs 1
So Vanderbilt is basing this on, for instance, the inflation when Spanish gold entered Europe from America.
But according to Marx American gold is cheaper because it was extracted with enslaved labor, not because it was abundant.
I don't know the history but I'd also say probably some combination of:
~Greater ease of finding new gold-rich locations, meaning less wasted (but otherwise socially necessary) labor time searching for gold
~Plunder of any gold the American societies may have already had. In this case the socially necessary labor (from the Europeans' perspective) embodied by the gold is merely an abstraction from the concrete labors of sufficiently armed expropriators (because they are not confronted by the need to compensate the original indigenous labor in order to appropriate its use-value for themselves).