this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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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 [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1Week 2Week 3Week 4Week 5Week 6Week 7Week 8Week 9Week 10Week 11Week 12Week 13Week 14Week 15Week 16Week 17Week 18Week 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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

A helpful conceptualization of Marx’s cycles is an inverted Fisher Price Rock a Stack:

Each individual donut represents a M-C-M cycle, but once Labor and mp are introduced, the surplus value raises you to a larger donut.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

rat-salute reporting in for posting duty

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Of course, as always, you do good work.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

marx-goth time for more CIRCUITS

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 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).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I read through Stephen Shapiro's summary of Chaps. 1 - 6.

Good stuff. Very much needed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I'll have to look into that. I'm having a much harder time comprehending vol 2 so far.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Oh, this is for Vol. 1.