I’m back on top of the managing this now: no more midweek posting: readings will be posted Sundays ready for the week.
We are almost finished Volume 1. You could even skip the appendices if you want. The 33% of the three volumes completed corresponds to the way we’re about 33% of the way through the year.
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](https://hexbear.net/post/2338512]
Week 17, April 22-28. From Vol. 1, we are reading Chapter 32, Chapter 33, Appendix I (Commodities as the Product of Capital), and Appendix II (Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus-Value)
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.
Audiobook of Ben Fowkes translation, American accent, male, links are to alternative invidious instances: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9
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 also noticed him bringing back the “negation of negation” line, since you mentioned the Spinoza thing a couple threads back.
I’d like to understand more about the sense in which Marx invokes this line, because it doesn’t seem like a perfect correspondence to me.
I understood Spinoza’s “negation of negation” as a statement about ontology — what defines Thing A and differentiates it from Thing B.
I have a knowledge gap on Hegel’s connection to this line, but I think Hegel’s system is basically structured on negation of negation, being the mechanism by which sublation works to resolve (Hegelian) contradiction.
Since Marx seems to have been primarily a Hegelian rather than a Spinozist, I think Marx would have drawn his understanding of “negation of negation” in the sense understood by Hegel, not necessarily that by Spinoza. So if for Hegel, “negation of negation” is the mechanism by which dialectical concepts evolve, then for Marx, it is the mechanism by which dialectical material things evolve, e.g. society. It makes sense when taken in this sequence of thought, but looking back it seems odd to have wandered so far from Spinoza’s original meaning.
Just thinking out loud really. If you or someone else has ideas about this I’d be curious
Just going to think outloud too since I’m way out of my expertise (and could be completely missing the point).
I think it’s interesting that, by thinking the process as negation of negation instead of just negation, period, we force ourselves to think of phenomena as a continuum - instead of “this came from that”, it makes we think “this came from that and is going to become something else through the continuation of the proccess being studied.” In the Marx quote above, he doesn’t stop at having capitalism negate individual private property, which would present the system to reader as the end point of the historical process, instead he goes on to show how capitalism gets negated by the same process and develops into the next thing.
It provides a dynamic point of view that forces you to consider how changes will accumulate over time and shift the whole thing around an axis of sorts. Reminds me of Wang Huning (I think?) writing about how the dollar hegemony may have put America at the top, but it’s also the very same process of it’s deindustrialization.