Hop in, comrades, we are reading Capital Volumes I-III this year, and we will every year 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. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.
Week 2, Jan 8-14, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 2 & Chapter 3 Sections 1 & 2.
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.
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. Also, please let me know if you spot any errors with the bookmarks so I can fix them!
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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Harvey's lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWvnUfModHP9Ci8M1g39l4AZgK6YLCXd0
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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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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.
how does this apply in the era of fiat currency? or rather, what's changed?
Since fiat money didn't really exist in Marx's time (it was many decades away), there wasn't much reason for him to explicitly talk about it's implications in Capital. Marx doesn't think the anchor to the value of precious metals are as tight as some of the economists and businessmen of the day assume, and that in fact there is quite a bit of float in the exchange value of money. But the completely unmoored nature of fiat money is something that he probably didn't anticipate.
It's not super relevant for the arguments made in Vol 1. At the level of workers interacting with their bosses, it's not so different from gold standard money.
But certainly has implications for the circulation of capital as discussed in Vol 2 and credit money as discussed in Vol 3. There's a few lines of thought about it among modern marxists; here's a whole book of essays on the subject. If there's any consensus about it, it's that fiat money accelerates growth and instability, and that it implies a much larger role for the state than Marx might have anticipated.
does fiat currency arise as a result of imperialism? obviously it arose during the era of imperialism but is there a causal relationship there? or is there no consensus about that?
It's not a precondition for imperialism. The European powers did most of their imperial conquering while they had gold standard currencies. And historically, you have the major European powers losing control of their empires shortly after they float their currencies.
Vol 1 has some more stuff on Imperialism in the last few chapters.
i was thinking the other way around. it took me a while to get to this but from the very end of chapter 3 section 2:
this would suggest that imperialism is a necessary precondition for fiat currency to flourish. this seems correct to me because it seems as though the gold standard has been replaced with the dollar standard. then the congealed human labor of the miner as represented by the gold would be replaced by the congealed human labor of something else, i think? maybe it's the labor represented in the us market as a whole? that's where i get lost