this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2026
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Recommendation is to read it at a steady pace but not as fast as you can. Read a chapter or a large section, then take a break with some related content like a lecture about the same topic. It’s good to cement the same ideas in multiple ways and not get your brain fried by reading a textbook straight through. It took me like 2 years to finish volume 1, and that was a small price to feel grounded for years afterward
Edit: personally I think it should be read sequentially though. Start with chapter 1. While Marx himself admitted the first chapter (the law of value) was not strictly necessary to understand exploitation, it’s still very useful from an expository and theoretical standpoint. And certainly you need that background to understand the more advanced stuff to later extend it to modern finance capitalism.
Yes, and Marx knew the first chapters would be boring as hell, and difficult to grasp, and this was one of the reasons he published the whole 1st volume together.
I finally found a specific quote I remembered where Marx talks about the necessity (or dispensability) of the first chapter. It was in the famous letter to Dr Kugelmann from July 11, 1868. Usually only an abridged version of the letter is shared, but the full text includes the following, just before the abridged version starts:
Already in the first year of the publication of Capital, critics were accusing Marx of starting from an a priori and abstract concept of value. In this letter he totally disagrees, of course correctly.
So yes, the first chapter on value is important, but not required to understand the basic facts.
This is also why, on advice of Kugelmann and others, Marx attached an appendix on value to the first German edition.
@tyra@lemmy.ml might find that appendix useful