We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. This will repeat yearly 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.
Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'
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/
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Fun game! How many common "refutations" of Marxism, the kind you might find in r/neoliberal, are directly addressed in the first chapter, especially in the first few pages of Capital.
Refutations of the labor theory of value often start with a claim that LTV means that if a laborer slacks off and is super inefficient in their production, that this will somehow make the commodity they produce more valuable. Another version of this argument is the claim that LTV means that the quality of the commodity doesn't affect it's value, or that literally useless commodities are supposed to have value.
If these people have read Capital, they didn't get past the first 3 paragraphs, because paragraph 4 is where the discussion of use value begins. It turns out, surprise, commodities actually have to be useful to people and of usable quality to have value, they don't just magically gain value because someone spent a lot of labor on processing or manufacturing it. A few paragraphs later, we get to discussions about the average labor power of society, and how that correlates to prices of exchange. I think what people get backwards about LVT is that, yes, inefficient productivity CAN cause a commodity to be very valuable and have a high price, but only when the average amount of labor required to produce or extract it is very high.
Marx's example of diamond extraction is prescient: diamonds were legitimately quite difficult to extract from the earth in that era, and so their value was high. In our modern age, automation in mining and synthetic diamond production have dramatically increased the productivity of labor of diamond mining, which has made them much less valuable. That's not because any particular worker was working super slowly and inefficiently, nor is it because of the use value of diamonds decreased (their use value has arguably increased, as they've found applications in industrial processes).
(I think it's not until vol 3 that Marx talks about monopolies, but that's an obvious elephant in the room when talking about diamonds)
Omg that link is so incredibly econ brained. It's like bourg academic economists have to write garbage like this to prove they haven't read Marx.
Marx's formulation of LTV is explicitly that what is contained in value isn't labor, it is labor power. It isn't just work, it is working for the capitalist. Power is energy exerted over time, allowing us to determine the actual material composition of value which eludes the bourgeois economist and their idealistic and transparently useless equilibrium pricing. Marx teaches while bourg economics obfuscates. He is explicit and repetitive, which makes us truly consider the "stuff" of value. This is why liberals can't tell the difference between mercantilism and capitalism. Value is our time and energy, our limited renewable life taken out of us, much of which is unpaid, and converted into commodities which converts to profits for the capitalist. Private property has never been anything but a grift, a way to trick the masses into voluntarily surrendering our material bodies for a dream sold to us by parasites.
Capitalism is class oppression, if it wasn't it wouldn't create value, it would just shift it around like medieval mercantilism. Honestly I think this is where a lot of progressive liberal "Marxists" end up in an overly economistic interpretation, especially class reductionist tendencies. Misreadings of Marx lead to bourgeois economic obfuscation; a close reading of Capital gives us the basic formulations for dispensing with bourgeois economics for good.
The other key thing to note is that commodities are not valued around the individual circumstances of their creation. So if I decide to make a perfect copy of a ‘bic biro’ pen, without the aid of specialist tooling and experience, it would take me hundreds of hours to make a biro, but the socially necessary labour for making a bic is the mere seconds of labour that a biro takes on the bic production line. The individual circumstance of the creation of my hand made biro doesn’t affect the value of the commodity.