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 1, January 4 - January 11, Volume 1 Chapter 1 ‘The Commodity’
This is the very first bookclub post, so get to know each other, ask questions about the basic premise, just keep mostly on-topic. This didn’t start on January 1st because I want it to start and end on the weekend. @'ing everyone mid-Thursday probably wouldn’t have gotten very many readers.
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/
2024 Archived Discussions
If you want to dig back into older discussions, this is an excellent way to do so.
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 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40 – Week 41 – Week 42 – Week 43 – Week 44 – Week 45 – Week 46 – Week 47 – Week 48 – Week 49 – Week 50 – Week 51 – Week 52
2025 Archived Discussions
If you want to dig back into older discussions, this is an excellent way to do so.
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 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40 – Week 41 – Week 42 – Week 43 – Week 44 – Week 45
2026 Archived Discussions
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.
N/A
noooo I’m already behind


not sure I’ll manage to finish chapter 1 in time, but hopefully I’ll be caught up through chapter 2 by the end of next week’s thread. I guess ideally I’d be done with chapter 3 in time for week 3’s thread, but that seems like wishful thinking (I do hope to eventually be ready with a comment by the beginning of each week). Also chapter 1 is gonna be the longest slog both because I’ve heard it’s difficult and because I’m reading all the (checks) four separate forewords/prefaces/introductions that are in my edition (I’m using the new Reitter translation). So if I can power through this, I can go the distance!
edit: locked in today and powered through all the prefaces, so I can tackle Chapter 1 tomorrow! Much excite

I’m behind too
I have no idea where the week went but fuck it I will figure it out somehow.You got this! It’s no big deal if you’re a bit behind at the start, anyhow—it is a year-long reading group, after all, so you’ve got plenty of time to catch up. The first few chapters are supposed to be the toughest, so don’t let that discourage you—just try to read a bit every day, and you’ll get there! I’ve been doing a half hour here, a half hour there, and I think I should finish chapter one in the next day or two. As soon as I can feel my eyes start to glaze over and notice I’m re-reading the same paragraph over and over, I know it’s time to take a break and do something else for a bit.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Maybe I’ll actually try this this year.
You should go for it!
Do it!
For this reading, I’m trying to really diagram out the categories as they are developed, to check if I really understand it. So I tried to implement the categories as data types in Haskell-ish pseudocode, but unfortunately this proved to be more tricky than I thought. Has anyone tried doing something like this, i.e. mathematically formalizing Marxian categories into something like a type system?
I found this really interesting thread on
/r/SocialistProgrammers, which seems to discuss something similar. However, I’m not trying to capture the full dynamism of Hegelian logic. I just want to take a snapshot of Marx’s categories at different points in the book for diagramming purposes, to show how the categories are connected. I imagine it could be visualized some way for pedagogical purposes.A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
Along the way, I learned about this mathematician William Lawvere who tried to formalize Hegel’s unity of opposites in the language of category theory:
Lawvere was a committed Marxist–Leninist throughout his life. He saw his political commitments as deeply connected to his scientific and philosophical work. In 1971, his dismissal from Dalhousie University was a result of his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and the Canadian government’s use of the War Measures Act.
Lawvere often infused his mathematical writing with philosophical and political concepts. In his 1970 paper “Quantifiers and Sheaves,” he connects the mathematical concept of adjoint functors to the dialectical principle of the unity of opposites and cites Mao Zedong’s essay “On Contradiction”, as well as Vladimir Lenin’s theory of knowledge.

See also: nLab: Hegel’s Logic as Modal Type Theory
What’s the best translation?
There’s not really a settled answer, but all the English translations are considered pretty good.
The Samuel Moore translation is from the 1887, with Engle’s assistance. This is public domain, and is the version on Marxist.org. The language is less modern, so you’ll have to be a little bit more studious about looking up definitions for words that are less commonly used today. Still perfectly readable, though.
The Ben Fowkes translation (the 1976 Penguin Classics version) is the most widely read version. You’ll be on the same footing in regards to terminology as almost everyone else who reads Capital. The language is more modern than the Samuel Moore translation, but not that modern, being fifty years old. This is the version I read, and I would recommend it.
The Paul Reitter translation is from 2024, and focuses on modernized language, and also preserving some of the original double meanings from German. I’ve only read the first chapter of this one, and it seems fine. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up becoming the definitive edition, but time will tell.
Did Aveling/Engels translate all 3 volumes? I’d really like to read his translations since it seems like they use less obscurantist language than the Penguin Books versions I have.
The first English translation of Volume 1 was published in 1887 by Edward Aveling and Samuel Moore. The first English translations of Volumes 2 and 3 were published in 1907 and 1909, respectively, by Ernest Untermann, several years after Aveling died in 1898.
Hey everyone, Capital bookclub is starting from the top again! If any friends missed the last one, bring 'em on over here. Just participate anywhere in the current 2026 thread, whichever thread that might be, to be added to the notification list. DM or reply to this comment asking to be removed if you wish to be removed.
Notification List
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add me to the list please! been looking at my copy of capital intimidating me from the shelf for far too long haha
add me to da list please
Can you add me to the list?
Sure thing!
List add plz. 2026 is the year I finally tackle capital
List add
Done!
plz
A little bit of politeness goes a long way
2026 is the year I finally tackle capital
You better believe I’ll be holding you to your word on that over the course of this year.
Personally, it took my quite a few years of reading through Das Kapital to actually finish all three volumes. My copy of the first volume is super worn down, from all the times I’ve started off trying to go through Capital, but had to give up after only finishing the first volume. It’s a little ironic, since the first volume is generally considered the driest and most boring, while the series gets progressively better until the peak of volume 3.
Add me!
You added!
add please

Add please!
count me in
You have been counted in
Please remove me from the list. I’ll keep an eye on pinned posts to keep track.
Removed! Interesting strategy, hope I keep seeing you in the bookclub
Add me too please. Thanks!
Added!
Please add me!
Done!
I wish there was a better tool for these clubs. Lemmy doesn’t have a proper Watch feature for new comments, so it is not motivating to add a comment on day 6 of a thread, because no one will see it, let alone commenting on a past week’s thread.
Thanks oscardejarjayes for hosting this year!
You can try saving the post of the week you’re trying to keep up with.
Jerboa (android app) doesn’t mark new comments (not that I know), but the default Lemmy UI on the web does. It’s a bit of a chore, but it can work.
I’ve definitely had that thought too. Last year I fell behind. And I debated on posting comments on older threads where nobody would revisit them

Please do! That’s why we link them!
People should sort by new by default and then upvote the comments they’ve read, maybe.
Yeah, Lemmy isn’t built for bookclubs. We could have a custom sorting algorithm to cater to bookclubs or something, and some kind of watch feature would be nice, but I think Lemmy is just not a very good place to hold bookclubs. In-person is book club king, and everything else is just a pale immitation. If we want to go one step further, moving off-platform might be a good decision. We might have to write it ourselves, but a Hexbear linked Bookclub virtual meeting space is very interesting.
You’re welcome, I’m always happy to serve my community! Cowbee’s my Lemmy hero, so I love to follow in his footsteps, and help out continuing his work.
@marxisthayaca@hexbear.net did a book club for a few years using an off-site resource.
It was perusall https://hexbear.net/post/108398
Cowbee’s my Lemmy hero, so I love to follow in his footsteps, and help out continuing his work.
You’re way too kind, comrade. Vampire led the 2024 reading group, so 2025 isn’t even original. Like you, I’m just trying to pay all the numerous people who helped me forward, and atone for my years of liberalism. shudders
I agree that the Lemmy format isn’t great for longer book clubs, it works great with single articles or short books but Capital is a commitment. One thing I saw used by other book clubs is asking a question per week, and trying to get people to answer that. It ups engagement and fosters further discussion. Just an idea! And thanks again, comrade!
Good luck everyone this year! The first 3 chapters of Volume 1 are the toughest to get through, but once you’re through those it’s pretty smooth sailing from there!
And thanks for hosting it this year, @oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net!

Yeah, definitely, that’s why my copy of Volume 1 is the rattiest, most read, and most worn out. It looks even worse when I’ve got it cracked open, midway through reading. I’ve started Das Kapital read throughs many many times, but I often put most of my energy into getting through 1, and end up too burned out for 2 and 3.

Your welcome! I love to give back the Hexbear community, and you’re like my idol, jus
Yea, 2 hit me like a truck and I only recently got to the end. It’s so much drier than volume 1, though I’ve heard 3 picks back up. 2 is still critical though, as circulation fundamentally expands the nature of how capitalism functions at a systemic level. Keeping regular pace seems to be the key, even reading ahead if you can manage it.
And thank you, comrade, that’s extremely sweet of you!
Will anyone else be using the Paul Reitter translation? I picked up a copy last year and have been looking for a reason to read it
I read Fowkes last year, considering reading along with Reitter this year.
together we can achieve the possible!
Can you add me again when reading volume 3? That’s the one I missed last year
Should be September when Vol 3 starts up. Do you have a way to set yourself a reminder?
Yes, no problem
I wonder if having the thread cover all 3 volumes (or 3 threads going at once or something) would work.
I wanna be added
reporting for dutylet’s goooooo i’m actually prepared this year, i spent december finally understanding what the transformation problem is about and now i’m itching to actually make it to vol. 3

















