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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:
The unfortunate fellow does not see that, even if there were no chapter on “value” in my book, the analysis of the real relationships which I give would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation. The nonsense about the necessity of proving the concept of value arises from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of the method of science.
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
This really brings some perspective to it and makes it less scary to start with it. I‘ll keep this in mind!
The Reading Capital with Comrades podcast is really good, I listened an episode after every two chapters as a review to male sure I got the main concepts.
David Harvey’s lectures were really interesting as well, he gets into a lot of detail on each chapter. Rather than using it as a review chapter by chapter, I listened to it to try and get a deeper understanding. I started listening to it about halfway through because I was struggling with Marx’s method, like the structure of his logic, and then just listened casually, and didn’t finish the series until well after I had finished the volume.
I recommend starting with “The Principles of Communism” by Engels. Same gist, way more approachable.
What? Its completely different.
Wage, Labor, and Capital or Price, Value, and Profit might be better primers for Capital
