Capital, Volume 3: A Reading Group

A 10 Session Reading Group with Sam Salour

Saturdays, October 8 – December 17 (no session November 26)

“But the basic reason for the amplitude and duration of these polemics lies in the fact that Volume 3 aims to answer the question: ‘Whither capitalism?’ It seeks to show that the system is intrinsically (‘immanently’) crisis-ridden: that neither the efforts of individual capitalists nor those of public authorities can prevent crises from breaking out. It seeks to show that inherent mechanisms, which cannot be overcome without abolishing private property, competition, profit and commodity production (the market economy), must lead to a final collapse.”
—From an introduction to Capital, Volume 3, by Ernest Mandel

This reading group convened by Sam Salour, an economics graduate student at the New School, will dig deep into Volume 3 of Marx’s Capital. Subtitled “The process of capitalist production as a whole,” this volume is concerned primarily with issues such as the internal differentiation of the capitalist class, the division of surplus value among individual capitals, and the definition and role of merchants’ capital, interest-bearing capital, and landed capital. In Part 3 Marx analyzes the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

$50-$10 per session, no one turned away for inability to pay