Results of first meeting.

The first meeting was held yesterday from 2-4 pm at the Empress Ale House. We discussed people's previous contact with Marx's writings and what we hoped to get out of a close reading of volume 1 of Capital. A few other housekeeping decisions were made:

• We plan to meet every week (Saturdays) unless this becomes unworkable. 
• Each week we will read one chapter of Capital (unless chapters are too short or too long, in which case a decision will be made to aggregate or split up a chapter).
• One or two of us will volunteer to pull out points of interest to the group from each weekly chapter. 

So for next week (Saturday, February 2) the plan is to read Chapter One, "The Commodity" (pp. 125-178 in the Penguin Classics edition). 

We also had some interesting discussion around the initial readings (Part 2 of the Communist Manifesto and the Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy). The discussion touched on the validity of the Base/Superstructure model of society, the materialist conception of history, and the place of women in Marx's political theory. Next week we will get into the nitty-gritty foundations of capitalist society, starting with an analysis of the commodity.

Next Meeting: February 2, 2013, 4-6 pm. Location TBA.