So I spent some time flipping through the prefaces and chapter 1, and also watched that first David Harvey lecture, and based on all that, here’s my proposal for the first 3 weeks of actually reading Capital: For week 1 , we read the prefaces (~30 pages), then we split chapter 1 roughly in half and read the two halves (~25 pages each) across weeks 2 and 3.
Pros: The prefaces do seem to have a lot to talk about in them, so I think it would be ok to give them their own week. Also, from what I can see, chapter 1 is particularly difficult, so it would probably be better to take it too slow rather than too fast.
Cons: To get a roughly even split we’d have to cut section 3 of chapter 1 across the two weeks, since it makes up the meat of the chapter. This doesn’t seem too bad though, since there seems to be a somewhat natural splitting point at 1.3(b).
So in summary
week(s) 0: Wage Labor + Value, Price and Profit
week 1: prefaces
week 2: chapter 1.1 - 1.3(a)
week 3: chapter 1.3(b) - end of chapter 1
I’m not sure I want to try planning farther than that until we see how well we do with the first few weeks. So what do people think? Does this (or some variation of this) seem reasonable? Or does anyone have any other ideas?