About
An Occasionally Illustrated Read-Along Podcast for Capital Volume 1, run by Hagen Blix. The podcast got started in August 2026, and trails an in-person reading group I’m facilitating.
The modest goal of this podcast is to help you, the listeners, to get an intellectual skill set out of engaging with this book, one that will help you develop a deeper understanding of the political situations you find yourself in - from the global context down to concrete organizing situations. This is a book one can think with, and that’s what I want to get across.
I will try my best to make this podcast one that you could listen to without reading, but fundamentally it is a read-along podcast. Every episode will cover a certain page range (indicated in the episode title), and you’ll get the most ouf of it, if you follow along! The book is following the new 2024 Paul Reitter translation.
The podcast episodes will come in two flavors – A-Side and B-Side.
On the A-Side episodes, I’ll walk you through the week’s reading, aiming to make it both accessible and fruitful. On the B-Side episodes I invite friends, comrades, fellow organizers, and scholars to chat about the reading with me. Sometimes these will be expansive, taking a particular topic to novel realms relevant to life and politics today, and sometimes they’ll dive deep into particular aspects of Marx’s analysis. Either way, I hope they will all be fun!
Episode Guide
Note that this table is likely to be ahead of the podcast’s actual release, and things may or may not deviate from the plan! Things almost always take longer than I think.
| Episode | Pages | Chapter | Content | B-Side Guest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1A | 5-14 | Preface & 1.1 | The Commodity | Michael Sappir |
| 2A | 14-24 | 1.1 & 1.2 | The Two Factors | Michael Sappir |
| 3A | 24-47 | 1.3 | The Value Form | Michael Sappir |
| 4A | 47-59 | 1.4 | The Fetish Character | Peter Hudis |
| 5A | 60-69 | 2 | The Exchange Process | |
| 6A | 69-120 | 3 | Money, or Commodity Circulation | |
| 7A | 121-149 | 4 | The Transformation of Money into Capital | Søren Mau |
| 8A | 150-173 | Chapter 5 | The Labor Process and the Valorization Process | |
| 9A | 174-202 | Chapters 6 & 7 | Constant Capital and Variable Capital & The Rate of Surplus Value | Jathan Sadowski |
B-Side episodes are likely to be released out of order, but the Start from the Beginning section will list the episodes that are released in their logical order, rather than their released order (i.e., 3B will follow directly after 3A there, even if 3B may have actually been released later). The main page, in contrast, will list episodes by order of their actual release, so as to make it easier for people who are following along while the podcast is being released.