Simple Question about Marx's Capital

[OllieX]

Why is it so complex when his audience was greatly, an uneducated class?

I have heard people say that it had to be due because no one would take it seriously otherwise, but I would appreciate if someone on here could help me understand. A cited paper by Marx or someone would be great to.

Thanks,
OllieX

[Anarpest]

I'm fairly sure that it was quite popular with the working class back in Marx's time, and I think Engels had even noted once that it had come to be known as the 'Bible of the working class' due to this popularity. It can't have been that complex, especially for an audience more likely to pick up on some of its allusions to German works and on the terminology used.

The complexity, when it's there, is probably a result of the complexity of the ideas rather than being explicitly created by Marx for the sake of it. If you're talking of volume I of Capital, the only one finalized and published in Marx's lifetime, then there's lots of 'accessible' sections, and really the only part which could really be called 'complex' is one or two chapters around the beginning. I think it could be a bit patronizing to expect a working class audience to only be able to digest something when completely force-fed, and if anything the fact that, as Marx warned in the preface, there is no 'royal road to science,' could well have spurred them on and made things interesting, especially given the fairly high levels of radicalism in some parts of the world then.

You also have to take into consideration that most of the difficulty for us in reading Marx is that we've already been told how Marx is wrong, and what Marx said, etc., filtered through years of bourgeois economists' non-analyses, and therefore face dilemmas in making sense of Marx and eradicating our pre-existing prejudices which the workers of the time probably didn't face. Really, even if you don't fully understand Capital vol. I, as long as you're not pre-oriented in such a way as to distort it, most of it should still be quite accessible, especially if it details your daily experience. Indeed, extracts from it had even been used for leaflets during strikes and such, and Marx was at the time very much a public and active figure as far as the workers' movement went, in contrast to now when he's primarily the subject of academic disputes.

[Deicide]

It's chapters 1, 2 and 3 which are a challenge to penetrate due to the insane levels of abstraction, which, I guess, is a consequence of Marx's method of inquiry, his dialectic. In a sense, he also starts Kapital backwards, instead of explaining concepts, how he reached his conclusions, or why he chose to begin where he did, he just begins straight away with the commodity. It's a completely alien method, contemporary pedagogy has us accustomed to gradually building one concept onto another, brick by brick.. Marx just dives straight into the deep end of the pool, it's quite overwhelming at first. I also don't think Marx ever states ''X causes Y'' instead it's ''X is related to Y''. It's quite hard to wrap your head around it, imo. Specially when you've never done any background reading.. Reading the first 3 chapters is like being hit by lightning strikes ;)

Here's Marx's preface to the French Edition of Capital.


Dear Citizen,

I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.

That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connexion between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.

That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

Believe me,
dear citizen,
Your devoted,

Karl Marx
London
March 18, 1872

[Railyon]

It's chapters 1, 2 and 3 which are a challenge to penetrate due to the insane levels of abstraction, which, I guess, is a consequence of Marx's method of inquiry, his dialectic. In a sense, he also starts Kapital backwards, instead of explaining concepts, how he reached his conclusions, or why he chose to begin where he did, he just begins straight away with the commodity. It's a completely alien method, contemporary pedagogy has us accustomed to gradually building one concept onto another, brick by brick.. Marx just dives straight into the deep end of the pool, it's quite overwhelming at first.

I agree, and after watching David Harvey's video lectures as supplementary "lessons" (lots of it, especially the latter lectures, are just rambling and raving on his part IMO, but very interesting), I think he once noted in lecture 13 that he heard people say Capital is meant to be read "backwards".

Which actually makes sense since it then goes from the "concrete to the abstract", not the other way around; in my experience Capital got easier to read after a while (most notably, as pointed out, the first few chapters on value and equivalents and so on), and I think especially the very vivid descriptions of working class life and its detriments is most definitely something the readers could relate to, I imagine.

[OllieX]

Thanks guys that helps me alot. I meant no disrespect to the working class, I myself have had some trouble with the beggining of volume 1.

[Rooster]

The hardest part i think is understanding marx's approach to it. In the first couple of chapters at least, he is holding three things in opposition to each other in order to examine them. But it's not immediately clear that he's doing this. Understanding that makes it a little easier to read but i have no idea why he couldn.t make this clearer. I also read once that Capital passed censorship because the authorities thought that it was too difficult for the common person to under stand.

[Railyon]

I also read once that Capital passed censorship because the authorities thought that it was too difficult for the common person to under stand.

And I also once heard the conspiracy theory that Marx was a Prussian government agent paid to write Capital to drown the workers movement in silly theory.

That is not a joke, at least one book has been written about that.

[Deicide]

I agree, and after watching David Harvey's video lectures as supplementary "lessons" (lots of it, especially the latter lectures, are just rambling and raving on his part IMO, but very interesting), I think he once noted in lecture 13 that he heard people say Capital is meant to be read "backwards".

Which actually makes sense since it then goes from the "concrete to the abstract", not the other way around; in my experience Capital got easier to read after a while (most notably, as pointed out, the first few chapters on value and equivalents and so on), and I think especially the very vivid descriptions of working class life and its detriments is most definitely something the readers could relate to, I imagine.

Are you reading Capital in German?

[Ted Lawrence]

I would definitely recommend those David Harvey lectures also. I watched the introduction and the first video and it helped a lot. I believe those same videos were put into book format, if that's easier for you (I got pretty sidetracked while watching them, I'd imagine that would be less of an issue while reading them). I think the book is called a Companion to Capital.

[Railyon]

Are you reading Capital in German?

Yes, but not the MEW versions. Second Edition 1872 (which is, as some people have told me, different from later editions)

[Rooster]

I would definitely recommend those David Harvey lectures also. I watched the introduction and the first video and it helped a lot. I believe those same videos were put into book format, if that's easier for you (I got pretty sidetracked while watching them, I'd imagine that would be less of an issue while reading them). I think the book is called a Companion to Capital.

I would say that the book is more useful. The big mess of a diagram he has is all cleaned up. I think that the book is mostly just the notes that are already up on the site though.

[Bronco]

Yeah, you're not the first to have thought this, Bakunin said of it


Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, by Karl Marx; Erster Band. This work will need to be translated into French, because nothing, that I know of, contains an analysis so profound, so luminous, so scientific, so decisive, and if I can express it thus, so merciless an expose of the formation of bourgeois capital and the systematic and cruel exploitation that capital continues exercising over the work of the proletariat. The only defect of this work... positivist in direction, based on a profound study of economic works, without admitting any logic other than the logic of the facts - the only defect, say, is that it has been written, in part, but only in part, in a style excessively metaphysical and abstract... which makes it difficult to explain and nearly unapproachable for the majority of workers, and it is principally the workers who must read it nevertheless. The bourgeois will never read it or, if they read it, they will never want to comprehend it, and if they comprehend it they will never say anything about it; this work being nothing other than a sentence of death, scientifically motivated and irrevocably pronounced, not against them as individuals, but against their class.