Why today’s radicals must read Marx’s Das Kapital

[jdhoch]

Whether we are talking about obesity epidemics, water shortages amid torrential downpours, or environmental degradation and toxification, the hollowing out of representative democracy, the erosion of workers rights, the growing inequalities between the rich and the rest, the dismantling of the public sector and the destruction of social gains and rights built up over decades; whether we are talking about a lost generation of young people whose skills and potentialities can find no gainful employment; the reduction of education to obedience, conformity and discipline; the transformation of the media from tools of information, connection and creativity to purveyors of ignorance, sensationalism and tired clichés; whether we are talking about the economic violence of the system or the surveillance society or the decreasing room to peacefully protest without being truncheoned, tasered or worse – all these problems and more can be traced back to the question of capital and unless we name the system within which these problems are developing, public debate, public discourse and policy agendas, are doomed to stay at the surface level, addressing symptoms at best, or making the problems worse by following the same discredited capitalist nostrums and prescriptions that are responsible for the problems in the first place.
This is why a book whose first volume appeared in 1867 remains compellingly relevant to our times. Marx’s great work has a universality about it – an applicability to capitalism in whatever country and whatever century it develops. Yet this universality is not an empty abstraction – Marx develops a critique that is both empirically responsible and more importantly cuts through to the essential relations of the system.




http://www.systemiccapital.com/why-todays-radicals-must-read-marxs-das-kapital/

[Book O'Dead]

As I've stated elsewhere, you don't read Capital, you study it.

[The Idler]

I think most people would wonder what Capital has to do with their lives before they gave up let alone finished Chapter 1.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I think most people would wonder what Capital has to do with their lives before they gave up let alone finished Chapter 1.

This is why i always recommend starting to read chapter 3 and then top go back to the first chapter once you have read this, then it's quite simple and comfortable reading.

[Book O'Dead]

I think most people would wonder what Capital has to do with their lives before they gave up let alone finished Chapter 1.

Granted, it's not a book for everyone but I thought that that was what the various prefaces and forewords were supposed to facilitate; establish the relationship between the reader and the message in the book.

It doesn't matter though because by the time Marx published Capital he had figured out how best to convey its knowledge to the working classes:

Pamphlets.

Marx was so fucking clever in distilling the fundamental laws of operation in capital to a relatively simple set of formulas and axioms, that he decided to give public talks and publish small works that explained the Law of Value, the different categories of value, how each value came into existence, culminating with and explanation of how it is that capital is created and accumulated and by what mechanism the accumulator of capital creates a vast fortune.

Two of the simplest, most elementary economic descriptions of capitalism in operation ever to have been produced by anyone are the handiwork of Karl Marx.

They can be obtained from Value, Price and Profit (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm) or its companion Wage Labor & Capital (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/index.htm).

[Internacional]

When my friends saw it in my backpack, they asked me "Why are you reading it?"

The answer is overwhelmingly simple: Kapital is more important than ever in today's world. Marx's theory behind the abuse of labor power has been amplified ten-folds in the world and we need to understand how this system works before a new one is instituted.

[MarxSchmarx]

I disagree.

I have read Kapital. But, only superficially. To truly read Kapital, to give it the consideration and weighing it deserves, is an ongoing, never ending process. Kapital, like many such texts, continues to inspire novel scholarship that must also be taken into account.

Kapital is, in many respects, akin to a work of art that must be brood upon, obsessed over, and digested after a certain maturity of life experiences to fully appreciate.

But having said this, to do Kapital justice is no small task. To those whom, particularly in the global north, question our seemingly limitless material abundance and who seeks a substantive alternative to the prevailing order, what Kapital has to offer is complicated. The basic injustice of capitalism goes far beyond the surplus value of labor, or the transformation problem, or use value, or really any topic Kapital engages at length. Kapital can, and perhaps should, be read as a normative indictment of capitalism, sure.

But I must come back to the artistic analogy. Consider some of Coltrane's final works. They are the butt of jokes, some regard them as failures and even (ironically) immature , and yet, when one gives it the attention they deserve, one comes to see the works for what they are. For until one developed an appreciation for the experiences of every day life and reflected seriously on the state of things, these works remain inaccessible and frankly a waste of a budding jazz fiend. Similarly, until brutality of capitalism is deeply appreciated to ones bones and the weight of the forces against liberation felt on a gut level, Kapital remains but yet another dry treatise on positive economics.

Kapital is not some holy religious text that only the initiated can appreciate. But it is a work which harkens to a younger marx in a radical way. Its power thus lies not in its analysis of capitalism, although these are insightful, but in its indictment thereof. And to therefore give it the attention it deserves as an extended moral denunciation is no trivial task.

Thus it is that much of Kapital, especially among those just entering the struggle, must be digested through secondary and perhaps even tertiary sources. Because only by reading it with the benefit of a context of a struggle for survival of both body and soul can Kapital be said to be truly read.

And for all its richness, I wonder whether the time needed to devote to truly read Kapital as it was meant to be read, as a sustained indictment of capitalism, is justified for most leftists. Most of us do not have the luxury of a monastic student. Moreover, nearly 150 years of bright, devoted revolutionaries have helped distill the main points of Kapital's analysis for us. I cannot therefore see a strong justification for devoting the time necessary to really read Kapital, at least under capitalism.

[Book O'Dead]

I disagree.

I have read Kapital. But, only superficially. [...]

I cannot therefore see a strong justification for devoting the time necessary to really read Kapital, at least under capitalism.

Capital is a scholarly work interesting mostly to scholars.

That's okay.

Marx understood that himself. That's why he published Value, Price and Profit and Wage Labor & Capital. So that the workers of his day could get the "comic book" version.

[Halleluhwah]

What do you guys think about David Harvey's lectures? I've listened to a few, and it's certainly not going to be very helpful if you aren't actually reading the text with him, but occasionally he'll make an interesting point or draw some connection I didn't quite notice. He also published it as a book (http://www.scribd.com/doc/82776801/A-Companion-to-Marx-s-Capital-By-David-Harvey) and there's some stuff there that isn't in the videos.

[Book O'Dead]

What do you guys think about David Harvey's lectures? I've listened to a few, and it's certainly not going to be very helpful if you aren't actually reading the text with him, but occasionally he'll make an interesting point or draw some connection I didn't quite notice. He also published it as a book (http://www.scribd.com/doc/82776801/A-Companion-to-Marx-s-Capital-By-David-Harvey) and there's some stuff there that isn't in the videos.

Sounds interesting but I would caution novices about relying too much on secondary sources because they, the novice, would have a hard time detecting if the author of the secondary work is traducing Marx's work.

There are many literary attempts out there to misrepresent what Marx and other communist actually said under the guise of defending Marxism, including certain publications attributable to Soviet authorship but the majority of it comes directly from capitalist book mills.

[Paul Cockshott]

I strongly advocate reading the original. I read it when I was 19 and I think I may have read a couple of books by Sweezy before that, but I cant recall finding it particularly hard to follow.

[piet11111]

The biggest issue i have with works of such complexity is that they are nigh impossible to find in Dutch especially an unabridged version.

Reading it in English is do-able but when i find a word that has a meaning i am not entirely sure of i can really mess it up and this little misunderstanding gradually evolves into a clusterfuck once more little misunderstandings accumulate.

[ed miliband]

Capital is a scholarly work interesting mostly to scholars.

That's okay.

Marx understood that himself. That's why he published Value, Price and Profit and Wage Labor & Capital. So that the workers of his day could get the "comic book" version.

nope - marx explicitly said he wrote capital for it to be read by the working class

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

nope - marx explicitly said he wrote capital for it to be read by the working class

I think it's very ambitious to think that non-academics will have any interest in Capital.

I mean look at Revleft: many of us are already Socialists but, as non-academics, many people on here struggle to even understand one basic definition (that of value). To say that Capital is intended to be a 'book of the masses' is well, as I say, ambitious.

[Book O'Dead]

nope - marx explicitly said he wrote capital for it to be read by the working class

He did? Where?

[MarxSchmarx]

Capital is a scholarly work interesting mostly to scholars.

That's okay.

Marx understood that himself. That's why he published Value, Price and Profit and Wage Labor & Capital. So that the workers of his day could get the "comic book" version.

Indeed. Marx had the wisdom to see that the entire projected series of Kapital (which he anticipated would go quite beyond the measly 2~3 volumes he worked on) would be tl;dr for some people. Unfortunately, like many of Marx's insights, this one is not widely shared among the left.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Indeed. Marx had the wisdom to see that the entire projected series of Kapital (which he anticipated would go quite beyond the measly 2~3 volumes he worked on) would be tl;dr for some people. Unfortunately, like many of Marx's insights, this one is not widely shared among the left.

Are you sure, comrade? His work on capital was planned for three or four volumes, but the key is to recognize that he should have done a long-book-for-an-outline of his six planned themes. Capital was just one of those themes. The outline for a critique of political economy that he did wasn't enough.

[Comrade Trollface]

Whether we are talking about obesity epidemics[/url]Stop right there. The more relevant text for that shit is Folk Devils and Moral Panics by Stanley Cohen. I only say that because you seem to have mentioned it like it was a real thing.

[ed miliband]

He did? Where?

can't remember. he did though, and i stand by my statement 100%. the closest thing i have to hand is the preface to the second german edition which begins with marx stressing the effort he made to popularise the first chapter, but warning that, as with most sciences, the beginning is an up-hill struggle. i doubt marx would attempt to popularise something he simply produced for learned professors, as you suggest.

supposing i'm wrong, i'll just say that 'capital' is absolutely fucking worthless if it is simply to remain in the hands of scholars and academics.


I think it's very ambitious to think that non-academics will have any interest in Capital.

I mean look at Revleft: many of us are already Socialists but, as non-academics, many people on here struggle to even understand one basic definition (that of value). To say that Capital is intended to be a 'book of the masses' is well, as I say, ambitious.

revleft isn't really a good measuring stick though; look at libcom - most posters seem to be workers actively involved in organisations like the afed, solfed, wobblies, and all well-versed in 'capital' and value-theory.

as i say above, 'capital' is nothing if it's just to be a dry old tome for academics to philosophise over.

[Deicide]

Preface to the French edition of Capital vol 1.


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

Marx is a quotable beast, the last line is great.

[ed miliband]

i fucking knew it!

[Book O'Dead]

preface to the french edition of capital vol 1.

"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."

:cool:

booooooooooooooooooooom!!!!!!

[ed miliband]

booooooooooooooooooooom!!!!!!

boom what?

marx is just stating the obvious. nowt to do with your comment there.

[Book O'Dead]

can't remember. he did though, and i stand by my statement 100%. the closest thing i have to hand is the preface to the second german edition which begins with marx stressing the effort he made to popularise the first chapter, but warning that, as with most sciences, the beginning is an up-hill struggle. i doubt marx would attempt to popularise something he simply produced for learned professors, as you suggest.

supposing i'm wrong, i'll just say that 'capital' is absolutely fucking worthless if it is simply to remain in the hands of scholars and academics.



revleft isn't really a good measuring stick though; look at libcom - most posters seem to be workers actively involved in organisations like the afed, solfed, wobblies, and all well-versed in 'capital' and value-theory.

as i say above, 'capital' is nothing if it's just to be a dry old tome for academics to philosophise over.


Though I share your sentiments I can't entirely agree with your implication that academics and scholars aren't workers too.

Also, the facts make any argument between us moot: Capital is not exclusively in the hands of scholars today and probably never was, except when it was first written. Don't you think?

[Book O'Dead]

boom what?

marx is just stating the obvious. nowt to do with your comment there.

Because I love what Marx wrote.

[Halleluhwah]

Also from the Preface to the first German edition:


Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty. That which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised. [1] The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.

With the exception of the section of value-form, therefore, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I presuppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.

It's kind of funny, because the comment on the difficulty of the value-form section is something I hear time and time again today. Marx knew what he was doing.

[MarxSchmarx]

Are you sure, comrade? His work on capital was planned for three or four volumes, but the key is to recognize that he should have done a long-book-for-an-outline of his six planned themes. Capital was just one of those themes. The outline for a critique of political economy that he did wasn't enough.

Six themes sounds about right - I double checked on google and it seems the series was supposed to extend to six volumes; the other elements of the project covered areas beyond what Das Kapital covered, although it seems tricky to track down the primary source reference on this.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Six themes sounds about right - I double checked on google and it seems the series was supposed to extend to six volumes; the other elements of the project covered areas beyond what Das Kapital covered, although it seems tricky to track down the primary source reference on this.

I would have preferred one big book on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, international trade, and the world market.

Hmph, it's too bad Karl Kautsky's Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx wasn't this one big book, and too bad Soviet political economists didn't work on this, either. :(

[citizen of industry]

Capital is a lot of fun. You might sense the injustice of capitalism in daily life, and grasp class-struggle on a fundamental level. Many people do. But then it just becomes a weak moral argument or a question of more equitable distribution. Capital is important in understanding the dynamics of capitalism, why is is unsustainable, on a scientific and not a moral plane. Any worker can read and understand capital if they want to. The more of it you read the easier it is to read and the more enjoyable. I agree with the OP. If you cover all the themes of capital in pamphlet form, you'll need a lot of pamphlets. Might as well read the books.

[shinjuku dori]

Literacy is very low in much of the Western world.

[citizen of industry]

Literacy is very low in much of the Western world.

Can you provide some figures? I don't think "much of" the western world is appropriate. Maybe "some of." Looks like above 80% for most of the western world, and about 99% in the most developed countries. (That's just averages though - it certain areas of the developed countries literacy rates are much lower, as with infant mortality, etc.). Obviously, if someone can't read we can't suggest they read Capital. But that's largely a problem I've never had to deal with, nor have you I'd wager.

[Book O'Dead]

Literacy is very low in much of the Western world.

You see this is the kind of statement one could expect from a bored 14 or 15 year-old boy or girl with PC at their fingertips.

[citizen of industry]

You see this is the kind of statement one could expect from a bored 14 or 15 year-old boy or girl with PC at their fingertips.

What's creepy though is that it isn't a bored teenager but some middle-aged dude serious about it.

[Lucretia]

The first chapter of Capital Vol 1 is by far the most challenging in the book, but that's only because it is the most interesting. It basically explains what money is, and through its rigorous analytical sequence, implicitly demonstrates the historical preconditions necessary for its existence.

[Robocommie]

Good timing on this, I just recently discovered David Harvey's online course about Kapital, and I've determined to go through it as best I can. It seems pretty cool and I like how David Harvey lectures. I'll just have to see if I can keep up with it because of my attention span disorder. :lol:

Just for the sake of sharing it with anyone who hasn't seen it, here's the link: http://davidharvey.org/

[Vanguard1917]

I think most people would wonder what Capital has to do with their lives before they gave up let alone finished Chapter 1.

That's a philistine attitude to study - abandoning a groundbreaking work of science because you (mistakenly) feel it has no direct relevance to your daily life.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I think workers will be more inclined to read Marxist texts when they begin to understand the nature of the capitalist system in more explicit detail. Today many people do not even read recreationally so I do not think all the blame can be laid at its jargon heavy pages. It is a gradual process of education which can only effectively take place with educated revolutionaries helping guide newer ones through assistance.

[The Jay]

I haven't read Capital, but I have read The German Ideology and a few other things and sections by Marx and from his works. They weren't the easiest to read, that may be because of both the time and language barrier from Marx. Knowing myself and those around me I feel safe saying that Capital would be beyond the interest of almost everyone. It's not that it wouldn't be helpful, it's that people just don't want to put in the work to read it with it's complex language and ideas.

Before I get jumped on for supposedly calling the proletariat stupid or lazy I challenge people to try to get most people to read Einstein's Relativity, not the theoretical work but the book he wrote to popularize and understand it. I read it the summer before I took modern physics to give myself a walking start into the course and found it very easy and straight-forward. When I loaned the book to non-physics students they found it incomprehensible. It's not that they're stupid or that the material had no relevance to their universe. It's that they don't think that they needed to know the complex ideas and theory behind relativity. They just want the technology based on it to work.

People may - more will hopefully - want capitalism to end, but not because of the unfair nature of the current system of property rights or the philosophical reasoning. People in general will want to end it because they are suffering from the end results. Reading Capital would help people to understand the way things are, but I don't see people reading it in the park or discussing it in bars. I hear how employers are screwing them.

Marx may have liked the proletariat to read Capital, but I don't think he expected them to, at least in great numbers. This holds true especially today.

[ed miliband]

Marx may have liked the proletariat to read Capital, but I don't think he expected them to, at least in great numbers. This holds true especially today.

let us repeat:


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.

[The Jay]

That implies that he didn't think that it was that accessible before.

[ed miliband]

That implies that he didn't think that it was that accessible before.

um, yes... look at the context, it's taken from the french edition of 'capital'. presumably many french proles couldn't read german.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

David Harvey talks about that specific quote in one of his lectures. According to him Marx thought publishing it in a serialized form was a great idea because it would be easier for workers to read it that way, but he worried that the French working class specifically would prefer to have access to it all at once due to some characteristic of the French I suppose.

Edit; I don't even know why I made this post because Marx already said all that in the quote in the first place haha.

[amanezca]

Agree with the OP. Sales of Das Kapital have skyrocketed across the world, from Germany to China and Japan. In radical times, people look for radical solutions.

Understanding postmodern capitalism in the age of globalization and austerity requires us to know Marx's analysis and also, more importantly, his method. More than ever we need to take up method employed in Das Kapital to understand present-day capital accumulation and economic relations more generally.

[Olentzero]

Sounds interesting but I would caution novices about relying too much on secondary sources because they, the novice, would have a hard time detecting if the author of the secondary work is traducing Marx's work.

Harvey specifically says in Companion to Capital that readers should read the relevant chapters in Capital first, then pick up the Companion and read his commentary. The introduction to Companion alone is an interesting read.