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Capital #1-3
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
"The following abridgement of the first volume of Capital - the foundation of Marx's entire system of economics - was made by Otto Rühle with great care and with profound understanding of his task. First to be eliminated were obsolete examples, then quotations from writings which today are only of historic interest, polemics with writers now forgotten, and finally numerous documents which, whatever their importance for understanding a given epoch, have no place in a concise exposition that pursues theoretical rather than historical objectives. At the same time, Rühle did everything to preserve continuity in the development of the scientific analysis. Logical deductions and dialectic transitions of thought have not, we trust, been infringed at any point. It stands to reason that this extract calls for attentive perusal." Leon Trotzy, 1939
This edition is provided with an introduction by Leon Trotsky, better known as "Marxism in our time".
This edition is provided with an introduction by Leon Trotsky, better known as "Marxism in our time".
1152 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1867
6,927 people are currently reading
76.2k people want to read
About the author
Karl Marx
3,087 books5,996 followersWith the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote
The Communist Manifesto
(1848) and
Das Kapital
(1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,331 reviews
July 8, 2020
Try to call me an uneducated socialist now, bitches!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
August 14, 2015
Louis Althusser wrote a preface to a French translation of Capital and in it he gives lots of advice on how to read this book – I recommend you read this book according to that advice, even if I didn’t quite do that myself. A big part of that advice is to not read in the order that Marx wrote. You see, the first few chapters on the commodity are seriously hard going. Much harder going than just about anything else in the book. In fact, Althusser was pretty well just following Marx’s on advice that the first few chapters could be skipped and then come back to later on. So, it wasn’t that he didn’t know the first bits were hard –he made them hard for a reason.
And that reason, Althusser says, is Hegel. Be that as it may, I feel that Marx pretty well has to start by explaining what a commodity is, because capitalism, which he is trying to understand, explain and criticise in this book, can’t be understood without understanding commodities. Why is that? Well, a large part of the point of capitalism is turning into commodities of more and more things that have never been commodities before. So much so that today just about everything can be a commodity – but this certainly wasn’t always the case. In fact, as Marx shows, prior to capitalism very few things were commodities.
Marx starts by stressing that a commodity needs to have a use value. This is really important, not least because often this is where people both start and end too. You know, why would you buy something if you had no use for it? But Marx makes the point that the use value of the commodity is actually the bit of the commodity that, by definition, the person selling the commodity is least interested in. If the person selling the commodity had a use for the commodity, why would they be selling it? A true commodity is something the person producing it has no use for at all. It has, instead, an exchange value for this person. And that exchange value can be expressed in money – money being a socially recognised store of value which allows for the trade of disparate things as if they were all the same thing. That is, if I make trousers I can sell those trousers for money and then use that money to buy any other kind of thing knowing that I am exchanging value for like value.
Which then begs the question, where does that value actually come from? And how can I exchange things knowing they actually do have ‘a like value’? Often you will hear that value is created by supply and demand. If there isn’t very much of something and everyone wants it, then it will have a particularly high value, if there is hardly any of it and no one wants it, or if there is lots and lots of it and everyone wants it, it will have a lower or perhaps no value at all. Everyone wants air, but air mostly ‘just is’ – and so has no exchange value, despite how essential it is – try not breathing for a while if you doubt this.
Marx argues this supply and demand idea isn’t where commodities really get their value from. In fact, he goes so far as to say that rare things (like gold and diamonds) often don’t get sold at their true value – so rather than their rarity increasing their value, it actually undermines their ‘true’ value. Instead he shows that it isn’t ‘how much of it’ that exists that decides something’s value, but rather how much ‘socially necessary labour time’ is incorporated into it that decides how expensive it is going to be. If it takes me six hours to make a pair of trousers and you two hours to catch a pound of fish, then I’m hardly going to exchange my trousers for your fish – it would make more sense for me to just spend two hours fishing myself if both have the same ‘value’. Marx says that in the end everything sells at its cost of production. That is, it sells for the price of the labour that is incorporated in it and for no more. Which then begs the question, where does profit come from. He spends quite a long time explaining that profit can’t come from ‘buying cheap and selling dear’ as that would mean the second capitalist would just be sending the first capitalist broke. Instead, Marx makes a really interesting move in showing that labour has an interesting property that makes it the essential commodity in commodity production, and therefore in capitalist production. That is, its ability to produce more than it costs to reproduce itself.
This sounds like getting money for nothing, but it is anything but that. Let’s say you are a capitalist (and like in a game of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, being a capitalist is by far the better option). To be a capitalist you need to buy a worker’s (or in fact, lots of workers) labour power. That is, you buy from them the only thing they have available to sell, their ability to work. But, just like you with the commodities that you well sell once the worker has finished making them, the labourer sells their labour power at its cost of production (or reproduction in this case). That means it will cost you as the capitalist a certain amount to employ the labourer their wages and that is the amount of money that it takes for the labourer to feed, clothe, house and raise their family (you’re going to need more labourers one day – and the labourer is going to provide them for you by using the money you pay them in wages to literally reproduce themselves). This amount of money is the cost of the labourer’s labour power. But the thing is that that labour power can produce more than just what it takes for it to reproduce itself. If the work day is 8 hours, the labourer might be able to produce enough product to pay for the reproduction of their labour power in only 4 hours. But they still have to work for the whole 8 hours. That means that you, the capitalist that employed the labourer, pays the labourer wages the full price of the workers first four hours of work, but after that four hours is up, the capitalist gets to keep everything the labourer produces for the next four hours and doesn’t really have to pay the labourer at all for that final four hours. And this is what Marx called ‘surplus value’: the value over and above that which is necessary to reproduce the labour of the labourer. And that is where the capitalist’s profits come from.
Sure, it isn’t all profit. The capitalist has to buy tools for the worker to work with, and raw materials for the worker to transform into commodities, but the capitalist receives whatever profit they are going to make out of the surplus labour time they get the worker to work.
The other bit to this is that capitalism is driven by the need to increasingly socialise the means of production. For instance, if I go to market with the trousers I have made, I really do need to sell them, ‘a man cannot live by trousers alone’. I need bread, meat, wine, tea, books, shirts and so on. But the whole process only works on the basis that while I’ve been making trousers everyone else has been making everything else that I need. If everyone was making trousers, we wouldn’t really get very far. It is only when the whole of society is actively engaged in producing commodities that the society can operate at all. And this socialisation goes all the way down, not only is it true that I can’t live by making trousers alone, but often I don’t even make all of the trousers anymore. Without us living in a society we could achieve literally nothing alone. This is a huge change from Feudalism, where peasant farmers mostly made everything they needed for life. Today, most of us are so specialised we hardly know what it is we actually help to ‘make’ at all. Marx calls this the alienation of labour.
Capitalism seeks to make everything as cheap as possible and it does this by finding ways to endlessly reduce the amount of labour that is needed to make any particular commodity. So, if it once took two weeks to produce a car, capitalism constantly seeks to find ways to speed up this process so that less and less actual labour will be incorporated in each car – and therefore each car will be cheaper. It does this by making each of the steps in the process of making the car isolated. This is the whole idea of a conveyor belt. One person doing one thing over and over again is more productive than that same person moving about doing many things. But doing the one thing over and over again is pretty well the definition of becoming ‘deskilled’ – and Marx stresses that if capitalism is good at anything, it is good at deskilling workers. Actually, that is exactly the point, as the less skill a labourer has the less you have to pay them. And it is worse that that, as it also means the easier it is to train someone to come in and replace them. A large part of this book looks at the horrors of 19th century workplaces, and a large part of those horrors involved the women and children that worked in those factories for very little wages. They could only do this because the processes had been made so simple literally a child could do them. Changing the laws may have taken kids out of the factories, but the same rule applied – the skill levels plummeted and with them the cost of labour continually dropped.
But this was for two reasons, one was that the labour labourers were selling was completely deskilled and so therefore much cheaper to reproduce. The second was that that labour was producing many more commodities and so it was literally costing less to reproduce that labour in the first place. I mean, if I need a loaf of bread and a t-shirt and shorts to survive and yesterday those things took two hours to produce and today they only take one hour to produce – then effectively my wages have dropped and more of my ‘labour time’ can be donated directly as surplus value into the pocket of the capitalist.
My productivity is the only thing the capitalist is interested in, but that interest is rapacious. Every means available to the capitalist to squeeze the last drop of value out of my labour will be tried. What is interesting is that once there appears to be no further ways of drawing surplus value out of me, and this is basically when my wages have been squeezed to the utmost and yet there is still not enough ‘value’ coming out of me, then the capitalist turns to machines. My understanding of this is that a machine is different from a tool in a very important respect. A tool is something a skilled worker uses in their work. A machine is something that transforms that work to do away with the skilled worker. That is, the very process of producing things is transformed by machines, not just to do what the worker and tool did previously, but to utterly transform how that process occurred. And machines then help to do away with more labour so that the cost of the commodities produced continually falls, especially the cost of that most important commodity, labour.
The other thing that Marx was able to show was that the rate of exploitation of labour was always greatest in countries with the most developed productive forces – the most machines. So, the English worker in Marx’s day was the most exploited worker in the world.
As I said, a large part of this book documents the utter horrors of lives of the working classes in Marx’s day. And it is gobsmacking. But there is a part of the modern reader that says while reading this things like, “well, things have certainly improved”. And this is definitely the case. However, like so many other things in life, it is only half of the story. As Marx points out, a large part of the reason why we are better off now than in his day is that commodities are so much cheaper to produce today. And this means that meeting the needs of large sections of the population is cheaper and easier than ever before. The problem is that so much of the wealth that is produced now gushes to the wealthiest sections of society as never before. For instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQ...
Marx basically said that there are two great classes in society. We like to talk about there being a 1%, a middle class (virtually everyone else) and a working class – who I guess we pretty much think are like the middle class, just with less class. This is, of course, a confusion of categories. The opposite of ‘middle class’ isn’t ‘working class’ – the opposite of ‘working class’ would have to be something like ‘leisured class’ – as someone who likes to say they are middle class, I can’t really say I’m ‘leisured’. Marx is very clear – everyone who has nothing else to sell other than their labour power is working class. Those who own the means of production and buy your labour power from you are capitalist. The other classes are those who still exist as artisans or small shop owners or intellectuals. But, before you get too smug, the whole point of capitalism is to do away with these ‘skilled’ jobs. Controlling labour and deskilling it is how profits are made and maximised. Increasingly, then, the working class will grow and the capitalist class, and all other classes will shrink.
Marx saw this as inevitably leading to a situation where a revolution would occur and the workers would take back what had been taken from them – the product of their surplus labour. But while Marx saw this as inevitable and of urgent necessity in his day, it is worth remembering that this book was written in 1867 – as close to 150 years ago as you might like – and that was a time before there was a motor car, before there were computers, moving pictures, MP3 players, flying machines, a world wide web of cat videos… I don’t need to go on, do I? The point is that capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx envisaged. That said, a lot of what Marx had to say about capitalism still holds true today. If capitalism has become kinder, it is mostly due to it being forced kicking and screaming to do so. But even those reforms are proving anything but permanent. More and more is being clawed back by capital every day – a book I read recently suggested that perhaps 50% of Americans are at or below the poverty line, certainly America’s prison population goes some way to confirm Marx’s vision of the ‘reserve army’ and the redundant population that needs to be shifted ‘somewhere else’. And today capital, as Marx predicted, is truly international – so much so that we have seen the deindustrialisation of large parts of the ‘developed’ world with millions of jobs moved to low wage countries – low wage, low environmental controls, low health and safety regulations… Capital is just as unfriendly today as it was in the 1860s, it probably even employs just as many kids.
I tried to read this book years ago and ever since have told people it is too turgid to read. This isn’t really true, and that was because I got stuck in the first few chapters. The advice of Althusser and of Marx himself, that is, skip the hard bits and come back to them later, is probably really good advice. This is one of the most influential books of all time. That doesn’t mean you have to read it, but to have never read it does put you at a bit of a disadvantage – in much the same way that saying you’ve never read The Interpretation of Dreams or On the Origin of the Species puts you at a disadvantage. Not the end of the world, but these books are famous for pretty good reasons.
And that reason, Althusser says, is Hegel. Be that as it may, I feel that Marx pretty well has to start by explaining what a commodity is, because capitalism, which he is trying to understand, explain and criticise in this book, can’t be understood without understanding commodities. Why is that? Well, a large part of the point of capitalism is turning into commodities of more and more things that have never been commodities before. So much so that today just about everything can be a commodity – but this certainly wasn’t always the case. In fact, as Marx shows, prior to capitalism very few things were commodities.
Marx starts by stressing that a commodity needs to have a use value. This is really important, not least because often this is where people both start and end too. You know, why would you buy something if you had no use for it? But Marx makes the point that the use value of the commodity is actually the bit of the commodity that, by definition, the person selling the commodity is least interested in. If the person selling the commodity had a use for the commodity, why would they be selling it? A true commodity is something the person producing it has no use for at all. It has, instead, an exchange value for this person. And that exchange value can be expressed in money – money being a socially recognised store of value which allows for the trade of disparate things as if they were all the same thing. That is, if I make trousers I can sell those trousers for money and then use that money to buy any other kind of thing knowing that I am exchanging value for like value.
Which then begs the question, where does that value actually come from? And how can I exchange things knowing they actually do have ‘a like value’? Often you will hear that value is created by supply and demand. If there isn’t very much of something and everyone wants it, then it will have a particularly high value, if there is hardly any of it and no one wants it, or if there is lots and lots of it and everyone wants it, it will have a lower or perhaps no value at all. Everyone wants air, but air mostly ‘just is’ – and so has no exchange value, despite how essential it is – try not breathing for a while if you doubt this.
Marx argues this supply and demand idea isn’t where commodities really get their value from. In fact, he goes so far as to say that rare things (like gold and diamonds) often don’t get sold at their true value – so rather than their rarity increasing their value, it actually undermines their ‘true’ value. Instead he shows that it isn’t ‘how much of it’ that exists that decides something’s value, but rather how much ‘socially necessary labour time’ is incorporated into it that decides how expensive it is going to be. If it takes me six hours to make a pair of trousers and you two hours to catch a pound of fish, then I’m hardly going to exchange my trousers for your fish – it would make more sense for me to just spend two hours fishing myself if both have the same ‘value’. Marx says that in the end everything sells at its cost of production. That is, it sells for the price of the labour that is incorporated in it and for no more. Which then begs the question, where does profit come from. He spends quite a long time explaining that profit can’t come from ‘buying cheap and selling dear’ as that would mean the second capitalist would just be sending the first capitalist broke. Instead, Marx makes a really interesting move in showing that labour has an interesting property that makes it the essential commodity in commodity production, and therefore in capitalist production. That is, its ability to produce more than it costs to reproduce itself.
This sounds like getting money for nothing, but it is anything but that. Let’s say you are a capitalist (and like in a game of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, being a capitalist is by far the better option). To be a capitalist you need to buy a worker’s (or in fact, lots of workers) labour power. That is, you buy from them the only thing they have available to sell, their ability to work. But, just like you with the commodities that you well sell once the worker has finished making them, the labourer sells their labour power at its cost of production (or reproduction in this case). That means it will cost you as the capitalist a certain amount to employ the labourer their wages and that is the amount of money that it takes for the labourer to feed, clothe, house and raise their family (you’re going to need more labourers one day – and the labourer is going to provide them for you by using the money you pay them in wages to literally reproduce themselves). This amount of money is the cost of the labourer’s labour power. But the thing is that that labour power can produce more than just what it takes for it to reproduce itself. If the work day is 8 hours, the labourer might be able to produce enough product to pay for the reproduction of their labour power in only 4 hours. But they still have to work for the whole 8 hours. That means that you, the capitalist that employed the labourer, pays the labourer wages the full price of the workers first four hours of work, but after that four hours is up, the capitalist gets to keep everything the labourer produces for the next four hours and doesn’t really have to pay the labourer at all for that final four hours. And this is what Marx called ‘surplus value’: the value over and above that which is necessary to reproduce the labour of the labourer. And that is where the capitalist’s profits come from.
Sure, it isn’t all profit. The capitalist has to buy tools for the worker to work with, and raw materials for the worker to transform into commodities, but the capitalist receives whatever profit they are going to make out of the surplus labour time they get the worker to work.
The other bit to this is that capitalism is driven by the need to increasingly socialise the means of production. For instance, if I go to market with the trousers I have made, I really do need to sell them, ‘a man cannot live by trousers alone’. I need bread, meat, wine, tea, books, shirts and so on. But the whole process only works on the basis that while I’ve been making trousers everyone else has been making everything else that I need. If everyone was making trousers, we wouldn’t really get very far. It is only when the whole of society is actively engaged in producing commodities that the society can operate at all. And this socialisation goes all the way down, not only is it true that I can’t live by making trousers alone, but often I don’t even make all of the trousers anymore. Without us living in a society we could achieve literally nothing alone. This is a huge change from Feudalism, where peasant farmers mostly made everything they needed for life. Today, most of us are so specialised we hardly know what it is we actually help to ‘make’ at all. Marx calls this the alienation of labour.
Capitalism seeks to make everything as cheap as possible and it does this by finding ways to endlessly reduce the amount of labour that is needed to make any particular commodity. So, if it once took two weeks to produce a car, capitalism constantly seeks to find ways to speed up this process so that less and less actual labour will be incorporated in each car – and therefore each car will be cheaper. It does this by making each of the steps in the process of making the car isolated. This is the whole idea of a conveyor belt. One person doing one thing over and over again is more productive than that same person moving about doing many things. But doing the one thing over and over again is pretty well the definition of becoming ‘deskilled’ – and Marx stresses that if capitalism is good at anything, it is good at deskilling workers. Actually, that is exactly the point, as the less skill a labourer has the less you have to pay them. And it is worse that that, as it also means the easier it is to train someone to come in and replace them. A large part of this book looks at the horrors of 19th century workplaces, and a large part of those horrors involved the women and children that worked in those factories for very little wages. They could only do this because the processes had been made so simple literally a child could do them. Changing the laws may have taken kids out of the factories, but the same rule applied – the skill levels plummeted and with them the cost of labour continually dropped.
But this was for two reasons, one was that the labour labourers were selling was completely deskilled and so therefore much cheaper to reproduce. The second was that that labour was producing many more commodities and so it was literally costing less to reproduce that labour in the first place. I mean, if I need a loaf of bread and a t-shirt and shorts to survive and yesterday those things took two hours to produce and today they only take one hour to produce – then effectively my wages have dropped and more of my ‘labour time’ can be donated directly as surplus value into the pocket of the capitalist.
My productivity is the only thing the capitalist is interested in, but that interest is rapacious. Every means available to the capitalist to squeeze the last drop of value out of my labour will be tried. What is interesting is that once there appears to be no further ways of drawing surplus value out of me, and this is basically when my wages have been squeezed to the utmost and yet there is still not enough ‘value’ coming out of me, then the capitalist turns to machines. My understanding of this is that a machine is different from a tool in a very important respect. A tool is something a skilled worker uses in their work. A machine is something that transforms that work to do away with the skilled worker. That is, the very process of producing things is transformed by machines, not just to do what the worker and tool did previously, but to utterly transform how that process occurred. And machines then help to do away with more labour so that the cost of the commodities produced continually falls, especially the cost of that most important commodity, labour.
The other thing that Marx was able to show was that the rate of exploitation of labour was always greatest in countries with the most developed productive forces – the most machines. So, the English worker in Marx’s day was the most exploited worker in the world.
As I said, a large part of this book documents the utter horrors of lives of the working classes in Marx’s day. And it is gobsmacking. But there is a part of the modern reader that says while reading this things like, “well, things have certainly improved”. And this is definitely the case. However, like so many other things in life, it is only half of the story. As Marx points out, a large part of the reason why we are better off now than in his day is that commodities are so much cheaper to produce today. And this means that meeting the needs of large sections of the population is cheaper and easier than ever before. The problem is that so much of the wealth that is produced now gushes to the wealthiest sections of society as never before. For instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQ...
Marx basically said that there are two great classes in society. We like to talk about there being a 1%, a middle class (virtually everyone else) and a working class – who I guess we pretty much think are like the middle class, just with less class. This is, of course, a confusion of categories. The opposite of ‘middle class’ isn’t ‘working class’ – the opposite of ‘working class’ would have to be something like ‘leisured class’ – as someone who likes to say they are middle class, I can’t really say I’m ‘leisured’. Marx is very clear – everyone who has nothing else to sell other than their labour power is working class. Those who own the means of production and buy your labour power from you are capitalist. The other classes are those who still exist as artisans or small shop owners or intellectuals. But, before you get too smug, the whole point of capitalism is to do away with these ‘skilled’ jobs. Controlling labour and deskilling it is how profits are made and maximised. Increasingly, then, the working class will grow and the capitalist class, and all other classes will shrink.
Marx saw this as inevitably leading to a situation where a revolution would occur and the workers would take back what had been taken from them – the product of their surplus labour. But while Marx saw this as inevitable and of urgent necessity in his day, it is worth remembering that this book was written in 1867 – as close to 150 years ago as you might like – and that was a time before there was a motor car, before there were computers, moving pictures, MP3 players, flying machines, a world wide web of cat videos… I don’t need to go on, do I? The point is that capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx envisaged. That said, a lot of what Marx had to say about capitalism still holds true today. If capitalism has become kinder, it is mostly due to it being forced kicking and screaming to do so. But even those reforms are proving anything but permanent. More and more is being clawed back by capital every day – a book I read recently suggested that perhaps 50% of Americans are at or below the poverty line, certainly America’s prison population goes some way to confirm Marx’s vision of the ‘reserve army’ and the redundant population that needs to be shifted ‘somewhere else’. And today capital, as Marx predicted, is truly international – so much so that we have seen the deindustrialisation of large parts of the ‘developed’ world with millions of jobs moved to low wage countries – low wage, low environmental controls, low health and safety regulations… Capital is just as unfriendly today as it was in the 1860s, it probably even employs just as many kids.
I tried to read this book years ago and ever since have told people it is too turgid to read. This isn’t really true, and that was because I got stuck in the first few chapters. The advice of Althusser and of Marx himself, that is, skip the hard bits and come back to them later, is probably really good advice. This is one of the most influential books of all time. That doesn’t mean you have to read it, but to have never read it does put you at a bit of a disadvantage – in much the same way that saying you’ve never read The Interpretation of Dreams or On the Origin of the Species puts you at a disadvantage. Not the end of the world, but these books are famous for pretty good reasons.
April 19, 2020
I remember seeing a review on here for this book from a guy who said he bought two copies of this book, one for himself and one for his girlfriend and that he didn't have a girlfriend anymore. I'm bringing this up because actually my boyfriend got me this book, as one of my birthday gifts none the less, and I have to say for the first three hundred pages it felt like I could really empathize with the other man's girlfriend.
This was really really annoying to read I'm going to be honest. I personally feel like a lot of my own politics align with the left and I think a lot of the ideas Marx brings up are important and good, especially surplus value. But like there's probably a reason people hate reading theory.
I think that if I have been reading this in the 1860s I would've liked it a lot more because all of the things being discussed would be contemporaneous but now I know all this stuff about industrial UK in the late 1800s and I don't know what I would do with that information?
I think the foreword was really useful and good once again though, and it did suggest not necessarily reading everything in order. It also gave some context that made things easier to understand. I do think some of the chapters were better than others and are much more useful for the context of understanding capitalism today. I also get why it was organized and structured the way it was originally to build up to the ideas Marx thought were important and wanted to juxtapose with the ideas of the economists of the day.
I think I could've gotten more out of this if I knew more about economics honestly, like the whole thing about monetary theory probably went straight over my head.
Honestly just glad I made it through it and I would just once again like to say that I still think reading source material is overrated and boring, I think we can usually get the best main ideas from older writing in better contemporary formats.
This was really really annoying to read I'm going to be honest. I personally feel like a lot of my own politics align with the left and I think a lot of the ideas Marx brings up are important and good, especially surplus value. But like there's probably a reason people hate reading theory.
I think that if I have been reading this in the 1860s I would've liked it a lot more because all of the things being discussed would be contemporaneous but now I know all this stuff about industrial UK in the late 1800s and I don't know what I would do with that information?
I think the foreword was really useful and good once again though, and it did suggest not necessarily reading everything in order. It also gave some context that made things easier to understand. I do think some of the chapters were better than others and are much more useful for the context of understanding capitalism today. I also get why it was organized and structured the way it was originally to build up to the ideas Marx thought were important and wanted to juxtapose with the ideas of the economists of the day.
I think I could've gotten more out of this if I knew more about economics honestly, like the whole thing about monetary theory probably went straight over my head.
Honestly just glad I made it through it and I would just once again like to say that I still think reading source material is overrated and boring, I think we can usually get the best main ideas from older writing in better contemporary formats.
January 30, 2025
De-mystifying the Left’s “Bible”:
Preamble:
--Friedrich Engels apparently called this book “the Bible of the working class” (which I believe was, in part, tongue in cheek, coming from a secular historical materialist), so I’m also referencing this tongue in cheek. I might add that Marx's “opium of the people” quote on religion had nuance, and my favourite quote comes from an advocate of Liberation Theology (Hélder Câmara):
--So, I really wanted a project for us to work on together, in depth, and what better book than Marx’s infamous Capital Volume 1 to bring us together? We ended up dividing into 3 meeting groups for different time-zones and reading paces, and each group has provided rewarding experiences. Check out Carlos Martinez’s interviews to inspire our efforts:
-with Vijay Prashad: https://youtu.be/BgiKOlMjUoo
-with Radhika Desai: https://youtu.be/8EkpdYH0Bhg
--Many leftists only read the The Communist Manifesto (indeed, same goes for the opposition, at least those who bother to read), a political pamphlet Marx/Engels wrote when they were age 29/27 in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 (“A specter is haunting Europe”… “you have nothing to lose but your chains!”); after the revolutions were co-opted by the bourgeoisie, Marx/Engels’ later preface explains how they left the Manifesto unaltered as a historical record.
--Marx’s Capital project, on the other hand, was a sober, lifelong academic pursuit. Marx had planned some 5-6 “books”, each with multiple volumes. He only finished Volume 1 (1,000+ pages) of the 1st book, with Engels piecing together Volume 2, 3, and 4(?) from Marx’s mountain of notes. The minority who make it through Volume 1 really drop off for the subsequent volumes, which are fragmented and dominated by Marx’s dry accounting style (whereas Volume 1 also features Marx’s literary depth and biting critique).
--Academic: which opposition has taken Classical political economy idols Adam Smith/David Ricardo etc. more seriously/extensively than Marx? …Certainly not today’s “mainstream Economics”, i.e. Neoclassical (“anti-Classical” according to Michael Hudson/Anwar Shaikh), where status quo shilling devolves into simply quoting the “Invisible Hand” passage without context (Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not to mention capitalism evolving beyond petty shopkeepers of butchers/bakers/brewers, face-palm) while deliberately rejecting Classical foundations (class distinctions/struggle, labour theory of value, economic rent, historical change, turbulent competition, etc.).
Highlights:
--I ended up splitting Volume 1 into 2 halves: Market Circulation and Production. Throughout, Marx is particularly interested in uncovering capitalism’s:
(i) Abstractions: historical social relations (i.e. power relations, interactions for social needs) that are hidden, where the surface appears as natural (physical/human nature) thus inevitable (crucial for social consent!).
(ii) Contradictions: potential sources of crises.
1) Capitalism’s Value system; Market Circulation of Capital:
--With the first sentences, we immediately get a sense that we’re reading the interaction between a science textbook (chemistry’s Periodic Table) and philosophical treatise (theory of value): “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”
--Note: Marx mimics scientific reductionism where simplifying assumptions are made to “turn off” certain parts in order to isolate and discover other parts (see The New Economics: A Manifesto for a useful distinction between this vs. the “constructionism” of utopic mainstream economics making “domain assumptions”). Thus, it’s a crucial challenge to keep track of what assumptions are at play throughout the book (and the entire Capital project).
…Starting with the commodity, Marx distinguishes its:
(i) Use-value: satisfies human wants/needs; a quality.
(ii) Exchange-value: the economic gain from selling something on the market, represented by price; a quantity.
…How these contradicting natures manifest in various scenarios is carefully unraveled, where market exchange prioritizes exchange-value while abstracting use-value (it’s difficult to compare heterogeneous qualities).
--Given the heterogeneous qualities of the commodities exchanged, the (general) commonality between commodities is both are products of labour; thus, Marx starts with the Classical Smith/Ricardo “labour theory of value”. However, Marx emphasizes that labour here must also be abstracted (heterogeneous labour becomes homogeneous; Marx calls the result “value”).
--We can theoretically measure “value” as “socially necessary labour-time” (the normal labour-time the society requires to produce the commodity), foreshadowing another contradiction: increase productivity = increase use-value produced (more commodities) but decrease “value” (shorter socially necessary labour-time needed, thus labour-power and the commodity are cheapened; see later).
--Private labour becomes social labour since it is now producing for social use (sold on ever-expanding market), but this social labour is contradicted by the relation only being via market exchange, thus indirect (sold to strangers). This stranger-to-stranger relation is mediated by the commodity sold/bought, resulting in “commodity fetishism” where social labour is concealed/objectified in the commodity itself. Just think of how visible the commodity/its price are, compared to all the labour relations/conditions throughout the commodity chain (let alone environmental conditions)!
--Let’s add some anthropology: despite economists trying to naturalize market exchange (esp. convenient thought-experiments of how human social relations started with barter), the actual mechanisms of market exchange (instantaneous exchange between strangers competing to maximize their own gain) is clearly not what built human sociability (families/tribes/communities). Not stopping to realize this shows how close our social assumptions are to anti-social Randian zealots; to dispel Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and revive social imagination, see Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
…This abstraction of labour (“value”) involves the Great Transformation from a “society with markets” (precapitalist, where markets were on the periphery) to a “market society” (capitalism); here I’m referring to the accessible intro Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails, channeling The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, on how capitalism required State violence during the Enclosures' privatization of the Commons to create the land market (to grow wool for the rising global market) and thus the labour market (from those dispossessed of land thus forced to sell their own labour).
...Marx describes how precapitalist personal landed property (“no land without its master”) became capitalist impersonal property (“money has no master”). Marx returns to this in the last part of the book, critiquing Smith’s so-called “primitive accumulation” (convenient assumption that capitalists got their capital from savings/hard work, thus the idyllic original accumulation) by describing the top-down violent dispossession of the domestic Enclosures (The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation) and even colonial enclosures (Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital).
--Another way to conceptualize the Great Transformation:
(i) C-M-C: precapitalist exchange of Commodity-for-Commodity (facilitated by Money). This is “selling in order to buy” because the end goal is the consumption of the Commodity (consuming its use-value). This end goal means the circulation stops, thus the inherent limits.
(ii) M-C-M’: “General Formula of Capital” where Money is invested for more Money (via producing and selling Commodity). This is “buying in order to sell” (speculation!) where the end is exchange-value (more Money), which starts another circulation of capital if re-invested. As David Harvey stresses, capital is a process that must be endless to survive (endless accumulation). Thus, the endless growth driving our existential ecological crises is at the heart of capitalism’s logic; economic growth = economic health under capitalism, even when the growth is viral/cancerous/self-destructive (must-read: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World).
…speaking of speculation, M-M’ is also mentioned in the context of interest-bearing capital, and the contradictions of money fetishism: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and [the capitalist] might just as well have intended to make money without producing at all” (see: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present and The Bubble and Beyond).
...Note: the contradictions of money as means-of-exchange vs. store-of-wealth are surprisingly central in the Patnaiks’ Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
--Capitalism’s value system treats the environment as a free gift (see The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power on capitalism externalizing costs by dumping it onto the environment). During Marx’s time, soil depletion was a major concern, where England was forced to import guano (seabird droppings from colonized islands) as fertilizer; Marx also mentions the disturbance of the metabolic relationship between humans and the environment from capitalist urbanization, spurring Ecological Marxism (Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).
…see the comments below for the 2nd half of the review (Volume 1’s focus on Capitalist Production)!
Preamble:
--Friedrich Engels apparently called this book “the Bible of the working class” (which I believe was, in part, tongue in cheek, coming from a secular historical materialist), so I’m also referencing this tongue in cheek. I might add that Marx's “opium of the people” quote on religion had nuance, and my favourite quote comes from an advocate of Liberation Theology (Hélder Câmara):
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.--When COVID shutdowns started, my “Economic Development” class with Jim Glassman was in its last weeks. Foreseeing that I would really miss the campus group-learning environment, I decided to start a Goodreads study group. I’ve always been disappointed with how little engagement there is on Goodreads for critical nonfiction compared with fiction. Where else can you find folks from all over the world reading the same obscure books?! Members who read critical nonfiction tend to just track their reading, while the few extended discussions are often siloed in one-on-one messaging.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
--So, I really wanted a project for us to work on together, in depth, and what better book than Marx’s infamous Capital Volume 1 to bring us together? We ended up dividing into 3 meeting groups for different time-zones and reading paces, and each group has provided rewarding experiences. Check out Carlos Martinez’s interviews to inspire our efforts:
-with Vijay Prashad: https://youtu.be/BgiKOlMjUoo
-with Radhika Desai: https://youtu.be/8EkpdYH0Bhg
--Many leftists only read the The Communist Manifesto (indeed, same goes for the opposition, at least those who bother to read), a political pamphlet Marx/Engels wrote when they were age 29/27 in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 (“A specter is haunting Europe”… “you have nothing to lose but your chains!”); after the revolutions were co-opted by the bourgeoisie, Marx/Engels’ later preface explains how they left the Manifesto unaltered as a historical record.
--Marx’s Capital project, on the other hand, was a sober, lifelong academic pursuit. Marx had planned some 5-6 “books”, each with multiple volumes. He only finished Volume 1 (1,000+ pages) of the 1st book, with Engels piecing together Volume 2, 3, and 4(?) from Marx’s mountain of notes. The minority who make it through Volume 1 really drop off for the subsequent volumes, which are fragmented and dominated by Marx’s dry accounting style (whereas Volume 1 also features Marx’s literary depth and biting critique).
--Academic: which opposition has taken Classical political economy idols Adam Smith/David Ricardo etc. more seriously/extensively than Marx? …Certainly not today’s “mainstream Economics”, i.e. Neoclassical (“anti-Classical” according to Michael Hudson/Anwar Shaikh), where status quo shilling devolves into simply quoting the “Invisible Hand” passage without context (Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not to mention capitalism evolving beyond petty shopkeepers of butchers/bakers/brewers, face-palm) while deliberately rejecting Classical foundations (class distinctions/struggle, labour theory of value, economic rent, historical change, turbulent competition, etc.).
Highlights:
--I ended up splitting Volume 1 into 2 halves: Market Circulation and Production. Throughout, Marx is particularly interested in uncovering capitalism’s:
(i) Abstractions: historical social relations (i.e. power relations, interactions for social needs) that are hidden, where the surface appears as natural (physical/human nature) thus inevitable (crucial for social consent!).
(ii) Contradictions: potential sources of crises.
1) Capitalism’s Value system; Market Circulation of Capital:
--With the first sentences, we immediately get a sense that we’re reading the interaction between a science textbook (chemistry’s Periodic Table) and philosophical treatise (theory of value): “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”
--Note: Marx mimics scientific reductionism where simplifying assumptions are made to “turn off” certain parts in order to isolate and discover other parts (see The New Economics: A Manifesto for a useful distinction between this vs. the “constructionism” of utopic mainstream economics making “domain assumptions”). Thus, it’s a crucial challenge to keep track of what assumptions are at play throughout the book (and the entire Capital project).
…Starting with the commodity, Marx distinguishes its:
(i) Use-value: satisfies human wants/needs; a quality.
(ii) Exchange-value: the economic gain from selling something on the market, represented by price; a quantity.
…How these contradicting natures manifest in various scenarios is carefully unraveled, where market exchange prioritizes exchange-value while abstracting use-value (it’s difficult to compare heterogeneous qualities).
--Given the heterogeneous qualities of the commodities exchanged, the (general) commonality between commodities is both are products of labour; thus, Marx starts with the Classical Smith/Ricardo “labour theory of value”. However, Marx emphasizes that labour here must also be abstracted (heterogeneous labour becomes homogeneous; Marx calls the result “value”).
--We can theoretically measure “value” as “socially necessary labour-time” (the normal labour-time the society requires to produce the commodity), foreshadowing another contradiction: increase productivity = increase use-value produced (more commodities) but decrease “value” (shorter socially necessary labour-time needed, thus labour-power and the commodity are cheapened; see later).
--Private labour becomes social labour since it is now producing for social use (sold on ever-expanding market), but this social labour is contradicted by the relation only being via market exchange, thus indirect (sold to strangers). This stranger-to-stranger relation is mediated by the commodity sold/bought, resulting in “commodity fetishism” where social labour is concealed/objectified in the commodity itself. Just think of how visible the commodity/its price are, compared to all the labour relations/conditions throughout the commodity chain (let alone environmental conditions)!
--Let’s add some anthropology: despite economists trying to naturalize market exchange (esp. convenient thought-experiments of how human social relations started with barter), the actual mechanisms of market exchange (instantaneous exchange between strangers competing to maximize their own gain) is clearly not what built human sociability (families/tribes/communities). Not stopping to realize this shows how close our social assumptions are to anti-social Randian zealots; to dispel Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and revive social imagination, see Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
…This abstraction of labour (“value”) involves the Great Transformation from a “society with markets” (precapitalist, where markets were on the periphery) to a “market society” (capitalism); here I’m referring to the accessible intro Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails, channeling The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, on how capitalism required State violence during the Enclosures' privatization of the Commons to create the land market (to grow wool for the rising global market) and thus the labour market (from those dispossessed of land thus forced to sell their own labour).
...Marx describes how precapitalist personal landed property (“no land without its master”) became capitalist impersonal property (“money has no master”). Marx returns to this in the last part of the book, critiquing Smith’s so-called “primitive accumulation” (convenient assumption that capitalists got their capital from savings/hard work, thus the idyllic original accumulation) by describing the top-down violent dispossession of the domestic Enclosures (The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation) and even colonial enclosures (Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital).
--Another way to conceptualize the Great Transformation:
(i) C-M-C: precapitalist exchange of Commodity-for-Commodity (facilitated by Money). This is “selling in order to buy” because the end goal is the consumption of the Commodity (consuming its use-value). This end goal means the circulation stops, thus the inherent limits.
(ii) M-C-M’: “General Formula of Capital” where Money is invested for more Money (via producing and selling Commodity). This is “buying in order to sell” (speculation!) where the end is exchange-value (more Money), which starts another circulation of capital if re-invested. As David Harvey stresses, capital is a process that must be endless to survive (endless accumulation). Thus, the endless growth driving our existential ecological crises is at the heart of capitalism’s logic; economic growth = economic health under capitalism, even when the growth is viral/cancerous/self-destructive (must-read: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World).
…speaking of speculation, M-M’ is also mentioned in the context of interest-bearing capital, and the contradictions of money fetishism: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and [the capitalist] might just as well have intended to make money without producing at all” (see: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present and The Bubble and Beyond).
...Note: the contradictions of money as means-of-exchange vs. store-of-wealth are surprisingly central in the Patnaiks’ Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
--Capitalism’s value system treats the environment as a free gift (see The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power on capitalism externalizing costs by dumping it onto the environment). During Marx’s time, soil depletion was a major concern, where England was forced to import guano (seabird droppings from colonized islands) as fertilizer; Marx also mentions the disturbance of the metabolic relationship between humans and the environment from capitalist urbanization, spurring Ecological Marxism (Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).
…see the comments below for the 2nd half of the review (Volume 1’s focus on Capitalist Production)!
May 31, 2024
Did not agree with everything Marx said...but there is no doubt that this book has changed the world. Over the years I don't think I have ever encountered a more misunderstood philosopher; I have had several people tell me they think he is evil incarnate - but when I ask them to tell me why they think that way (and ask if they have ever read any of his works) they say 'I will never read anything by him!' Go figure!
May 7, 2022
Das Kapital = Capital (Volumes 1-3), Karl Marx
Capital, Volume I (Das Kapital), 1867,
Capital, Volume II (posthumously published by Engels), 1885,
Capital, Volume III (posthumously published by Engels), 1894.
Capital. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital is an 1867 economics book by German philosopher Karl Marx. In Volume I, the only part of Marx's multi-volume Capital: Critique of Political Economy to be published during his lifetime, Marx critiques capitalism chiefly from the standpoint of its production processes. After Marx's death, Friedrich Engels compiled and expanded his friend's notes into volumes II (1885) and III (1894).
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: سال 1972میلادی
عنوان: سرمایه (کاپیتال)؛ نویسنده: کارل مارکس؛ مترجم: ایرج اسکندری؛ تهران، حزب توده ایران، 1352؛ آلمان شرقی، زالتس لند، در یک جلد؛
عنوان: سرمایه نقدی بر اقتصاد سیاسی؛ نویسنده: کارل مارکس؛ مترجم: حسن مرتضوی؛ تهران، لاهیتا، چاپ نخست جلد اول 1392؛ در سه حلد، چاپ نخست جلد دوم 1393؛ چاپ نخست جلد سوم 1396 میلادی؛ موضوع: اقتصاد - روند گردش سرمایه - سده 19م
کارل مارکس کتاب «سرمایه (کاپیتال)» خویش را، نقدی بر اقتصاد بورژوائی، از ديدگاه سود قشر کارگر میدانند، «مارکس» در «سرمایه» بیش از یکبار همداستانی خویش با اثر «هاجسکین» به نام «دفاع از کارگر در برابر ادعاهای سرمایه» را، ابراز میکنند؛ «مارکس» نخستین جلد از کتابهای «سرمایه» را به ترسیم برداشت کلی خویش از ارزش اضافی، و استثمار کارگران، که به گفته ی ایشان، در پایان منجر به کاهش نرخ سود، و پاشیدگی و فروریزش سرمایه داری صنعتی خواهد شد، اختصاص داده اند؛ تا پاییز سال1871میلادی همگی نسخههای چاپ نخست به زبان «آلمانیِ» «سرمایه» به فروش رسیدند، و کتاب به چاپ دوم نیز رسید؛ درخواستها برای چاپ برگردان «روسی» کتاب، منجر به انتشار سه هزار نسخه از «سرمایه»، به زبان «روسی» در روز بیست و هفتم ماه مارس سال1872میلادی شد؛ «مارکس» باقیمانده ی زندگی خود را، به کار بر روی جلدهای دوم و سوم «سرمایه» بگذاشتند، و هر دو جلد دوم و سوم پس از درگذشت ایشان، توسط «انگلس»؛ جلد دوم با عنوان «سرمایه، جلد دو: فرایند گردش سرمایه»، در ماه ژوئیه سال1893میلادی؛ و جلد سوم یک سال پس از آن در ماه اکتبر سال1894میلادی، با عنوان «سرمایه، جلد سه: فرایند تولید سرمایهدارانه به مثابه یک کل»؛ منتشر شدند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 11/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 16/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Capital, Volume I (Das Kapital), 1867,
Capital, Volume II (posthumously published by Engels), 1885,
Capital, Volume III (posthumously published by Engels), 1894.
Capital. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital is an 1867 economics book by German philosopher Karl Marx. In Volume I, the only part of Marx's multi-volume Capital: Critique of Political Economy to be published during his lifetime, Marx critiques capitalism chiefly from the standpoint of its production processes. After Marx's death, Friedrich Engels compiled and expanded his friend's notes into volumes II (1885) and III (1894).
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: سال 1972میلادی
عنوان: سرمایه (کاپیتال)؛ نویسنده: کارل مارکس؛ مترجم: ایرج اسکندری؛ تهران، حزب توده ایران، 1352؛ آلمان شرقی، زالتس لند، در یک جلد؛
عنوان: سرمایه نقدی بر اقتصاد سیاسی؛ نویسنده: کارل مارکس؛ مترجم: حسن مرتضوی؛ تهران، لاهیتا، چاپ نخست جلد اول 1392؛ در سه حلد، چاپ نخست جلد دوم 1393؛ چاپ نخست جلد سوم 1396 میلادی؛ موضوع: اقتصاد - روند گردش سرمایه - سده 19م
کارل مارکس کتاب «سرمایه (کاپیتال)» خویش را، نقدی بر اقتصاد بورژوائی، از ديدگاه سود قشر کارگر میدانند، «مارکس» در «سرمایه» بیش از یکبار همداستانی خویش با اثر «هاجسکین» به نام «دفاع از کارگر در برابر ادعاهای سرمایه» را، ابراز میکنند؛ «مارکس» نخستین جلد از کتابهای «سرمایه» را به ترسیم برداشت کلی خویش از ارزش اضافی، و استثمار کارگران، که به گفته ی ایشان، در پایان منجر به کاهش نرخ سود، و پاشیدگی و فروریزش سرمایه داری صنعتی خواهد شد، اختصاص داده اند؛ تا پاییز سال1871میلادی همگی نسخههای چاپ نخست به زبان «آلمانیِ» «سرمایه» به فروش رسیدند، و کتاب به چاپ دوم نیز رسید؛ درخواستها برای چاپ برگردان «روسی» کتاب، منجر به انتشار سه هزار نسخه از «سرمایه»، به زبان «روسی» در روز بیست و هفتم ماه مارس سال1872میلادی شد؛ «مارکس» باقیمانده ی زندگی خود را، به کار بر روی جلدهای دوم و سوم «سرمایه» بگذاشتند، و هر دو جلد دوم و سوم پس از درگذشت ایشان، توسط «انگلس»؛ جلد دوم با عنوان «سرمایه، جلد دو: فرایند گردش سرمایه»، در ماه ژوئیه سال1893میلادی؛ و جلد سوم یک سال پس از آن در ماه اکتبر سال1894میلادی، با عنوان «سرمایه، جلد سه: فرایند تولید سرمایهدارانه به مثابه یک کل»؛ منتشر شدند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 11/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 16/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
March 27, 2007
Do you know how many pages this is? 1152. And worth every leaf on the tree. A must read for anyone willing or wanting to wax grand about capitalism.
Picture it: My first semester in graduate school. Day two. My professor goes over the syllabus, week one: Das Kapital (Marx)/ chps. 1 - 15, 22, 27 etc. I cry for three days lamenting the decision to pursue higher education. Then I read that shit and my little world changes.
Picture it: My first semester in graduate school. Day two. My professor goes over the syllabus, week one: Das Kapital (Marx)/ chps. 1 - 15, 22, 27 etc. I cry for three days lamenting the decision to pursue higher education. Then I read that shit and my little world changes.
October 5, 2019
10/4/19 - A literary masterpiece and probably the greatest work of social theory. Rereading it with comrades, following the sudden collapse of our political home, proved to be an unexpected source of joy for me this year.
***
More than anything else, the genius of Marx lies in him having given us a dialectical framework for understanding and - hopefully - changing the world. Is that too pretentious a way of putting it? No, I don't think so...
A little over a hundred and fifty years since the publication of Capital, Volume 1, and the world has seen both horrors and progress that Marx himself could scarcely have imagined.
In chapter 15 ('machinery and large scale industry') Marx details how the introduction of machinery immediately caused workers to rebel wherever it happened. Much as he sympathizes with them, however, this is not Marx's own approach. Liberation will not come through the simple rejection of the social order but only through its dialectical transformation.
Marx leaves the question of revolution versus reform very much open, in my view. His discussion of the Factory Acts in chapter 10 hardly suggests a rejection of parliamentary tactics. What counts as a "revolution" is also an interesting question. It should not be controversial to assert that, in addition to creating unprecedented growth, capitalism also tends to plunge whole societies into unprecedented catastrophes.
Living when he did, Marx could only begin to have an inkling of the latter, but here he is on great Irish famine
In the last part of the 19th century, Ireland proved to be a harbinger of a global phenomenon, as perhaps 50 million people died in famines caused by European imperial expansion (see Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World). Capital is not the black book of capitalism, but it does continue provide the best framework for understanding human civilization for the past couple centuries. Without Marx, all we can do is either avert our gaze (eg, Steven Pinker) or else simply go insane from the parade of meaningless suffering.
***
9/12/2017 - I manage to finish Marx's opus a couple days before the 150th anniversary of its first publication. Per usual, I find the mere feat of powering through a great & difficult book doesn't automatically lead to an increase in wisdom. I'll have to cogitate on this one a while.
Yes, it's a brilliant, messy thing. Chapters of abstract algebra alternate with harrowing pieces of journalism and history. Marx's exact thesis, if he has one, is often elusive. Before reading it, I was under the impression that it was only the young, romantic Marx who was concerned with matters such as alienation. So I was pleasantly surprised by the many darkly lyrical passages here on the commodity form. While truth be told I struggled with the intricacies of his theory of value, I'd say old Marx is still the indispensable entry point for a critique of modern society.
*
Not clear if Marx thought he was being ironic here. One hundred fifty years later, these words read more starkly literal than they could have at the time. Capitalism is killing the planet. The past century and half hasn't been a total bust in terms of human progress. Even so, the crises and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production have yet to be resolved.
Marx wrote Capital in part as polemic against the liberals of his day (Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill come in for memorable drubbings). While he agreed with them in denouncing slavery and other premodern varieties of domination, he also sought to expose he new kind of oppression masked in the commodity form. Bourgeois freedoms, if not completely illusory, were certainly inadequate to ensure a just society.
This strand of his thought remains controversial. Many have seen Marxism as an authoritarian doctrine. Given the history of really existing socialism in the twentieth century, this has sometimes been fair. Nonetheless, it seems to me there's never been a better time to renew a Marxist critique of liberalism than right now. As Slavoj Zizek once slyly remarked, we're all supposed to have a great big orgasm whenever we hear the word 'democracy,' but we're also not supposed to talk about the conditions under which people are able to make meaningful decisions about their lives.
The granting of formal democracy to much of the earth's population does not seem to be doing much to stay the plagues of social stratification and climate change. Indeed it's hard to take the word 'democracy' as much more than a joke in a world where 6 individuals have as much combined wealth as the poorer half of humanity. In the US, home of freedom and capitalist hegemon par excellence, we are seeing a shockingly unprecedented collapse in living standards; in the richest country in the world, a drop in life expectancy for a large demographic (that would be the infamous 'white working class').
Which is just to say we may be on the cusp of a new dark ages, or we may have already passed over and be in the early stages of it. Marx's 19th century vision of proletarian revolution is not necessarily the solution. What is necessary is a lucid critique of the current social system if we have any hope to transform it. For this , Capital remains an incomparable resource.
*
How did Marx foresee the end of capitalism? This book really has far more to say about its origins. As a revolutionary he was always committed to the belief that a more just society was possible, and yet still we find passages such as
Not just brute exploitation, but also the spell of ideology. How then is it possible to awaken to revolutionary consciousness? Thirty pages later we get something of an answer
The fame of this passage is out of all proportion to its place in the book. In context it almost comes across as a non sequitur. In a massive book devoted overwhelmingly to the genesis and logic of capitalism, Marx suddenly shifts to speak, for less than a page, of the possibility of socialism.
Marx's marvelous rhetoric here may conflict with the substance of his point. He's not arguing that an increase in misery per se will lead to a revolutionary class. Plainly suffering does not necessarily empower or enlighten. Marx's political horizon is tied to the specific conditions of the industrial working class of time. The notion, say, of 'seizing the means of production' was by no means abstract or metaphorical in its original context. A highly disciplined army of workers could very well seize ownership of the factory in which they toiled. If this happened on the scale of the whole society, capitalism itself could be abolished.
At the time of his writing, and for decades afterwards, it was a plausible enough hypothesis. However, ultimately it was not borne out by history. For all the historic achievements the labor movement, it never managed to defeat capitalism for good. The capitalist mode of production has survived the advent of deindustrialization in the advanced western countries. To find a guide to the present conjuncture, then, I don't think we should look to his triumphalist mode about an ever-growing workers' movement. Rather, we can find insight in is earlier remarks (see page 783) about the progress of capital accumulation creating a redundant population.
Today we see not so much a strong proletariat growing in confidence, but an angry mass divided against itself, painfully aware of its own redundancy. In lieu of a strong revolutionary left, we're likely to see atomized communities continue competing with each other to prove who is more or less redundant. This is why reinventing class consciousness is such a daunting yet necessary task for then 21st century.
***
More than anything else, the genius of Marx lies in him having given us a dialectical framework for understanding and - hopefully - changing the world. Is that too pretentious a way of putting it? No, I don't think so...
A little over a hundred and fifty years since the publication of Capital, Volume 1, and the world has seen both horrors and progress that Marx himself could scarcely have imagined.
In chapter 15 ('machinery and large scale industry') Marx details how the introduction of machinery immediately caused workers to rebel wherever it happened. Much as he sympathizes with them, however, this is not Marx's own approach. Liberation will not come through the simple rejection of the social order but only through its dialectical transformation.
Marx leaves the question of revolution versus reform very much open, in my view. His discussion of the Factory Acts in chapter 10 hardly suggests a rejection of parliamentary tactics. What counts as a "revolution" is also an interesting question. It should not be controversial to assert that, in addition to creating unprecedented growth, capitalism also tends to plunge whole societies into unprecedented catastrophes.
Living when he did, Marx could only begin to have an inkling of the latter, but here he is on great Irish famine
Ireland, having during the last twenty years reduced its population by nearly one-half, is at this moment undergoing the process of still further reducing the number of its inhabitants to a level which will correspond exactly with the requirements of its landlords and the English woollen manufacturers. - pp 572
In the last part of the 19th century, Ireland proved to be a harbinger of a global phenomenon, as perhaps 50 million people died in famines caused by European imperial expansion (see Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World). Capital is not the black book of capitalism, but it does continue provide the best framework for understanding human civilization for the past couple centuries. Without Marx, all we can do is either avert our gaze (eg, Steven Pinker) or else simply go insane from the parade of meaningless suffering.
***
9/12/2017 - I manage to finish Marx's opus a couple days before the 150th anniversary of its first publication. Per usual, I find the mere feat of powering through a great & difficult book doesn't automatically lead to an increase in wisdom. I'll have to cogitate on this one a while.
Yes, it's a brilliant, messy thing. Chapters of abstract algebra alternate with harrowing pieces of journalism and history. Marx's exact thesis, if he has one, is often elusive. Before reading it, I was under the impression that it was only the young, romantic Marx who was concerned with matters such as alienation. So I was pleasantly surprised by the many darkly lyrical passages here on the commodity form. While truth be told I struggled with the intricacies of his theory of value, I'd say old Marx is still the indispensable entry point for a critique of modern society.
*
Capital, which has such "good reasons" for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers surrounding it, allows its actual movement to be determined as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by probable fall of the earth into the sun - pp 380
Not clear if Marx thought he was being ironic here. One hundred fifty years later, these words read more starkly literal than they could have at the time. Capitalism is killing the planet. The past century and half hasn't been a total bust in terms of human progress. Even so, the crises and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production have yet to be resolved.
Marx wrote Capital in part as polemic against the liberals of his day (Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill come in for memorable drubbings). While he agreed with them in denouncing slavery and other premodern varieties of domination, he also sought to expose he new kind of oppression masked in the commodity form. Bourgeois freedoms, if not completely illusory, were certainly inadequate to ensure a just society.
This strand of his thought remains controversial. Many have seen Marxism as an authoritarian doctrine. Given the history of really existing socialism in the twentieth century, this has sometimes been fair. Nonetheless, it seems to me there's never been a better time to renew a Marxist critique of liberalism than right now. As Slavoj Zizek once slyly remarked, we're all supposed to have a great big orgasm whenever we hear the word 'democracy,' but we're also not supposed to talk about the conditions under which people are able to make meaningful decisions about their lives.
The granting of formal democracy to much of the earth's population does not seem to be doing much to stay the plagues of social stratification and climate change. Indeed it's hard to take the word 'democracy' as much more than a joke in a world where 6 individuals have as much combined wealth as the poorer half of humanity. In the US, home of freedom and capitalist hegemon par excellence, we are seeing a shockingly unprecedented collapse in living standards; in the richest country in the world, a drop in life expectancy for a large demographic (that would be the infamous 'white working class').
Which is just to say we may be on the cusp of a new dark ages, or we may have already passed over and be in the early stages of it. Marx's 19th century vision of proletarian revolution is not necessarily the solution. What is necessary is a lucid critique of the current social system if we have any hope to transform it. For this , Capital remains an incomparable resource.
*
How did Marx foresee the end of capitalism? This book really has far more to say about its origins. As a revolutionary he was always committed to the belief that a more just society was possible, and yet still we find passages such as
It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance - pp 899
Not just brute exploitation, but also the spell of ideology. How then is it possible to awaken to revolutionary consciousness? Thirty pages later we get something of an answer
Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated - pp 929
The fame of this passage is out of all proportion to its place in the book. In context it almost comes across as a non sequitur. In a massive book devoted overwhelmingly to the genesis and logic of capitalism, Marx suddenly shifts to speak, for less than a page, of the possibility of socialism.
Marx's marvelous rhetoric here may conflict with the substance of his point. He's not arguing that an increase in misery per se will lead to a revolutionary class. Plainly suffering does not necessarily empower or enlighten. Marx's political horizon is tied to the specific conditions of the industrial working class of time. The notion, say, of 'seizing the means of production' was by no means abstract or metaphorical in its original context. A highly disciplined army of workers could very well seize ownership of the factory in which they toiled. If this happened on the scale of the whole society, capitalism itself could be abolished.
At the time of his writing, and for decades afterwards, it was a plausible enough hypothesis. However, ultimately it was not borne out by history. For all the historic achievements the labor movement, it never managed to defeat capitalism for good. The capitalist mode of production has survived the advent of deindustrialization in the advanced western countries. To find a guide to the present conjuncture, then, I don't think we should look to his triumphalist mode about an ever-growing workers' movement. Rather, we can find insight in is earlier remarks (see page 783) about the progress of capital accumulation creating a redundant population.
Today we see not so much a strong proletariat growing in confidence, but an angry mass divided against itself, painfully aware of its own redundancy. In lieu of a strong revolutionary left, we're likely to see atomized communities continue competing with each other to prove who is more or less redundant. This is why reinventing class consciousness is such a daunting yet necessary task for then 21st century.
November 12, 2015
Ugh.
Soul-crushing in its hatred of human nature, and irritating in its misconstruing of economic maxims. Beginning with a vast oversimplification of Adam Smith's theory of value, Marx proceeds to describe, for ants, bees and other insectile collectivists, the kind of economics he wishes had evolved among humans. He then offers--via a distortion of the Hegelian dialectic, which is itself a distortion of logic--a historicist, "scientific" account of how the "proletariat" will inevitably rise and take control of the world.
Conspiratorial, ignorant, brutally authoritarian. Bring antidepressants.
Soul-crushing in its hatred of human nature, and irritating in its misconstruing of economic maxims. Beginning with a vast oversimplification of Adam Smith's theory of value, Marx proceeds to describe, for ants, bees and other insectile collectivists, the kind of economics he wishes had evolved among humans. He then offers--via a distortion of the Hegelian dialectic, which is itself a distortion of logic--a historicist, "scientific" account of how the "proletariat" will inevitably rise and take control of the world.
Conspiratorial, ignorant, brutally authoritarian. Bring antidepressants.
December 10, 2008
Had Marx avoided moral judgments in this tome, had he stuck only to symptoms of capitalism’s maladies, this book might still be read in the West today. Instead, Marx and his labor theory of value are considered discredited by economics departments and worthy of little more than synopses and essays about the work – Das Kapital is still cited by many and read by none – and this is probably because Marx’s moral remedy led to greater woes than capitalism did.
This book is also too long by about 2/3. I would recommend reading it the following way: Review the title and first two pages of each chapter. If you grasp what Marx is after, move along to the next chapter – otherwise, keep reading until you do have a grasp on it. Marx will repeat himself tirelessly and occasionally leaven things with mathematical formulae that are entirely unnecessary for a contemporary reader. If you’re reading Das Kapital for its economics insights, you may skip large parts of the book’s second half. If you are reading it for a condemnation of the moral failures of free-market capitalism, you may skip large parts of the book’s first half – and most of the first halves of each chapter.
Is this book still timely in some of its observations? Absolutely. Is it worth the 40 or so hours it takes to read cover-to-cover? Probably not.
Here are the book’s two greatest insights, I believe:
1. The farther money moves from human labor, the more dangerous it becomes.
2. At every moment capitalism reduces the value of every existing commodity and subsequently the value of every skill set required to provide it.
The overarching insight that Marx had about capitalism, the one we’re contending with right now, is that it eventually cannibalizes itself.
Trouble is, Marx insisted on putting faces on the system. He insisted on chronicling the immorality of some English capitalists of the 1860s. In so doing, he failed to predict today’s United States of America: Everybody is a participant, an exploiter and an exploited, and all are ruined by the system. Today’s corporate officer works 100 hours/week. Today’s lower middle-class laborer works 40 hours/week. One envies the other’s wealth. One envies the other’s time. Neither is fulfilled or content. Both realize capitalism’s constant revolution and reinvention will render them obsolete at least once in their lives.
Capitalism’s fundamental instability is incompatible with human contentment.
But the acceleration of capitalism’s cycles is not something Marx explicitly predicted. Make no mistake, though: Were Marx able to stand in the middle of today’s Manhattan and behold the meltdown of a commissions-based economy in which trillions of dollars are made by electronically moving capital from one place to another, he would say, “What took so long?”
This book is also too long by about 2/3. I would recommend reading it the following way: Review the title and first two pages of each chapter. If you grasp what Marx is after, move along to the next chapter – otherwise, keep reading until you do have a grasp on it. Marx will repeat himself tirelessly and occasionally leaven things with mathematical formulae that are entirely unnecessary for a contemporary reader. If you’re reading Das Kapital for its economics insights, you may skip large parts of the book’s second half. If you are reading it for a condemnation of the moral failures of free-market capitalism, you may skip large parts of the book’s first half – and most of the first halves of each chapter.
Is this book still timely in some of its observations? Absolutely. Is it worth the 40 or so hours it takes to read cover-to-cover? Probably not.
Here are the book’s two greatest insights, I believe:
1. The farther money moves from human labor, the more dangerous it becomes.
2. At every moment capitalism reduces the value of every existing commodity and subsequently the value of every skill set required to provide it.
The overarching insight that Marx had about capitalism, the one we’re contending with right now, is that it eventually cannibalizes itself.
Trouble is, Marx insisted on putting faces on the system. He insisted on chronicling the immorality of some English capitalists of the 1860s. In so doing, he failed to predict today’s United States of America: Everybody is a participant, an exploiter and an exploited, and all are ruined by the system. Today’s corporate officer works 100 hours/week. Today’s lower middle-class laborer works 40 hours/week. One envies the other’s wealth. One envies the other’s time. Neither is fulfilled or content. Both realize capitalism’s constant revolution and reinvention will render them obsolete at least once in their lives.
Capitalism’s fundamental instability is incompatible with human contentment.
But the acceleration of capitalism’s cycles is not something Marx explicitly predicted. Make no mistake, though: Were Marx able to stand in the middle of today’s Manhattan and behold the meltdown of a commissions-based economy in which trillions of dollars are made by electronically moving capital from one place to another, he would say, “What took so long?”
November 13, 2022
So my adventure of three years finally comes to an end and I find myself to be so much more wiser with it. For the last year or so I've been annoying and asking capitalist npcs if they know of the labour theory of value (hint:they don't.)
I had several setbacks and there were times when I thought of entirely giving it up. But my perseverance (which is not a trait that comes naturally to me, I'm a very lazy person) finally seems to have yielded something. Despite the difficult nature of the text, a patient reading of it (of even just the first four chapters really) will induce a long epiphany. I realise now how stupid I was before I read the book. Maybe I'll write a longer review some day, when I feel qualified enough to do so. For now, I am so glad to have finished it and I'm gonna flex for a decade at least.
Edit: I found the math (which I've been told is intimidating) fairly easy to follow. It maybe because I am physics grad student or it may be because I never thought of it as intimidating and it really wasn't, so my lack of fear helped. I think trying to approach this book fearlessly is the first step. Nevertheless here are some tips and suggestions:
1) Establish a reading circle/ study group: This was a key contributor to my perseverance. Just as I started reading Capital, I was fortunate enough to find this study group here on Goodreads. Although it eventually became inactive, the initial biweekly meetings helped me get through the most difficult chapters, and the interactions with others from different parts of the world helped me stay connected to the text. So my advice would be to find a reading circle or start one on your own if you're ambitious enough. Either way, Capital is very difficult to read all on your own.
2) David Harvey lectures: These are easily available on YouTube and help a great deal. Also, if you play the videos at a speed of 1.25 or 1.5, they're almost thrilling.
3) Secondary reading/supplementary texts: Although I have referred to fragments from different books, there are easily available texts and written notes online that are very helpful. Even a simple google search will yield at least a few good results. I must have scoured the internet for commodity fetishism because even though there isn't much about it volume 1, it's a key Marxian concept.
4) Podcasts: This must have been my most important resource after the reading group. And this is the simplest because you can listen to them even while doing chores, it might even almost be like a meditation. My favorite podcasts were Marx madness, Reading Capital with comrades and Introduction to Marx/Marxism.
Remember to not get too intimidated. Trust me, the math isn't really all that hard, especially if you use the right, easily available resources. Happy reading!
I had several setbacks and there were times when I thought of entirely giving it up. But my perseverance (which is not a trait that comes naturally to me, I'm a very lazy person) finally seems to have yielded something. Despite the difficult nature of the text, a patient reading of it (of even just the first four chapters really) will induce a long epiphany. I realise now how stupid I was before I read the book. Maybe I'll write a longer review some day, when I feel qualified enough to do so. For now, I am so glad to have finished it and I'm gonna flex for a decade at least.
Edit: I found the math (which I've been told is intimidating) fairly easy to follow. It maybe because I am physics grad student or it may be because I never thought of it as intimidating and it really wasn't, so my lack of fear helped. I think trying to approach this book fearlessly is the first step. Nevertheless here are some tips and suggestions:
1) Establish a reading circle/ study group: This was a key contributor to my perseverance. Just as I started reading Capital, I was fortunate enough to find this study group here on Goodreads. Although it eventually became inactive, the initial biweekly meetings helped me get through the most difficult chapters, and the interactions with others from different parts of the world helped me stay connected to the text. So my advice would be to find a reading circle or start one on your own if you're ambitious enough. Either way, Capital is very difficult to read all on your own.
2) David Harvey lectures: These are easily available on YouTube and help a great deal. Also, if you play the videos at a speed of 1.25 or 1.5, they're almost thrilling.
3) Secondary reading/supplementary texts: Although I have referred to fragments from different books, there are easily available texts and written notes online that are very helpful. Even a simple google search will yield at least a few good results. I must have scoured the internet for commodity fetishism because even though there isn't much about it volume 1, it's a key Marxian concept.
4) Podcasts: This must have been my most important resource after the reading group. And this is the simplest because you can listen to them even while doing chores, it might even almost be like a meditation. My favorite podcasts were Marx madness, Reading Capital with comrades and Introduction to Marx/Marxism.
Remember to not get too intimidated. Trust me, the math isn't really all that hard, especially if you use the right, easily available resources. Happy reading!
August 17, 2015
Marx was a man badly in need of an editor. For all of the financial, amiable, and intellectual support provided by Engels, one wishes that Engels had only he had been more ruthless is cutting the fat from his partner's work. This would have been easy enough at the time, but by now Marx’s writing has acquired a sacred aura.
The main meat of this bloated tome is all in the first few hundred pages. Marx actually lays out his ideas in a very pleasing and pithy manner. I wish the rest of the book was like this. By chapter 3, Marx has descended fully into prolix pedantry. By the middle of the book, the reader is lost in a sea of irrelevant information. Part of this is due to a general lack of integration of Marx’s interests.
Marx’s intellect was broad. He could write skillfully about philosophy, economics, history, and current events. He could write in an ultra-precise, actuarial style, or in beautiful literary prose. In short, Marx was a rare genius. But unlike other rare geniuses who possessed these sweeping talents, Marx seems incapable of making these interests fit under one roof. He dons different hats for different chapters, creating abrupt shifts in tone and substance. One moment, you are reading sublime, abstract philosophy; another moment, the tabloids.
In some ways, this book is similar to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . Like Kant, Marx is trying to overcome all of human knowledge in one grand sweep. Also like Kant, Marx is trying to integrate previously separate and antagonistic traditions. Most notably, Marx tries to wed German idealistic philosophy with English political-economy. But the marriage is strange and unhappy.
An underlying tension that runs through Capital is between a metaphysical/rationalist way of viewing the world, and a materialist/empiricist one. Of course, Marx is now famous for being a materialist; and he did everything in his power to create this impression. But one finds traces of his German penchant for metaphysics in his love of theory, which involves examining problems at the highest possible level of abstraction. Another continental quality is Marx’s use of dialectical reasoning throughout the work. The result is that some chapters are just as far from observable fact as anything Hegel could have written.
But then there’s the English side. All at once, Marx will set off on his charts and figures and statistics. He will include quote after quote from reports, newspapers, speeches, and addresses. He will examine specific historical and geographic cases in great detail. And when this happens, gone is the abstraction and ideation and dialectic.
So the text is disorganized. But what of the ideas? I had high hopes for this book. Marx is treated like a religious figure in many circles, and this book is held to be his greatest. I was expecting some serious and profound reflections on capitalism.
But Capital didn’t pay. This, in my opinion, is almost entirely due to his reliance on the “labour theory of value”. (For those who don’t know, Marx did not originate this idea; one can find the basic form as far back as John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.) Let me explain. Roughly, the idea is that all the value in an economy is ultimately derived from labour. This is why cars are worth more than toy cars, and those fancy drinks at Starbucks are worth more than a cup of coffee.
At first glance, this seems to hold. But the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. For one, the amount of labour involved in making a cup of coffee at Starbucks is standard. Yet, getting a cup in Manhattan is about twenty cents more expensive than getting a cup in Queens. Moreover, the price of a cup of coffee varies over time, yet the steps involved in making a cup of coffee have been standard for years. So clearly there must be more to it than labor.
Marx responds that he is not interested in superficial fluctuations in price. The value he is interested in is the natural price to which fluctuations return. So to speak, the ‘signal’ behind the ‘noise’.
Again, this seems to satisfy. But let’s think about it a little more. Take diamonds. Diamonds are now egregiously expensive. But the reason for this is not that producing a cut diamond requires an enormous amount of labour. It is because a single company controls the supply of diamonds, tightening it to make them artificially rare. And at the same time, advertising for diamond rings has substantially increased the demand. The price of diamonds has been high for years. So where is the ‘signal’ to the ‘noise’?
The truth is, the labour theory of value is untenable as a theory. A commodity’s price is determined by (A) effective demand (i.e. people who want it that have the resources to get it); and (B) how rare it is. This is economics 101, but Marxists would disagree. Take this quote from Ernest Mandel’s introduction, where he defends the labour theory of value with orthodox vigor:
It is true. People are starving every day, yet the price of food shows no sign of approaching the price of jet planes. But when people are starving, this is not demand in the economic sense—it is not effective demand. If they had the resources to get food, then they wouldn’t be starving. So this defense is fallacious. I can sit in my room and profoundly hope for a supermodel to walk in the door. But this is not demand on the economic sense.
Let’s take a more banal example. Say you have a horrendous, intolerable headache. You wander into the nearest drug store. You are in the touristy part of town, and everything is seriously overpriced. You look at the price tag of headache medicine and hesitate. But another second and your mind is made up—your head hurts so much, you’ll pay any price.
Here’s another example. Let’s say I came into possession of the handwritten manuscript of Marx’s Capital. I sell it at auction for three million dollars. Is that manuscript worth so much because there is three million dollar’s worth of labour congealed in it? Or because (A) there’s only one, and (B) people really want it. Supply and demand.
I know I’m belaboring this point. But I’m doing so because the entirety of Marx’s analysis rests on this faulty premise. Once you reject this theory of value, the entire edifice collapses and you’re left with nothing. Therefore, I feel confident in saying that I learned nothing about capitalism from this book.
I would even go so far as to say that accepting this theory of value blinds you to actual problems with capitalism. Here’s a real contradiction. Competition between owners will lead them to competitively cut their worker’s pay, in order to maximize profits. But if every owner, system-wide, is cutting pay, then you have a problem—a lack of effective demand. And if nobody is buying anything, business will stagnate. This demand problem can be temporary circumvented by giving people credit, but then you eventually get yourself into a debt trap, which is what just happened to our economy.
This is simple enough. But even this thought would have been impossible had I accepted the labour theory of value.
There is another serious flaw in Marx’s thinking. True to his reputation, this book is about the exploitation of one class by another. And it should be said, this class dynamic is integral to capitalism. But concentrating exclusively on inter-class struggles blinds Marx to the equally important intra-class struggles. In fact, capitalism is driven by competition between equals. Workers compete with workers, bosses with bosses, owners with owners. Instead of the homogenized blocks of people that Marx imagines, the economy is heterogenous, filled with individuals who are all employing different strategies. So this makes Marx’s analysis simplistic.
So I think there are systematic and serious problems with Marx’s thinking. He almost completely misses the ball. Yet whenever there’s an economic crisis in the future, the Marxists will all come out brandishing their copies of Capital and screaming that Marx predicted it. (By the way, isn’t there some sort of statute of limitations on predictions? At some point, we have to admit that Marx was wrong…). Yes, yes, and every time there’s a food shortage, we’ll have to go screaming back to Malthus.
I’m being very hard on the guy. But that’s only because I fear some people still take him at his word. Please, for the love of Marx, don’t get your economic information solely from him and his followers. You will get an extraordinarily warped picture of things.
But there is something charming about Marx’s writing. Maybe it’s his dorkiness. Reading through these pages often felt like hearing about the latest conspiracy theory about the Pixar movies. It is set forth in such an urgent tone, and such an elaborate argument is built up, that one cannot but help be dazzled. I also like Marx’s prose. It’s hard to put your finger on just what’s so good about it. At first glance it looks ordinary enough. But there’s always an unexpected turn, a satisfying cadence, or a captivating idea lurking around the corner. The man could write.
I also believe it is valuable to work yourself through an intellectual system such as this. If he is mistaken, Marx is at least wonderfully consistent, and builds an impressive theoretical apparatus. You can spend hours wandering its recesses, and applying it to new materials. It’s satisfying intellectual play. This book is also a fascinating historical document. During its bloated middle section, Marx includes some mind-blowing information about the working class in England. Conditions were truly horrible, which makes you understand why the man was convinced that capitalism was evil.
In regards to communism (hardly touched upon in this book), I have some frustrations with Marxists. I have yet to hear, in any substantial detail, how their perfect utopian system would work. All I am told is that it will be utopia. But the coup de grâce is that they use this imagined society, empty of suffering and full of brotherly love, to make our current society look bad. But this makes no sense. This is to compare an actual state of things with a phantasm of the imagination. Even if it is worked out in glorious detail in your mind, it still remains a thought. And no communist would point to its failed and horrifying manifestations in history as an example. This leaves them groundless.
I have gone on for far too long. I am also a man badly in need of an editor. I’m both very glad I read this book, and very disappointed with it. I am glad because Marx is a charming writer and an original thinker, and because his analysis was so influential. But I am disappointed that is is so bankrupt of ideas, and seems to be just as “scientific” (to use a favorite word of his) as L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics.
The main meat of this bloated tome is all in the first few hundred pages. Marx actually lays out his ideas in a very pleasing and pithy manner. I wish the rest of the book was like this. By chapter 3, Marx has descended fully into prolix pedantry. By the middle of the book, the reader is lost in a sea of irrelevant information. Part of this is due to a general lack of integration of Marx’s interests.
Marx’s intellect was broad. He could write skillfully about philosophy, economics, history, and current events. He could write in an ultra-precise, actuarial style, or in beautiful literary prose. In short, Marx was a rare genius. But unlike other rare geniuses who possessed these sweeping talents, Marx seems incapable of making these interests fit under one roof. He dons different hats for different chapters, creating abrupt shifts in tone and substance. One moment, you are reading sublime, abstract philosophy; another moment, the tabloids.
In some ways, this book is similar to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . Like Kant, Marx is trying to overcome all of human knowledge in one grand sweep. Also like Kant, Marx is trying to integrate previously separate and antagonistic traditions. Most notably, Marx tries to wed German idealistic philosophy with English political-economy. But the marriage is strange and unhappy.
An underlying tension that runs through Capital is between a metaphysical/rationalist way of viewing the world, and a materialist/empiricist one. Of course, Marx is now famous for being a materialist; and he did everything in his power to create this impression. But one finds traces of his German penchant for metaphysics in his love of theory, which involves examining problems at the highest possible level of abstraction. Another continental quality is Marx’s use of dialectical reasoning throughout the work. The result is that some chapters are just as far from observable fact as anything Hegel could have written.
But then there’s the English side. All at once, Marx will set off on his charts and figures and statistics. He will include quote after quote from reports, newspapers, speeches, and addresses. He will examine specific historical and geographic cases in great detail. And when this happens, gone is the abstraction and ideation and dialectic.
So the text is disorganized. But what of the ideas? I had high hopes for this book. Marx is treated like a religious figure in many circles, and this book is held to be his greatest. I was expecting some serious and profound reflections on capitalism.
But Capital didn’t pay. This, in my opinion, is almost entirely due to his reliance on the “labour theory of value”. (For those who don’t know, Marx did not originate this idea; one can find the basic form as far back as John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.) Let me explain. Roughly, the idea is that all the value in an economy is ultimately derived from labour. This is why cars are worth more than toy cars, and those fancy drinks at Starbucks are worth more than a cup of coffee.
At first glance, this seems to hold. But the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. For one, the amount of labour involved in making a cup of coffee at Starbucks is standard. Yet, getting a cup in Manhattan is about twenty cents more expensive than getting a cup in Queens. Moreover, the price of a cup of coffee varies over time, yet the steps involved in making a cup of coffee have been standard for years. So clearly there must be more to it than labor.
Marx responds that he is not interested in superficial fluctuations in price. The value he is interested in is the natural price to which fluctuations return. So to speak, the ‘signal’ behind the ‘noise’.
Again, this seems to satisfy. But let’s think about it a little more. Take diamonds. Diamonds are now egregiously expensive. But the reason for this is not that producing a cut diamond requires an enormous amount of labour. It is because a single company controls the supply of diamonds, tightening it to make them artificially rare. And at the same time, advertising for diamond rings has substantially increased the demand. The price of diamonds has been high for years. So where is the ‘signal’ to the ‘noise’?
The truth is, the labour theory of value is untenable as a theory. A commodity’s price is determined by (A) effective demand (i.e. people who want it that have the resources to get it); and (B) how rare it is. This is economics 101, but Marxists would disagree. Take this quote from Ernest Mandel’s introduction, where he defends the labour theory of value with orthodox vigor:
Even when thousands of people are dying of hunger, and the ‘intensity of need’ for bread is certainly a thousand times greater than the ‘intensity of need’ for aeroplanes, the first commodity will remain immensely cheaper than the second, because much less socially necessary labour has been spent on its production.
It is true. People are starving every day, yet the price of food shows no sign of approaching the price of jet planes. But when people are starving, this is not demand in the economic sense—it is not effective demand. If they had the resources to get food, then they wouldn’t be starving. So this defense is fallacious. I can sit in my room and profoundly hope for a supermodel to walk in the door. But this is not demand on the economic sense.
Let’s take a more banal example. Say you have a horrendous, intolerable headache. You wander into the nearest drug store. You are in the touristy part of town, and everything is seriously overpriced. You look at the price tag of headache medicine and hesitate. But another second and your mind is made up—your head hurts so much, you’ll pay any price.
Here’s another example. Let’s say I came into possession of the handwritten manuscript of Marx’s Capital. I sell it at auction for three million dollars. Is that manuscript worth so much because there is three million dollar’s worth of labour congealed in it? Or because (A) there’s only one, and (B) people really want it. Supply and demand.
I know I’m belaboring this point. But I’m doing so because the entirety of Marx’s analysis rests on this faulty premise. Once you reject this theory of value, the entire edifice collapses and you’re left with nothing. Therefore, I feel confident in saying that I learned nothing about capitalism from this book.
I would even go so far as to say that accepting this theory of value blinds you to actual problems with capitalism. Here’s a real contradiction. Competition between owners will lead them to competitively cut their worker’s pay, in order to maximize profits. But if every owner, system-wide, is cutting pay, then you have a problem—a lack of effective demand. And if nobody is buying anything, business will stagnate. This demand problem can be temporary circumvented by giving people credit, but then you eventually get yourself into a debt trap, which is what just happened to our economy.
This is simple enough. But even this thought would have been impossible had I accepted the labour theory of value.
There is another serious flaw in Marx’s thinking. True to his reputation, this book is about the exploitation of one class by another. And it should be said, this class dynamic is integral to capitalism. But concentrating exclusively on inter-class struggles blinds Marx to the equally important intra-class struggles. In fact, capitalism is driven by competition between equals. Workers compete with workers, bosses with bosses, owners with owners. Instead of the homogenized blocks of people that Marx imagines, the economy is heterogenous, filled with individuals who are all employing different strategies. So this makes Marx’s analysis simplistic.
So I think there are systematic and serious problems with Marx’s thinking. He almost completely misses the ball. Yet whenever there’s an economic crisis in the future, the Marxists will all come out brandishing their copies of Capital and screaming that Marx predicted it. (By the way, isn’t there some sort of statute of limitations on predictions? At some point, we have to admit that Marx was wrong…). Yes, yes, and every time there’s a food shortage, we’ll have to go screaming back to Malthus.
I’m being very hard on the guy. But that’s only because I fear some people still take him at his word. Please, for the love of Marx, don’t get your economic information solely from him and his followers. You will get an extraordinarily warped picture of things.
But there is something charming about Marx’s writing. Maybe it’s his dorkiness. Reading through these pages often felt like hearing about the latest conspiracy theory about the Pixar movies. It is set forth in such an urgent tone, and such an elaborate argument is built up, that one cannot but help be dazzled. I also like Marx’s prose. It’s hard to put your finger on just what’s so good about it. At first glance it looks ordinary enough. But there’s always an unexpected turn, a satisfying cadence, or a captivating idea lurking around the corner. The man could write.
I also believe it is valuable to work yourself through an intellectual system such as this. If he is mistaken, Marx is at least wonderfully consistent, and builds an impressive theoretical apparatus. You can spend hours wandering its recesses, and applying it to new materials. It’s satisfying intellectual play. This book is also a fascinating historical document. During its bloated middle section, Marx includes some mind-blowing information about the working class in England. Conditions were truly horrible, which makes you understand why the man was convinced that capitalism was evil.
In regards to communism (hardly touched upon in this book), I have some frustrations with Marxists. I have yet to hear, in any substantial detail, how their perfect utopian system would work. All I am told is that it will be utopia. But the coup de grâce is that they use this imagined society, empty of suffering and full of brotherly love, to make our current society look bad. But this makes no sense. This is to compare an actual state of things with a phantasm of the imagination. Even if it is worked out in glorious detail in your mind, it still remains a thought. And no communist would point to its failed and horrifying manifestations in history as an example. This leaves them groundless.
I have gone on for far too long. I am also a man badly in need of an editor. I’m both very glad I read this book, and very disappointed with it. I am glad because Marx is a charming writer and an original thinker, and because his analysis was so influential. But I am disappointed that is is so bankrupt of ideas, and seems to be just as “scientific” (to use a favorite word of his) as L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics.
September 17, 2016
دوستانِ گرانقدر، این کتاب یکی از دشوارترین کتاب هایی است که در زمینهٔ فلسفه و فلسفهٔ سیاسی و اقتصادی، به چاپ رسیده است
عزیزانم، در زمان خواندن کتاب، برایِ معنی کردنِ برخی از واژه هایِ فلسفی و سیاسی و فهمِ برخی از جملاتِ این کتاب، بهتر است که از کتب یا رفرنس هایِ دیگر کمک بگیرید
این کتاب بسیار تخصصی است و متأسفانه ترجمۀ بسیار ضعیفِ کتاب برایِ غیرقابلِ فهم شدنِ برخی از جملاتِ کتاب نیز، مزیدِ بر علت شده است
دوستانِ خردگرا، نمیشود منکر این بود که «مارکس» ظلم ستیز بوده و در راهِ آگاهیِ انسان ها تلاش فراوان نموده است، هر انسانِ خردمندی بیشترِ اقداماتِ «مارکس» را گرامی میدارد، ولی ممکن است در بینِ خردگرایان، در نوعِ پذیرفتنِ اندیشه هایِ «مارکس» اختلافِ سلیقه وجود داشته باشد... به هرحال هرکدام از ما از نظرات و نوعِ تفکرِ فیلسوفِ موردِ پسندمان استفاده کرده و از سخنانِ او بهره میبریم، به عنوانِ مثال، من دوستدارِ فلسفهٔ زنده یاد «برتراند راسل» و «آرتور شوپنهاور» هستم... ممکن است که از دوستانِ خردمند و اهلِ مطالعه، یکی علاقه مند به «نیچه» باشد و دیگری علاقه مند به «مارکس» باشد ... پس مطالعۀ کتبِ فلاسفه و اندیشمندانی که مخالفِ خرافات و موهومات بوده اند، بدون تردید برای شما زیانی نخواهد داشت
فلسفهٔ مورد پسندِ من با اندیشه های <مارکس> همسو و همجهت نمیباشد... او از آن دسته از روشنفکرانی بود که هدفش تغییر دادنِ این جهان بود، من شخصاً این روشِ «مارکس» را نمیپسندم... به عقیدهٔ من، به جایِ تغییرِ جهان، بهتر است جهان را بشناسیم... در این یک مورد شناخت بهتر از تغییر میباشد
البته ممکن است که برخی از دوستان با نظرِ من مخالف باشند و الگویِ تغییر جهان موردِ پسندشان باشد
پس دوستانِ گرامی، اختلاف در عقیده با یک روشنفکر و فیلسوف، دلیل نمیشود که ما آثار و نوشته هایش را نخوانیم... متأسفانه در ایران بسیاری از مردم و حتی تحصیل کرده ها با آنکه شناختی از <مارکس> و فلسفهٔ او ندارند، اصطلاحی در دهانشان افتاده که به هرکسی که با دین و مذهبشان مخالف باشد به او <مارکسیسم> میگویند در صورتی که هیچ ربطی به یکدیگر ندارند ... و دریغ از ذره ای تحقیق و مطالعه از سوی این مقلّدان!! فقط همچون طوطی حرف های یک سری بیخرد را تکرار میکنند...پس خواهشاً تحتِ تاثیرِ صحبت هایِ عده ای مذهبیِ خرافاتی و بهتر بگویم موجوداتِ «یک کتابی» یا "تک کتابی" قرار نگیرید، و خودتان کتبِ گوناگون را بخوانید و جویایِ راستی و درستی باشید و به نوشته ها و حرف های پوچ و بدون پایه و اساسِ موجوداتِ مذهبی، ذره ای توجه نکنید.. آنها افکارشان توسطِ دین، فاسد و کرم خورده شده است و اندکی فهم به شناختِ فلسفه و فلاسفهٔ نامی ندارند و نخواهند داشت
امیدوارم بهترین فلسفه را برایِ زندگی خودتان، در نظر گرفته و توجه زیادی به کرامتِ انسانی خودتان داشته باشید
<پیروز باشید و ایرانی>
عزیزانم، در زمان خواندن کتاب، برایِ معنی کردنِ برخی از واژه هایِ فلسفی و سیاسی و فهمِ برخی از جملاتِ این کتاب، بهتر است که از کتب یا رفرنس هایِ دیگر کمک بگیرید
این کتاب بسیار تخصصی است و متأسفانه ترجمۀ بسیار ضعیفِ کتاب برایِ غیرقابلِ فهم شدنِ برخی از جملاتِ کتاب نیز، مزیدِ بر علت شده است
دوستانِ خردگرا، نمیشود منکر این بود که «مارکس» ظلم ستیز بوده و در راهِ آگاهیِ انسان ها تلاش فراوان نموده است، هر انسانِ خردمندی بیشترِ اقداماتِ «مارکس» را گرامی میدارد، ولی ممکن است در بینِ خردگرایان، در نوعِ پذیرفتنِ اندیشه هایِ «مارکس» اختلافِ سلیقه وجود داشته باشد... به هرحال هرکدام از ما از نظرات و نوعِ تفکرِ فیلسوفِ موردِ پسندمان استفاده کرده و از سخنانِ او بهره میبریم، به عنوانِ مثال، من دوستدارِ فلسفهٔ زنده یاد «برتراند راسل» و «آرتور شوپنهاور» هستم... ممکن است که از دوستانِ خردمند و اهلِ مطالعه، یکی علاقه مند به «نیچه» باشد و دیگری علاقه مند به «مارکس» باشد ... پس مطالعۀ کتبِ فلاسفه و اندیشمندانی که مخالفِ خرافات و موهومات بوده اند، بدون تردید برای شما زیانی نخواهد داشت
فلسفهٔ مورد پسندِ من با اندیشه های <مارکس> همسو و همجهت نمیباشد... او از آن دسته از روشنفکرانی بود که هدفش تغییر دادنِ این جهان بود، من شخصاً این روشِ «مارکس» را نمیپسندم... به عقیدهٔ من، به جایِ تغییرِ جهان، بهتر است جهان را بشناسیم... در این یک مورد شناخت بهتر از تغییر میباشد
البته ممکن است که برخی از دوستان با نظرِ من مخالف باشند و الگویِ تغییر جهان موردِ پسندشان باشد
پس دوستانِ گرامی، اختلاف در عقیده با یک روشنفکر و فیلسوف، دلیل نمیشود که ما آثار و نوشته هایش را نخوانیم... متأسفانه در ایران بسیاری از مردم و حتی تحصیل کرده ها با آنکه شناختی از <مارکس> و فلسفهٔ او ندارند، اصطلاحی در دهانشان افتاده که به هرکسی که با دین و مذهبشان مخالف باشد به او <مارکسیسم> میگویند در صورتی که هیچ ربطی به یکدیگر ندارند ... و دریغ از ذره ای تحقیق و مطالعه از سوی این مقلّدان!! فقط همچون طوطی حرف های یک سری بیخرد را تکرار میکنند...پس خواهشاً تحتِ تاثیرِ صحبت هایِ عده ای مذهبیِ خرافاتی و بهتر بگویم موجوداتِ «یک کتابی» یا "تک کتابی" قرار نگیرید، و خودتان کتبِ گوناگون را بخوانید و جویایِ راستی و درستی باشید و به نوشته ها و حرف های پوچ و بدون پایه و اساسِ موجوداتِ مذهبی، ذره ای توجه نکنید.. آنها افکارشان توسطِ دین، فاسد و کرم خورده شده است و اندکی فهم به شناختِ فلسفه و فلاسفهٔ نامی ندارند و نخواهند داشت
امیدوارم بهترین فلسفه را برایِ زندگی خودتان، در نظر گرفته و توجه زیادی به کرامتِ انسانی خودتان داشته باشید
<پیروز باشید و ایرانی>
June 30, 2012
READ THE SHIT OUT OF THIS FKN DOORSTOP. LONG LIVE SOCIALISM.
May 4, 2015
'Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common.'
June 3, 2010
Karl Marx's Capital can be read as a work of economics, sociology and history. He addresses a myriad of topics, but is most generally trying to present a systematic account of the nature, development, and future of the capitalist system. There is a strong economic focus to this work, and Marx addresses the nature of commodities, wages and the worker-capitalist relationship, among other things. Much of this work tries to show the ways in which workers are exploited by the capitalist mode of production. He also provides a history of past exploitations. Marx argues that the capitalist system is ultimately unstable, because it cannot endlessly sustain profits. Thus, it provides a more technical background to some of his more generally accessible works, like The Communist Manifesto.
This study guide focuses on one component of Capital, Marx's schema of how the capitalist system functions. Marx argues that commodities have both a use-value and an exchange-value, and that their exchange-value is rooted in how much labor-power went into them. While traditionally people bought commodities in order to use them, capitalists use commodities differently. Their final goal is increased profit. Therefore, they put out money and buy commodities, in order to sell those commodities for a profit. The cycle then repeats itself. The reason why the capitalists are able to make a profit is that they only need to pay workers their value (how much it takes to keep them functional), but the workers produce more than that amount in a day. Thus, the workers are exploited. The capitalists are able to do this because they have more power, and control the means of production. Furthermore, the workers' character is negatively affected by the system. They don't own the products of their labor, and the repetitive work they have to do makes them little more than machines.
Marx presents several definitions that will be important throughout his work, so it is very important to be clear on their meanings. A use-value corresponds to the usefulness of an object, and is internal to that object. For example, a hammer is a use-value because of its contributions to building. Its use-value comes from its usefulness. In contrast, a hammer's exchange-value comes from its value relative to other objects. For example, a hammer might be worth two screwdrivers. An object doesn't have an exchange value in itself, but only in its relationship with other objects.
However, the fact that the hammer and screwdriver can be exchanged at all suggests that there must be something common between them, some means of comparison. Marx says that this is the object's value. Value means the amount of labor it takes to make the commodities. This labor theory of value is very important to Marx's theory. It implies that the price of commodities comes from how much labor was put into them. One implication of this is that objects with natural use-value, such as forests and other natural resources, do not have value because no labor went into them. One problematic question, then, is how such natural resources can have exchange-value (people do spend money on them) without benefiting from labor. It is also important to consider how Marx's conception of the roots of exchange value differs from modern economic theory. In modern theory, something's exchange value is rooted in people's subjective preferences. While the amount of labor required would be linked to the supply curve of a commodity, its exchange value is also determined by the demand curve. Marx focuses exclusively on labor.
This book also gives a general sense of Marx's approach in Capital.Here he dissects one aspect of the modern capitalist system and presents a schema for understanding why it functions as it does. Later Marx will analyze things like the role of money and the capitalist. While this book makes many historical and sociological arguments, it is largely a book of economic theory and its implications.
One thing to consider when thinking about Marx's characterization of capitalism is where this capitalistic ethic came from. Marx says that capitalists have an endless need for more money, and that the system of capitalism requires and perpetuates this attitude. Even if this is true, however, it does not explain how capitalism developed in the first place. What made people view M' as an end in itself? Where does this thirst for profit come from? Marx's description does not spend a lot of time explaining how people could have come to develop these ideas. This limitation is a potential theoretical difficulty.
Marx spends a lot of time discussing the ways in which capitalism is rooted in social institutions. Capitalism is not natural, but rather depends upon social structures, such as property laws. One social factor that is very important for Marx's theory is that the workers don't own the means of production. Because of this, they must sell their labor to others. It is precisely because workers do own their own labor that they are able to give up all claims to it, by selling it as property. As a result, they don't own the commodities they produce; somebody else owns their labor and the products of that labor. The result is that workers become alienated from their labor—they do not control or own what they create. In Marx's framework, labor-power is a commodity in the market. Its value is determined in the same way as for other commodities, and it is used by capitalists as another commodity in the production process.
Marx's labor theory of value becomes very important when looking at the commodity of labor-power. A hammer's value comes from the amount of labor put into it. What, then, is labor-power's value? Marx applies the definition of value—its value is the amount of labor needed to produce and sustain labor-power. Or more simply, it is the amount of labor needed to keep the laborer alive and functioning at his capacity. Let's say that a worker needs $100/week to survive and function. The value of his labor-power is, therefore, $100/week as well. A worker's "price" (his wage) must be at least $100/week in order for the worker to be paid at value. This concept will be very important in later chapters, when Marx will try to show that it is possible to exploit labor.
Marx's labor theory of value again makes an appearance, as he tries to explain a seeming paradox. A capitalist purchases all of the inputs needed to make a commodity (labor-power, raw materials, etc.) at their value. He also sells the end-product at its value. If this is the case, where does the surplus value come from? If there's no surplus value, then capitalism cannot exist, because there would be no profit. Marx's answer comes from the unique character of labor- power. Labor-power's use-value (what it can create) is not the same thing as its exchange-value (what is needed to sustain the worker). A worker sells himself at his value, but he produces more than this value. In this way, the capitalist gains surplus-value. This is significant, because it explains how exploitation can occur as the result of a series of freely made trades. The worker could complain that he is not being paid for the value of what he produces. However, the capitalist can reply that the worker is being paid his value. Once the worker is paid for a day's work, the capitalist has the right to use him for a day. Justice is part of the overall mode of production of the times, and as a result, this exchange can be considered "just."
Why do the workers put up with such exploitation? Couldn't they demand higher wages, that match the value their labor-power produces? Marx's answer is that the workers don't have the capacity to work without the capitalists; they require factories and other means of production. The workers are selling an abstract capacity to labor, and because of this, the capitalist is able to exploit them by only paying labor-power's value. Consider whether you think Marx's characterization of the labor market is fair. Does labor have the ability to fight exploitation and set wages closer to the value of what they produce? Think of this both historically and theoretically.
An important theme in Marx's work is class tension. According to Marx, all of history has been defined by class conflict. Modern times are no different in this regard, and are defined by tension between the capitalist and the worker. Marx describes one source of this tension in this chapter, as he mentions again the asymmetry between the use-value and exchange-value of labor-power (already discussed in Chapter 7). In this class conflict, the capitalists are the stronger class. This allows them to exert more force and define what workers will be paid. However, the fact that they are the stronger class does not simply give capitalists more bargaining power. Rather, social institutions such as property laws are defined to support the capitalists' needs. The mode of production reflects the economic system of capitalism. It will continue to do so, and continue to favor the capitalists, until it self-destructs.
It is important to realize that the capitalists cannot behave differently; there will always be tension between them and the workers. The very essence of a capitalist is his desire to gain surplus-value. The only way to do so is to exploit workers by failing to pay workers for the full value of what they produce. In order to survive, the capitalist must exploit. Thus, the tension between workers and capitalists is structural. The capitalist system requires exploitation. Measures to ease workers' hardships, such as a minimum wage or welfare are simply band-aids; they cannot change what a capitalist is.
This study guide focuses on one component of Capital, Marx's schema of how the capitalist system functions. Marx argues that commodities have both a use-value and an exchange-value, and that their exchange-value is rooted in how much labor-power went into them. While traditionally people bought commodities in order to use them, capitalists use commodities differently. Their final goal is increased profit. Therefore, they put out money and buy commodities, in order to sell those commodities for a profit. The cycle then repeats itself. The reason why the capitalists are able to make a profit is that they only need to pay workers their value (how much it takes to keep them functional), but the workers produce more than that amount in a day. Thus, the workers are exploited. The capitalists are able to do this because they have more power, and control the means of production. Furthermore, the workers' character is negatively affected by the system. They don't own the products of their labor, and the repetitive work they have to do makes them little more than machines.
Marx presents several definitions that will be important throughout his work, so it is very important to be clear on their meanings. A use-value corresponds to the usefulness of an object, and is internal to that object. For example, a hammer is a use-value because of its contributions to building. Its use-value comes from its usefulness. In contrast, a hammer's exchange-value comes from its value relative to other objects. For example, a hammer might be worth two screwdrivers. An object doesn't have an exchange value in itself, but only in its relationship with other objects.
However, the fact that the hammer and screwdriver can be exchanged at all suggests that there must be something common between them, some means of comparison. Marx says that this is the object's value. Value means the amount of labor it takes to make the commodities. This labor theory of value is very important to Marx's theory. It implies that the price of commodities comes from how much labor was put into them. One implication of this is that objects with natural use-value, such as forests and other natural resources, do not have value because no labor went into them. One problematic question, then, is how such natural resources can have exchange-value (people do spend money on them) without benefiting from labor. It is also important to consider how Marx's conception of the roots of exchange value differs from modern economic theory. In modern theory, something's exchange value is rooted in people's subjective preferences. While the amount of labor required would be linked to the supply curve of a commodity, its exchange value is also determined by the demand curve. Marx focuses exclusively on labor.
This book also gives a general sense of Marx's approach in Capital.Here he dissects one aspect of the modern capitalist system and presents a schema for understanding why it functions as it does. Later Marx will analyze things like the role of money and the capitalist. While this book makes many historical and sociological arguments, it is largely a book of economic theory and its implications.
One thing to consider when thinking about Marx's characterization of capitalism is where this capitalistic ethic came from. Marx says that capitalists have an endless need for more money, and that the system of capitalism requires and perpetuates this attitude. Even if this is true, however, it does not explain how capitalism developed in the first place. What made people view M' as an end in itself? Where does this thirst for profit come from? Marx's description does not spend a lot of time explaining how people could have come to develop these ideas. This limitation is a potential theoretical difficulty.
Marx spends a lot of time discussing the ways in which capitalism is rooted in social institutions. Capitalism is not natural, but rather depends upon social structures, such as property laws. One social factor that is very important for Marx's theory is that the workers don't own the means of production. Because of this, they must sell their labor to others. It is precisely because workers do own their own labor that they are able to give up all claims to it, by selling it as property. As a result, they don't own the commodities they produce; somebody else owns their labor and the products of that labor. The result is that workers become alienated from their labor—they do not control or own what they create. In Marx's framework, labor-power is a commodity in the market. Its value is determined in the same way as for other commodities, and it is used by capitalists as another commodity in the production process.
Marx's labor theory of value becomes very important when looking at the commodity of labor-power. A hammer's value comes from the amount of labor put into it. What, then, is labor-power's value? Marx applies the definition of value—its value is the amount of labor needed to produce and sustain labor-power. Or more simply, it is the amount of labor needed to keep the laborer alive and functioning at his capacity. Let's say that a worker needs $100/week to survive and function. The value of his labor-power is, therefore, $100/week as well. A worker's "price" (his wage) must be at least $100/week in order for the worker to be paid at value. This concept will be very important in later chapters, when Marx will try to show that it is possible to exploit labor.
Marx's labor theory of value again makes an appearance, as he tries to explain a seeming paradox. A capitalist purchases all of the inputs needed to make a commodity (labor-power, raw materials, etc.) at their value. He also sells the end-product at its value. If this is the case, where does the surplus value come from? If there's no surplus value, then capitalism cannot exist, because there would be no profit. Marx's answer comes from the unique character of labor- power. Labor-power's use-value (what it can create) is not the same thing as its exchange-value (what is needed to sustain the worker). A worker sells himself at his value, but he produces more than this value. In this way, the capitalist gains surplus-value. This is significant, because it explains how exploitation can occur as the result of a series of freely made trades. The worker could complain that he is not being paid for the value of what he produces. However, the capitalist can reply that the worker is being paid his value. Once the worker is paid for a day's work, the capitalist has the right to use him for a day. Justice is part of the overall mode of production of the times, and as a result, this exchange can be considered "just."
Why do the workers put up with such exploitation? Couldn't they demand higher wages, that match the value their labor-power produces? Marx's answer is that the workers don't have the capacity to work without the capitalists; they require factories and other means of production. The workers are selling an abstract capacity to labor, and because of this, the capitalist is able to exploit them by only paying labor-power's value. Consider whether you think Marx's characterization of the labor market is fair. Does labor have the ability to fight exploitation and set wages closer to the value of what they produce? Think of this both historically and theoretically.
An important theme in Marx's work is class tension. According to Marx, all of history has been defined by class conflict. Modern times are no different in this regard, and are defined by tension between the capitalist and the worker. Marx describes one source of this tension in this chapter, as he mentions again the asymmetry between the use-value and exchange-value of labor-power (already discussed in Chapter 7). In this class conflict, the capitalists are the stronger class. This allows them to exert more force and define what workers will be paid. However, the fact that they are the stronger class does not simply give capitalists more bargaining power. Rather, social institutions such as property laws are defined to support the capitalists' needs. The mode of production reflects the economic system of capitalism. It will continue to do so, and continue to favor the capitalists, until it self-destructs.
It is important to realize that the capitalists cannot behave differently; there will always be tension between them and the workers. The very essence of a capitalist is his desire to gain surplus-value. The only way to do so is to exploit workers by failing to pay workers for the full value of what they produce. In order to survive, the capitalist must exploit. Thus, the tension between workers and capitalists is structural. The capitalist system requires exploitation. Measures to ease workers' hardships, such as a minimum wage or welfare are simply band-aids; they cannot change what a capitalist is.
March 31, 2020
«بابام در عوضِ اینکه کتابِ 'سرمایه'ی کارل مارکس رو برام بفرسته، کتاب 'چگونه بدون تلاش کردن موفق شوید' رو واسم فرستاده! دیگه خودتون ببینید چه خریه!»
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)
June 13, 2019
To judge a book by the way it affected the world is a mistake, though a tempting mistake. If we are to do so, almost all religious books will get a one-star rating because of the violent actions of followers of the respective religion. I don't wish to be so cruel as to judge Marx, his 'Das Kapital' or socialism, on the basis of human rights violations in communist Russia and China.
..... But even if we are to give in to this temptation, we will find that Marx has a mostly positive impact. Before him, the world was driven by a blind capitalist force which burns down everything to profits - mostly based on the exploitation of workers who (often mere children) worked more than 16 hours at times. Some laws for the benefit of workers were already being made by the time Marx wrote the book, but I think it is mostly thanks to Marx that overexploitation of workers is no longer taken for granted in the west.
Socialism can't be any more blamed for the suffering of people in communist countries (blame stays for communism, the political system) just as democracies cannot be blamed for their poor and homeless (blame lies with badly created capitalism, the economic system). Dr. B. R. Ambendkar, the father of constitution of India, said that political equality (the aim of democracy) can't be of much value without social and economic equality (the aim of socialism). Just as the solution to all problems of democracy is more democracy, the solution to all problems of socialism is more socialism. Unfortunately, the two systems seem to resist each other. Socialism seems to prefer communism or dictatorship while democracy leans toward capitalist or mixed economic systems.
Anyway, to get back to the book, Marx does an amazing job of bringing out the ways in which the workers are getting violated when he goes to real-life examples. But his theory itself seemed to be as absurd as that of capitalist economist he argues against. At the end of the day, a capitalist does take risks, does bring assets together, does bear the loss if such loss were to come; and deserves what goes by name of profit.
The problem is not profits, the problem lies in two things. First, how the profits are made. By exploitation of workers. Where profits can only be made by undertaking workers, such business have no right to exist. This trashes the argument of those who are against the minimum wages because it would reduce the profitability of businesses. Where businesses are too big to die, it means the government (and indirect taxpayer who mostly workers) is paying for inefficiency of Management who will get big cheques for their badly done jobs. If capitalism means survival of fittest, those managers should lose their jobs first.
Another cruel way in which profits are made is by way of heavy discrimination in salaries of upper and lower levels of workers. The CEOs of big companies might give a better quality of work than average ground level worker but the difference between the two qualities doesn't excuse the difference in reimbursement (the two can often stand in a ration of 100:1). Now I know I know a capitalist would say that salaries are decided by laws of demand and supply. the But then the supply of highly qualified managers far more exceed the need for them (a handful needed in any organization) than ground-level level workers can exceed their demand. To create an artificial scarcity of supply you could make education expensive. But even though education keeps getting expensive, the supply of workers top-level jobs still vastly outnumber the demand for them. A highly paid manager has good reason to exploit workers under him to make profits for his bosses or he risks losing his job and the big package.
Last cruel way profits or high incomes are made is holding onto ridiculously big assets. In Middle-East, it is oil the wells; in the USA it is technology giants like Whatsapp, Facebook, and Google. One important difference is that later have at least use their minds to create something truly valuable rather just get lucky. They might just seem to deserve all the money but, beyond some limits, we no more own products of our own genius than ones we inherit from fathers. A genius like money we inherited from poor looks are the gifts of accident of luck. The government in name of people will take away the old treasures that might be found in your backyard after paying you a percentage. I don't see why products of intelligence shouldn't go the same way.
The second thing that I'd wrong with capitalism is laws of inheritance. It is not always about survival of fittest but just as much as survival of children and grandchildren of fittest. You can call capitalism a race but a race is equal only if we start at some point. A country truly dedicated to capitalism would not let too much of wealth get inherited by the children. Capitalist countries suffer from income gaps because they aren't being capitalist enough. The best version of capitalism (at least as Adam Smith, another misunderstood soul sees it) would have best of socialism embedded inside it. The government of a truly capitalist country would take actions against corporations that resist workers (peaceful) movements.
Anyway returning back to book, I don't agree with Marx's ideas that capitalist doesn't add value to goods. But I do agree though that profits, rents, interests beyond a certain limit (beyond what might be needed to maintain the assets they are connected to) are an unproductive transfer of money from poor to rich rather than actually earned incomes.
I do have an argument of my own to make. You might fix sums to be paid to different stakeholders (workers, capitalists, entrepreneurs, landlords, government, )from revenue of the business and you will have a surplus left in the end. Now according to capitalism, this surplus belongs to an entrepreneur who has taken the risk in running operations and so a fixed sum is not big enough payment for him. But these days, you can shrug that argument off, and say he got insurance at a fixed premium to ward off the risk. And even if he didn't, the argument still holds - if an insurance company can undertake risk for fixed sum why not let an entrepreneur or capitalist do the same?
However, the problem is who gets the surplus? Who ensures that the system runs smoothly? Because that party would have too much power not to abuse it. In capitalism, it lies with filthy rich capitalists while in socialism it is taken over by the government, and though the last do so in name of workers, the workers who are the bulk of population do not gain much in either case.
..... But even if we are to give in to this temptation, we will find that Marx has a mostly positive impact. Before him, the world was driven by a blind capitalist force which burns down everything to profits - mostly based on the exploitation of workers who (often mere children) worked more than 16 hours at times. Some laws for the benefit of workers were already being made by the time Marx wrote the book, but I think it is mostly thanks to Marx that overexploitation of workers is no longer taken for granted in the west.
Socialism can't be any more blamed for the suffering of people in communist countries (blame stays for communism, the political system) just as democracies cannot be blamed for their poor and homeless (blame lies with badly created capitalism, the economic system). Dr. B. R. Ambendkar, the father of constitution of India, said that political equality (the aim of democracy) can't be of much value without social and economic equality (the aim of socialism). Just as the solution to all problems of democracy is more democracy, the solution to all problems of socialism is more socialism. Unfortunately, the two systems seem to resist each other. Socialism seems to prefer communism or dictatorship while democracy leans toward capitalist or mixed economic systems.
Anyway, to get back to the book, Marx does an amazing job of bringing out the ways in which the workers are getting violated when he goes to real-life examples. But his theory itself seemed to be as absurd as that of capitalist economist he argues against. At the end of the day, a capitalist does take risks, does bring assets together, does bear the loss if such loss were to come; and deserves what goes by name of profit.
The problem is not profits, the problem lies in two things. First, how the profits are made. By exploitation of workers. Where profits can only be made by undertaking workers, such business have no right to exist. This trashes the argument of those who are against the minimum wages because it would reduce the profitability of businesses. Where businesses are too big to die, it means the government (and indirect taxpayer who mostly workers) is paying for inefficiency of Management who will get big cheques for their badly done jobs. If capitalism means survival of fittest, those managers should lose their jobs first.
Another cruel way in which profits are made is by way of heavy discrimination in salaries of upper and lower levels of workers. The CEOs of big companies might give a better quality of work than average ground level worker but the difference between the two qualities doesn't excuse the difference in reimbursement (the two can often stand in a ration of 100:1). Now I know I know a capitalist would say that salaries are decided by laws of demand and supply. the But then the supply of highly qualified managers far more exceed the need for them (a handful needed in any organization) than ground-level level workers can exceed their demand. To create an artificial scarcity of supply you could make education expensive. But even though education keeps getting expensive, the supply of workers top-level jobs still vastly outnumber the demand for them. A highly paid manager has good reason to exploit workers under him to make profits for his bosses or he risks losing his job and the big package.
Last cruel way profits or high incomes are made is holding onto ridiculously big assets. In Middle-East, it is oil the wells; in the USA it is technology giants like Whatsapp, Facebook, and Google. One important difference is that later have at least use their minds to create something truly valuable rather just get lucky. They might just seem to deserve all the money but, beyond some limits, we no more own products of our own genius than ones we inherit from fathers. A genius like money we inherited from poor looks are the gifts of accident of luck. The government in name of people will take away the old treasures that might be found in your backyard after paying you a percentage. I don't see why products of intelligence shouldn't go the same way.
The second thing that I'd wrong with capitalism is laws of inheritance. It is not always about survival of fittest but just as much as survival of children and grandchildren of fittest. You can call capitalism a race but a race is equal only if we start at some point. A country truly dedicated to capitalism would not let too much of wealth get inherited by the children. Capitalist countries suffer from income gaps because they aren't being capitalist enough. The best version of capitalism (at least as Adam Smith, another misunderstood soul sees it) would have best of socialism embedded inside it. The government of a truly capitalist country would take actions against corporations that resist workers (peaceful) movements.
Anyway returning back to book, I don't agree with Marx's ideas that capitalist doesn't add value to goods. But I do agree though that profits, rents, interests beyond a certain limit (beyond what might be needed to maintain the assets they are connected to) are an unproductive transfer of money from poor to rich rather than actually earned incomes.
I do have an argument of my own to make. You might fix sums to be paid to different stakeholders (workers, capitalists, entrepreneurs, landlords, government, )from revenue of the business and you will have a surplus left in the end. Now according to capitalism, this surplus belongs to an entrepreneur who has taken the risk in running operations and so a fixed sum is not big enough payment for him. But these days, you can shrug that argument off, and say he got insurance at a fixed premium to ward off the risk. And even if he didn't, the argument still holds - if an insurance company can undertake risk for fixed sum why not let an entrepreneur or capitalist do the same?
However, the problem is who gets the surplus? Who ensures that the system runs smoothly? Because that party would have too much power not to abuse it. In capitalism, it lies with filthy rich capitalists while in socialism it is taken over by the government, and though the last do so in name of workers, the workers who are the bulk of population do not gain much in either case.
July 5, 2020
در این “مرور” بیشتر تلاش میکنم تا تجربه خودم را به عنوان یک کتابخوان نیمهحرفهای از خواندن کتاب "سرمایه" شرح دهم. در مورد این کتاب شرح و تفسیر و نقد از جانب اندیشمندان بزرگ بسیار است و این کار را برای کسی چون من بسیار سخت میکند. به همین خاطر ترجیح میدهم در مورد محتوای کتاب کمتر نظر بدهم. دوباره میگویم این مرور بیشتر به درد کتابخوانهای نیمهحرفهای میخورد، کسی که در فلسفهخوانی و یا سایر حوزههای علوم انسانی خود را صاحبنظر میداند، ممکن است این مرور را حتی شاید مبتذل بداند؛
خب برای خواندن کتاب (مخصوصا برای کلنجار رفتن با سه فصل نخست) باید کمی بیشتر از حد معمول حوصله و اراده داشته باشید. به نظر من کسی که میخواهد این کتاب را بخواند باید انگیزهی بیشتری از "فقط کتاب خواندن" داشته باشد. سه فصل ابتدایی، در حالی که هنوز با ادبیات مارکس خو نگرفتهاید میتواند به راحتی باعث شود کتاب را رها کنید. اما اگر از سه فصل اول عبور کردید، امکان این که کتاب را رها کنید کمتر میشود. علاوه بر این که با ادبیات کتاب آشنا شدهاید، چارچوب مفهومی کتاب هم ساخته شده است و از این به بعد خواندن کتاب روانتر پیش خواهد رفت.
خواندن کتاب حداقل سه پیشنیاز دارد:
یک. کتاب "نقد پیشفرضهای اصلی اقتصاد سیاسی کلاسیک" است. مارکس تلاش میکند انگارههای اصلی اقتصاددانان کلاسیک در مورد جامعه اتوپیایی آنها را نقد کند. مارکس حتی در خیلی از سطرهای کتاب میگوید "من فعلا به سراغ واقعیت واقعا موجود نمیروم (بنا به گفته هاروی، یکی از شارحان مارکس، "واقعیت واقعا موجود" بیشتر موضوع جلد دوم سرمایه است) و تنها پیشفرضها و درک اقتصاددانان کلاسیک را از وضعیت اتوپیایی نقد میکنم." به همین علت اگر با اقتصاد سیاسی کلاسیک آشنایی داشته باشید بسیار به فهم بهتر کتاب کمک خواهد کرد. مشخصا آدام اسمیت، مالتوس، ریکاردو و جیمز استورات میل.
دو. اگر با تاریخ اروپا به طور ویژه اروپای قرون وسطی، مبانی فئودالیسم و الغای نظام سرفداری آشنایی (قطعا بیشتر از آشنایی ویکیپدیایی) داشته باشید، بسیار به درک مباحث کتاب کمک خواهد کرد.
سه. در مورد نسبت اندیشه هگل و مارکس هم بسیار گفتهاند. آشنایی خواننده با هگل و روش دیالکتیکی او هم بسیار به درک عمیق روش مارکس در این کتاب کمک خواهد کرد.
اما اگر خیلی هم به این پیشنیازها تسلط ندارید، باز هم خواندن کتاب خیلی خیلی بهتر و مفیدتر از نخواندن آن است. همچنین در طی زمانی که کتاب را میخوانید میتوانید اطلاعات خود را در مورد سه پیشنیاز قبلی از منابع مختلف بالا ببرید.
من کتاب را همراه با "راهنمای سرمایه مارکس" نوشتهی دیوید هاروی و ترجمه عارف اقوامی مقدم خواندم. اگر خیلی درگیر "ترجمهی خوب و بد" هستید، ترجمه کتاب هاروی میتواند به غایت آزارتان دهد. اما به نظر من کتاب هاروی بسیار به فهم بهتر کتاب کمک میکند. خب ویدئوی کلاسهای هاروی روی یوتیوب هم هست.
اما دو نکته که دوست دارم اینجا ار آنها بگویم:
یک. مارکس فروپاشی سرمایهداری و ظهور جامعهای بیطبقه را نوید میدهد. جامعهای که در آن بهرهکشی کارگران، استثمار، سرکوب و شکافهای طبقاتی از بین میرود. من هر چقدر که با روایت مارکس از سرمایهداری موافق باشم، با "امید او به آیندهای بی طبقه" همراه نیستم. من تضادها و سیاهیهای تاریخ را بخش ضروری زندگی انسانی میدانم و معتقدم تنها شکل تضادها است که در تکامل زندگی انسانی تغییر میکند. "جامعهی بی طبقه" بیشتر امری اسطورهای است که اگر چه خیالی است اما تخیلش لازم است. درکی از جامعهی اسطورهای و اتوپیایی است که کمک میکند فرم زندگی امروز خودمان را به عنوان "تنها فرم طبیعی و ضروری و راستین زندگی" ندانیم. تخیل است که ما را به "سمت چیزی بهتر" سوق میدهد، وسوسهمان میکند و رانهای است تا "وضعیت موجود" را در هر شکل و فریبی که هست نقد کنیم و از آن فراتر برویم. حرکت به سمت "چیزی بهتر" که قطعا "چیزی بهتر" از آن نیز وجود دارد و این مسیر تاریخ باید باشد.
دو. کتاب میتواند شما را هم غمگین و هم خشمگین کند. مخصوصا اگر کارگر و کارمند (چه به معنای کلاسیک و چه به معنای امروزیاش) باشید. جزئیات روایتی که مارکس از استثمار کار کارگران{و البته کارمندان} میگوید را میتوانید در زندگی روزمرهتان و محیط کار (خصوصا در این نظام سرمایهدارانهی خشن و تعدیلنشدهی امروز ایران) لمس کنید. کتاب شما را به شدت به جو محیط کاری و آن چه واقعا در جریان است حساس میکند. تراکم حس غم و خشم در سینهی آدمی، میتواند به کینهی انقلابی ختم شود. بگذارید حداقل "تخیل" کنیم.
اردیبهشت ۹۹
خب برای خواندن کتاب (مخصوصا برای کلنجار رفتن با سه فصل نخست) باید کمی بیشتر از حد معمول حوصله و اراده داشته باشید. به نظر من کسی که میخواهد این کتاب را بخواند باید انگیزهی بیشتری از "فقط کتاب خواندن" داشته باشد. سه فصل ابتدایی، در حالی که هنوز با ادبیات مارکس خو نگرفتهاید میتواند به راحتی باعث شود کتاب را رها کنید. اما اگر از سه فصل اول عبور کردید، امکان این که کتاب را رها کنید کمتر میشود. علاوه بر این که با ادبیات کتاب آشنا شدهاید، چارچوب مفهومی کتاب هم ساخته شده است و از این به بعد خواندن کتاب روانتر پیش خواهد رفت.
خواندن کتاب حداقل سه پیشنیاز دارد:
یک. کتاب "نقد پیشفرضهای اصلی اقتصاد سیاسی کلاسیک" است. مارکس تلاش میکند انگارههای اصلی اقتصاددانان کلاسیک در مورد جامعه اتوپیایی آنها را نقد کند. مارکس حتی در خیلی از سطرهای کتاب میگوید "من فعلا به سراغ واقعیت واقعا موجود نمیروم (بنا به گفته هاروی، یکی از شارحان مارکس، "واقعیت واقعا موجود" بیشتر موضوع جلد دوم سرمایه است) و تنها پیشفرضها و درک اقتصاددانان کلاسیک را از وضعیت اتوپیایی نقد میکنم." به همین علت اگر با اقتصاد سیاسی کلاسیک آشنایی داشته باشید بسیار به فهم بهتر کتاب کمک خواهد کرد. مشخصا آدام اسمیت، مالتوس، ریکاردو و جیمز استورات میل.
دو. اگر با تاریخ اروپا به طور ویژه اروپای قرون وسطی، مبانی فئودالیسم و الغای نظام سرفداری آشنایی (قطعا بیشتر از آشنایی ویکیپدیایی) داشته باشید، بسیار به درک مباحث کتاب کمک خواهد کرد.
سه. در مورد نسبت اندیشه هگل و مارکس هم بسیار گفتهاند. آشنایی خواننده با هگل و روش دیالکتیکی او هم بسیار به درک عمیق روش مارکس در این کتاب کمک خواهد کرد.
اما اگر خیلی هم به این پیشنیازها تسلط ندارید، باز هم خواندن کتاب خیلی خیلی بهتر و مفیدتر از نخواندن آن است. همچنین در طی زمانی که کتاب را میخوانید میتوانید اطلاعات خود را در مورد سه پیشنیاز قبلی از منابع مختلف بالا ببرید.
من کتاب را همراه با "راهنمای سرمایه مارکس" نوشتهی دیوید هاروی و ترجمه عارف اقوامی مقدم خواندم. اگر خیلی درگیر "ترجمهی خوب و بد" هستید، ترجمه کتاب هاروی میتواند به غایت آزارتان دهد. اما به نظر من کتاب هاروی بسیار به فهم بهتر کتاب کمک میکند. خب ویدئوی کلاسهای هاروی روی یوتیوب هم هست.
اما دو نکته که دوست دارم اینجا ار آنها بگویم:
یک. مارکس فروپاشی سرمایهداری و ظهور جامعهای بیطبقه را نوید میدهد. جامعهای که در آن بهرهکشی کارگران، استثمار، سرکوب و شکافهای طبقاتی از بین میرود. من هر چقدر که با روایت مارکس از سرمایهداری موافق باشم، با "امید او به آیندهای بی طبقه" همراه نیستم. من تضادها و سیاهیهای تاریخ را بخش ضروری زندگی انسانی میدانم و معتقدم تنها شکل تضادها است که در تکامل زندگی انسانی تغییر میکند. "جامعهی بی طبقه" بیشتر امری اسطورهای است که اگر چه خیالی است اما تخیلش لازم است. درکی از جامعهی اسطورهای و اتوپیایی است که کمک میکند فرم زندگی امروز خودمان را به عنوان "تنها فرم طبیعی و ضروری و راستین زندگی" ندانیم. تخیل است که ما را به "سمت چیزی بهتر" سوق میدهد، وسوسهمان میکند و رانهای است تا "وضعیت موجود" را در هر شکل و فریبی که هست نقد کنیم و از آن فراتر برویم. حرکت به سمت "چیزی بهتر" که قطعا "چیزی بهتر" از آن نیز وجود دارد و این مسیر تاریخ باید باشد.
دو. کتاب میتواند شما را هم غمگین و هم خشمگین کند. مخصوصا اگر کارگر و کارمند (چه به معنای کلاسیک و چه به معنای امروزیاش) باشید. جزئیات روایتی که مارکس از استثمار کار کارگران{و البته کارمندان} میگوید را میتوانید در زندگی روزمرهتان و محیط کار (خصوصا در این نظام سرمایهدارانهی خشن و تعدیلنشدهی امروز ایران) لمس کنید. کتاب شما را به شدت به جو محیط کاری و آن چه واقعا در جریان است حساس میکند. تراکم حس غم و خشم در سینهی آدمی، میتواند به کینهی انقلابی ختم شود. بگذارید حداقل "تخیل" کنیم.
اردیبهشت ۹۹
February 23, 2018
An eye-opener
September 5, 2017
It’s shameful that it’s taken me so long to read 'Capital'. I should have done so when I was an undergrad, more than a decade ago. This is not my first attempt, though. I borrowed an aged hardback library edition of Volume 1 in 2011 and was defeated by the 8 (EIGHT) forewords and prefaces; I never made it to Marx’s actual words. This edition seemed more manageable, due to being abridged and having a mere four introductions and prefaces. Abridged or not, ‘Capital’ is undoubtedly hard work. I read it at a third or less of my usual rate. Marx’s sentences are long and often require reading twice to grasp what exactly he means. The sections recounting the development of the industrial revolution are easier, as they are more historical than theoretical. For the most part, however, this is theory and thus dense and demanding. Nonetheless, I found it highly rewarding to read.
If, like me, you have been mired in free market economic theory throughout your academic life, 'Capital' can be extremely satisfying. There were times when I could feel it rewiring my brain, as I’d hoped it might. It presents a fundamentally different approach to macroeconomics than the neoclassical economics I’ve been taught since 2001. Given Marx’s dismissal of the classical ('vulgar') economists, I can only imagine how scathing he would be of their heirs. Although I’ve read plenty of theory and academic work that refers to Marxism, none of it gave me more than the vaguest possible grounding in the actual content of 'Capital', because it says so many complex and nuanced things that require careful explanation.
There are number of ways in which Marx’s analysis of capitalism significantly differs from neoclassical macroeconomics that seemed important to me:
i) the assumption that change is always happening and that technological developments are not a magically exogenous factor (cf the frustrating Solow-Swan model of long term growth).
ii) The related disdain for any notion of equilibrium. It’s a non-existent mirage, I swear economics is only obsessed with it because it lends itself to tidy graphs.
iii) Assuming from the start that wages are set by how much the employer can get away with paying, not by individual contract negotiations in which employer and employee are somehow on a level playing field.
iv) Dismissal of the idea of full employment. Markets cannot achieve this and never have - why would they? Full employment only occurs with heavy government intervention, for example in the UK during WWII when much of the economy was nationalised. Marx’s concept of the reserve labour force remains extremely helpful and apposite today – which is why I’d come across it before.
v) Much fuller explanation than macroeconomics can manage of why and how production becomes progressively more capital-intensive, how rates of profit can fall while absolute profits rise, and how the labour-intensity of production can fall while longer hours and higher productivity are perpetually demanded from employees.
I have a mug with a picture of Marx in all his bearded glory and the caption, ‘I warned you that this would happen’. It’s true, he did. Although Capital is explicitly analysing relations between capital and labour at a specific point in time, there is an inevitable temptation to extrapolate to the present day (from this and his other work – the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy is often cited in recent commentary, I should read that). I found a number of points that meaningfully echoed the structural economic problems of today:
I thought a lot about the service industries while reading 'Capital'. Of course, factory-based worker exploitation is still very much in existence in 2017; we in Britain just don’t have to look at it. Children and women still work for long hours in terrible conditions to make cheap garments, but in Asia rather than Europe. The impoverished employees of the developed world are now largely in service industry jobs, essentially replicating the work of 19th century domestic servants that has escaped mechanisation. Other than the very rich, most people do not have live-in servants anymore (in the UK housing market there’s no space for them, apart from anything else). Instead, we hire snippets of servitude when getting a house cleaned, or a child minded, or food delivered to our door. Generally such service workers are on insecure low-paid contracts, employed by large companies. This trend is by no means incompatible with Marx’s analysis.
Page 389 has a tidy explanation of how service work can become productive to capital: ‘The same labour (for example, that of a gardener, a tailor) can be performed by the same worker on behalf of a capitalist or on immediate uses. In the two cases, he is wage-earning or hired by the day, but, if he works for the capitalist, he is a productive worker, since he produces capital, whereas if he works for a direct user he is unproductive.’ This brought to mind the so-called disruptive platforms like Uber. Whereas a taxi driver working independently was not contributing to the accumulation of capital, an Uber driver is, as a parasitic firm skims off a portion of their takings. These misleadingly-termed ‘sharing economy’ service companies accumulate forms of capital that Marx would likely not recognise, though: personal data and algorithms for the most part.
One thing I was left wondering at the end of the book was: how exactly can we define the term ‘capital’ today? (Clearly I should read Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century soon.) A line from the HBO sitcom Silicon Valley sprang to mind: “Our product is our stock”. By some bizarre convolution, tech firms seem to accumulate capital in the form of their own stock valuation, an abstraction that should depend on their capital, profits, turnover, etc. Tech giants and social media companies either make massive losses or profit only by advertising products sold by other companies. Their capital has melted into air, or bytes.
This may be a function of the abridged edition I read, which contains almost all of Vol 1 but only extracts of 2 and 3, but I was surprised to find no speculation about the future path of capitalism. I knew that ‘Capital’ would be essentially a historic analysis. However I wonder if there is anything further about the ultimate results of the falling rate of profit relative to capital (‘The progressive tendency of the general rate of profit to fall is, therefore, just an expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.’) The current state of Late Capitalism raises the questions: what else can be commoditised? How much faster can the population be persuaded to consume? How much more of the day can be occupied by activities that generate revenue for businesses? Is there a point at which the credit system collapses under the weight of loans that can never be repaid? (In the latter case, 2007/8 could have been a false alarm or an early warning.) There was also less discussion of class than I’d expected. The division into working class, bourgeoisie, landowners, and capitalists was merely assumed as part of the context.
Something I did locate, however, was the seed of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming on pages 231 and 267:
My only quibble with ‘Capital’ was occasional disagreement with the translator’s comma placement, although that must have been a real challenge to get right with such lengthy sentences in German. Marx’s occasional zingers were great, particularly the Bentham burns: 'The arch-philistine Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence.' Likewise this description of the English parliament: 'a permanent Trade's Union of the capitalists'. In short, 'Capital' definitely did not disappoint. It’s always pleasing when a classic that is still widely read and hugely influential lives up to expectations.
If, like me, you have been mired in free market economic theory throughout your academic life, 'Capital' can be extremely satisfying. There were times when I could feel it rewiring my brain, as I’d hoped it might. It presents a fundamentally different approach to macroeconomics than the neoclassical economics I’ve been taught since 2001. Given Marx’s dismissal of the classical ('vulgar') economists, I can only imagine how scathing he would be of their heirs. Although I’ve read plenty of theory and academic work that refers to Marxism, none of it gave me more than the vaguest possible grounding in the actual content of 'Capital', because it says so many complex and nuanced things that require careful explanation.
There are number of ways in which Marx’s analysis of capitalism significantly differs from neoclassical macroeconomics that seemed important to me:
i) the assumption that change is always happening and that technological developments are not a magically exogenous factor (cf the frustrating Solow-Swan model of long term growth).
ii) The related disdain for any notion of equilibrium. It’s a non-existent mirage, I swear economics is only obsessed with it because it lends itself to tidy graphs.
iii) Assuming from the start that wages are set by how much the employer can get away with paying, not by individual contract negotiations in which employer and employee are somehow on a level playing field.
iv) Dismissal of the idea of full employment. Markets cannot achieve this and never have - why would they? Full employment only occurs with heavy government intervention, for example in the UK during WWII when much of the economy was nationalised. Marx’s concept of the reserve labour force remains extremely helpful and apposite today – which is why I’d come across it before.
v) Much fuller explanation than macroeconomics can manage of why and how production becomes progressively more capital-intensive, how rates of profit can fall while absolute profits rise, and how the labour-intensity of production can fall while longer hours and higher productivity are perpetually demanded from employees.
I have a mug with a picture of Marx in all his bearded glory and the caption, ‘I warned you that this would happen’. It’s true, he did. Although Capital is explicitly analysing relations between capital and labour at a specific point in time, there is an inevitable temptation to extrapolate to the present day (from this and his other work – the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy is often cited in recent commentary, I should read that). I found a number of points that meaningfully echoed the structural economic problems of today:
The capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand, enforcing economy in each individual business, on the other hand, begets, by its anarchical system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous.
[...]
‘It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers, if the cost is about the same. […] The more extended the scale of production, the stronger this motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital. […] We have further seen that the capitalist […] progressively replaces skilled labourers by less skilled, mature labour-power by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young persons or children.
[...]
The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces them to submit to over-work and to subjugation under the dictates of capital.
I thought a lot about the service industries while reading 'Capital'. Of course, factory-based worker exploitation is still very much in existence in 2017; we in Britain just don’t have to look at it. Children and women still work for long hours in terrible conditions to make cheap garments, but in Asia rather than Europe. The impoverished employees of the developed world are now largely in service industry jobs, essentially replicating the work of 19th century domestic servants that has escaped mechanisation. Other than the very rich, most people do not have live-in servants anymore (in the UK housing market there’s no space for them, apart from anything else). Instead, we hire snippets of servitude when getting a house cleaned, or a child minded, or food delivered to our door. Generally such service workers are on insecure low-paid contracts, employed by large companies. This trend is by no means incompatible with Marx’s analysis.
Page 389 has a tidy explanation of how service work can become productive to capital: ‘The same labour (for example, that of a gardener, a tailor) can be performed by the same worker on behalf of a capitalist or on immediate uses. In the two cases, he is wage-earning or hired by the day, but, if he works for the capitalist, he is a productive worker, since he produces capital, whereas if he works for a direct user he is unproductive.’ This brought to mind the so-called disruptive platforms like Uber. Whereas a taxi driver working independently was not contributing to the accumulation of capital, an Uber driver is, as a parasitic firm skims off a portion of their takings. These misleadingly-termed ‘sharing economy’ service companies accumulate forms of capital that Marx would likely not recognise, though: personal data and algorithms for the most part.
One thing I was left wondering at the end of the book was: how exactly can we define the term ‘capital’ today? (Clearly I should read Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century soon.) A line from the HBO sitcom Silicon Valley sprang to mind: “Our product is our stock”. By some bizarre convolution, tech firms seem to accumulate capital in the form of their own stock valuation, an abstraction that should depend on their capital, profits, turnover, etc. Tech giants and social media companies either make massive losses or profit only by advertising products sold by other companies. Their capital has melted into air, or bytes.
This may be a function of the abridged edition I read, which contains almost all of Vol 1 but only extracts of 2 and 3, but I was surprised to find no speculation about the future path of capitalism. I knew that ‘Capital’ would be essentially a historic analysis. However I wonder if there is anything further about the ultimate results of the falling rate of profit relative to capital (‘The progressive tendency of the general rate of profit to fall is, therefore, just an expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.’) The current state of Late Capitalism raises the questions: what else can be commoditised? How much faster can the population be persuaded to consume? How much more of the day can be occupied by activities that generate revenue for businesses? Is there a point at which the credit system collapses under the weight of loans that can never be repaid? (In the latter case, 2007/8 could have been a false alarm or an early warning.) There was also less discussion of class than I’d expected. The division into working class, bourgeoisie, landowners, and capitalists was merely assumed as part of the context.
Something I did locate, however, was the seed of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming on pages 231 and 267:
‘Not until the invention of Watt’s second and so-called double-acting steam engine, was a prime mover found, that begot its own force by the consumption of coal and water, whose power was entirely under man’s control, that was mobile and a means of locomotion, that was urban and not, like the water-wheel, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in towns instead of, like the water-wheels, being scattered up and down the country, that was of universal technical application, and, relatively speaking, little affected in its choice of residence by local circumstances.’
[...]
‘According to Gaskell, the steam engine was from the very first an antagonist of human power, an antagonist that enabled the capitalist to tread under the foot the growing claims of the workmen, who threatened the newly born factory system with a crisis.’
My only quibble with ‘Capital’ was occasional disagreement with the translator’s comma placement, although that must have been a real challenge to get right with such lengthy sentences in German. Marx’s occasional zingers were great, particularly the Bentham burns: 'The arch-philistine Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence.' Likewise this description of the English parliament: 'a permanent Trade's Union of the capitalists'. In short, 'Capital' definitely did not disappoint. It’s always pleasing when a classic that is still widely read and hugely influential lives up to expectations.
Want to read
May 21, 2020"In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms."
Karl Marx, London,
January 24, 1873
(he meant "stimulate"...)
Marxism applied failed. Still, The Economist finds virtue in the ideology.
https://www.economist.com/news/books-...
I am glad there was one called Mises, to counter Marx: https://mises.org/wire/mises-myth-marx
And, Marx didn't use the word "capitalism"
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/james-m..."
But, communism failed.
PS a propos China's case: https://qz.com/1270109/chinas-communi...
PPS Still, some forget History: http://mnemosyne.ee/en/participation-...
UPDATE
Yes, there are those who still believe the marxist theory is one of "the most perceptive critiques"
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articl...
UPDATE
The cover and a cartoon inside the latest issue of "Philosophy Now" pleased me greatly.
Right, Marx needs to be questioned.
Karl Marx, London,
January 24, 1873
(he meant "stimulate"...)
Marxism applied failed. Still, The Economist finds virtue in the ideology.
https://www.economist.com/news/books-...
I am glad there was one called Mises, to counter Marx: https://mises.org/wire/mises-myth-marx
And, Marx didn't use the word "capitalism"
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/james-m..."
But, communism failed.
PS a propos China's case: https://qz.com/1270109/chinas-communi...
PPS Still, some forget History: http://mnemosyne.ee/en/participation-...
UPDATE
Yes, there are those who still believe the marxist theory is one of "the most perceptive critiques"
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articl...
UPDATE
The cover and a cartoon inside the latest issue of "Philosophy Now" pleased me greatly.
Right, Marx needs to be questioned.
February 8, 2021
Well that was a journey. Finally reached the end after two months of trudging through 10-15 pages a day. I'll write a proper review once I've finished going through my notes, but the thought I'll leave here for now is: read Capital! It's not impossible. A few chapters are tough going, and you should just go slowly (and accept that it's fine if you don't quite understand a few ideas - come back to them next time). But the core concepts are so insightful and profound, and the writing is powerful, poetic and funny. A strange thing to say about a book that came out 150 years ago, but it's indispensable for understanding modern society. And yes it's long, but as Radhika Desai says, show me any reading list and I'll happily remove three average-length books in order to make way for Capital Volume 1.
July 26, 2016
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Karl Marx
Preface to the First German Edition
Afterword to the Second German Edition
--Capital [Abridged]
Marx's Selected Footnotes
Explanatory Notes
Subject Index
Name Index
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Karl Marx
Preface to the First German Edition
Afterword to the Second German Edition
--Capital [Abridged]
Marx's Selected Footnotes
Explanatory Notes
Subject Index
Name Index
January 27, 2008
I have to say, this joint is bangin'. I find it useful when I'm in the club. P.S. Check out the total or expanded form of value. It's defective!
May 4, 2010
Vampires, monsters, fetishes! Stick with Marx through the saga of the coat and the M-C-M' and the rewards are so rich. When he guides you from the realm of exchange into the realm of production, I dare you not to feel like you are involved in cracking an incredible mystery. Because you are.
May 22, 2017
you will never see 20 yards of linen or one coat the same way again
March 28, 2021
"The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-values, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser."
You could probably fill a library with insightful reviews, responses, commentary, and reflections on Marx's Capital, and many of the reviews on this site do add colour to the illustrious picture. However, since I don't feel that I would be able to add much, I won't waste anybody's time trying to add my own views or commentary.
Instead, I'll offer brief pointers on reading Capital:
*Read the book! Obvious, I know, but if you're like me you've probably expended a great deal of energy reading everything but the book itself, as a kind of countertransference, to escape getting the book read.
*Be wary of guidebooks and guidance. Sure Louis Althusser, Michael Heinrich, Ben Fine, and David Harvey all may have a great understanding and reading of Capital, but getting to read Capital on your own terms should be the first step towards understanding it, and focusing on somebody's else's perspective (and all of the digressions involved in that) will likely distract you. Also, not all advice is good advice ... except mine of course ;).
*Analyse the text, don't be a passive reader. Engage with the text, scribble on it, make notes, highlight it, put sticky notes on it, underline etc. Don't simply scan it passively like a newspaper article. Remember, this is one of the most important and influential texts in the social science canon, regardless of your individual view on its contents and style.
*Try and have a basic grasp of some of the context(s) of Marx's work. This means getting an idea of who Adam Smith is, who the Physiocrats were, why the Poor Laws existed etc, and having a basic knowledge of Marx's philosophy. Don't distract yourself by trying to get an expansive view of everything around Marx's life and context, but a brief read on Marxism like Karl Marx: His Life and Environment or this, may be helpful, provided that it doesn't distract you from the book.
*Read the footnotes and endnotes, most of them are pretty useful.
*Break the book up into chunks. Reading a 750-1100 page book (depending on edition) will obviously seem like a mammoth challenge. But reading a chapter/subchapter, or say 10, 20, or 40 pages a day, is nothing. Doing this will help you understand the book a lot better, since you can review what you have read, and will ensure that you don't just gloss over the words in huge stretches. It should also seem like less of a commitment, so you can keep gaming or whatever you nonsense you get up to.
*READ THE BOOK!
*If all else fails, there's always the abridged version Das Kapital
You could probably fill a library with insightful reviews, responses, commentary, and reflections on Marx's Capital, and many of the reviews on this site do add colour to the illustrious picture. However, since I don't feel that I would be able to add much, I won't waste anybody's time trying to add my own views or commentary.
Instead, I'll offer brief pointers on reading Capital:
*Read the book! Obvious, I know, but if you're like me you've probably expended a great deal of energy reading everything but the book itself, as a kind of countertransference, to escape getting the book read.
*Be wary of guidebooks and guidance. Sure Louis Althusser, Michael Heinrich, Ben Fine, and David Harvey all may have a great understanding and reading of Capital, but getting to read Capital on your own terms should be the first step towards understanding it, and focusing on somebody's else's perspective (and all of the digressions involved in that) will likely distract you. Also, not all advice is good advice ... except mine of course ;).
*Analyse the text, don't be a passive reader. Engage with the text, scribble on it, make notes, highlight it, put sticky notes on it, underline etc. Don't simply scan it passively like a newspaper article. Remember, this is one of the most important and influential texts in the social science canon, regardless of your individual view on its contents and style.
*Try and have a basic grasp of some of the context(s) of Marx's work. This means getting an idea of who Adam Smith is, who the Physiocrats were, why the Poor Laws existed etc, and having a basic knowledge of Marx's philosophy. Don't distract yourself by trying to get an expansive view of everything around Marx's life and context, but a brief read on Marxism like Karl Marx: His Life and Environment or this, may be helpful, provided that it doesn't distract you from the book.
*Read the footnotes and endnotes, most of them are pretty useful.
*Break the book up into chunks. Reading a 750-1100 page book (depending on edition) will obviously seem like a mammoth challenge. But reading a chapter/subchapter, or say 10, 20, or 40 pages a day, is nothing. Doing this will help you understand the book a lot better, since you can review what you have read, and will ensure that you don't just gloss over the words in huge stretches. It should also seem like less of a commitment, so you can keep gaming or whatever you nonsense you get up to.
*READ THE BOOK!
*If all else fails, there's always the abridged version Das Kapital
September 26, 2023
call me an uneducated Marxist now. No but fr this monstrosity of a book is worth the many headaches. It truly is, as Engels says, "the bible of the working class".
July 29, 2018
Everyone knows Marx. And everyone knows Das Kapital. Or rather: everyone knows about Marx and Das Kapital. His name seems to come up with great frequency in public debates and public discourse; almost always in a polemical sense: someone either uses Marx or marxism as charicature to defend radical liberalism or someone uses Marx or marxism as ideal to promote radical equality (on any topic, basically: cultural marxism is as widespread as economic marxism).
I'm just like everyone. I heard and read about Marx. In school, and later when reading about philosophy and economics. Being a child of the 80's, I grew up with the idea of Western supremacy and the failure of marxism. Some years ago I watched a BBC documentary on the economic crisis of 2008, in which the host of the show used Marx, Keynes and Hayek to explain the different views (on both cause and solution) on solving the financial/banking crisis. In this documentary, it became clear to me that Marx wasn't some nutjob who simply wanted revolution; he seemed to be a clear-minded and consequentual thinker. Ever since, reading Marx has been on my list.
In this review I won't outline the whole book - this would be impossible, since the book itself contains 840 pages (and this is just the text). Besides impossible, it would also be highly obscure, since Marx's message is pretty clear and short, and he uses more than half of the book to offer detailed descriptions about the conditions of the worker, the statistics of economic trends and cycles, etc. Simply put: the message of Capitcal can be summarized rather quick.
According to Marx, in the fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe saw a major shift. Before this time, Europe consisted of mostly regional agricultural societies, in which most peasants owned some land, had to work on the land of their landlord or give some part of their produce to the landlord in order to pay rent, and lived a fairly decent live, in which family and community were important pillars of stability.
During the fifteenth century, things started to change. Due to local power shifts, the possessors of land started to confiscate the lands of peasants and expulse these peasants and their families to the towns. This trend was intensified by the Reformation, when most of the European states started to confiscate the enemy church's lands and divide these lands among the wealthy nobles. Later on, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the aristocracy (for example in Britain) started stealing lands from the state, as well.
Almost at the same time, there happened a shift in agriculture. No longer was arable land needed; pasture was what would be the future. Further, due to technological improvements, farmers could do with fewer and fewer hired personnel - meaning even more trekking to the towns. In these towns, guilds and cooperations were the protection of artisans and traders. This meant that these ever-growing towns were put under more and more strain of an increasing population of poor, unskilled labour force.
But even though these huge shifts in European societies created a totally new form of living for many, they didn't radically change the relations between labour and production. This changed with the scientific and technological breakthroughs in the seventeenth century, combined with the economic changes (for example, the origin of the banking system, the system of public debt and the colonization of the New World, etc.). Now it was possible to apply the newest technologies and inventions to produce more efficiently and cost-effective. The owner of the means of production - the natural resources/materials and the machinery - could buy labour force to create value. This is - according to Marx - the very foundation of capitalism.
Before capitalism there was division of labour, in the sense that each labourer produced a product. Later, when manufacture became possible (i.e. putting a group of labourers together in a building), the output could be increased. But the social division of labour only happened when the Industrial Revolution started: now the making of products was broken down in sequences of tiny steps, in which first each labourer would be selected for one single step in this process of production, and later on the labourer was replaced by machinery that could accomplish those tiny steps in the process of production much faster and much more accurate. This was capitalism at its finest: before this time, the labourer used to tools to produce, now the capitalist bought machinery that used up labour force to produce. Human beings went from creators to being simple input into machinery to produce value.
I should rather add some important caveat to this last point. This is Marx's second main thesis in Capital. The labourer is used up - as labour force - by the means of production (i.e. the machinery), in order to create value. But value for whom? According to Marx, this is the main stumbling block in (contemporary) economics. The economists before him - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc. - thought value was created by the laws of supply and demand: the capitalist would sell his products on the market above the cost price and make profits off them (Smith's 'invisible hand'). But Marx claims these economists either were mistaken, or worse were frauds and henchmen of the bourgeousie. According to Marx, value is not created by the law of supply and demand, but value is created by labour.
How does this work? Well, due to the economic and social changes in Europe, capital accumulated in the hands of the rich few - the capitalists. The masses were driven to the towns, creating a huge potential labour force. The problem is, all men - capitalist and proletarian alike - need to eat, drink, live in a house, raise a family, etc. This means that every man, woman and child needs to earn enough to procure these means of subsistence. Before capitalism, this wasn't a problem: everyone could produce his own means of subsistence and live off the land (so to speak). Now the situation was drastically altered: in order to buy the means of subsistence the masses had to sell their one and only product - labour force. The capitalist was the buyer, the worker the seller.
But the labour market is no free market (in the sense of Adam Smith's invisible hand): the capitalist has the monopoly on the means of production, meaning, in effect, that he could demand anything from the worker. If the worker had to work 5 hours in order to earn enough wages to procure the means of subsistence for him and his family, the capitalist wouldn't be happy. He wouldn't make any profit. So what happened? The capitalists demanded - over decades and centuries - ever longer working days. At the time of Marx's writing, men, women and children had to work (slave is a more appropriate word here) for 14-18 hours in factories and industrial plants, in abominable conditions (safe and decent conditions cost money...). This meant that all the hours above the fictional 5 hours were hours in which the worker produced value for the capitalist without getting anything in return for this.
And now we see immediately what is the foundation of capitalism: the capitalist creates value by buying more and more means of production, which continuously use up labour force.
There is an intrinsic drive to extremities within this capitalist system of production. According to Marx, capital consists of two parts: constant capital (i.e. the macinery, the natural materials used in production, etc.) and variable capital (i.e. the labour force). Over time, the capitalist will invest his generated capital into more constant capital: he will buy more, and more sophisticated machinery and natural resources. You might think this is good news for the worker, since this means more work. No so fast. Technological improvements lead to replacing the worker - who was degraded to doing insanely routine micro-steps within the process of production anyways - by machines. Machines need to be tended to, but one doesn't need as skilled a person to watch a machine compared to a person who needs to produce with his own hands. This meant that the male work force was steadily sacked; women, and preferably children (some as young as 5 or 6 years old), were now demanded. Lower skilled workers; less wages. Capital wins.
Over time, capitalism uses up the Earth and its inhabitants as material; its only goals is creating value, creating more capital. Or rather: letting the Earth and its inhabitants create more value - at the cost of themselves. Since capital attracts capital, capitalists will take over rival capitalists - leading to an accumulation of more and more capital in the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists. But since the capitalist only can produce value (or rather: let others produce it for him) when there's a market for his products, throwing more and more people into abject poverty is not really good for business. This is the internal contradiction in the capitalist system of production, at least according to Marx. The system will break down eventually, when capital cannot create any new capital anymore. The machinery has consumed itself, so to speak.
This is when the workers need to scare away - or kill off, Marx never was that clear on this - the remaining capitalists and confiscate the means of production for themselves. According to Marx, who applied so Hegelian dialectic on the system of production, capitalism was the negation of the former state in which the individual worker produced for himself and his family. Eventually, capitalism is negated by another negation (a 'negation of the negation'), namely the taking over of the means of production by the workers. Communism as a Hegelian dialectical end-state - how convenient.
The above is, in a sense, the main message of Das Kapital. The strength of the book lies in that fact that Marx doesn't just offer us a technical analysis of capitalism - he backs up his arguments with facts, statistics and illustrations. So when he talks about how the poor are being used up by the system as material (i.e. labour force - literally dehumanized beings, only counted in labour hours), he cites report after report by British Commissions send to investigate the working conditions and life standards of the workers. It is really shocking and heart-breaking to read these stories. Young boys who would work 20+ hours in mines - without light - and be 'lived up' when reaching 20; the housing conditions of the poor, where tens of people would sleep together, crammed up, only to switch beds with the workers returning from night shifts; the brutal working conditions, including all the injuries and deaths, of men, women and children; the continuous lobbying of capitalists and economists to increase the pressure on the poor; the diseases and epidemics running rampant in the poor districts and workplaces - in a word: the awful dehumanization of human beings.
No matter how touching it all is (it really is, in my opinion), one should also ask questions of truth when such radical claims are made. There are some major points in the book where Marx's moral anger seems to fly out of control. For starters, he divides up society in capitalists and proletarians. This is much too simplistic: there's always a huge room for graduate and intermediate positions. Not everyone was equally effected by the capitalist system of production - for better or for worse. Next, his labour theory of surplus value is wrong. Commodities can't be bought and sold to create value; but neither can capital create value. At least not in the sense that Marx mentions (maybe the modern day global banking system is a vindication of Marx's theory?).
Also, Marx's view of history as a process of dialectic progress towards communism is a Hegelian illusion. Hegel thought history follows a law (the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis; this synthesis forms the start, a new thesis, for a new dialectical process, and so on), and this law would result in the end-state. For Hegel, this was the Prussion state. For Marx, this is the Communist state. No matter what state one prefers, the claim is based on the assumption that history follows a law (or laws). This is proven to be impossible (cf. Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism [1957]). History doesn't follow laws, so Marx's fundamental assumption is false. Last, Marx put forward his theories on capitalism as scientific. The problem is: Marx's predictions (for example, the revolution coming in the most highly developed countries; the revolution coming - at all; etc.) were falsified by experience. In the USA, people like Henri Ford started to treat and pay their workers better, so they had a bigger market for their products. If you pay your workers better, they can buy your cars, and you will earn even more. In this sense, the solution of the horrors of industrial capitalism were (and are - in my opinion) to be sought for WITHIN capitalism, rather than throwing away the baby with the bathwather.
Anno 2018, Marx is usually brought up in highly intellectual debates on eceonomic policies or some such subject. Reading Das Kapital really made me see this is such a distorted view. Das Kapital is, first and foremost, an analysis of a capitalist system of production that crushed millions of people - worldwide - under its wheels, all for the benefit of the upper echelons. Second, it made me realize the unscrupulous attitude of the economists, especially in the UK and France, to support oppression by distorting the truth and giving politicians fance arguments to increase the oppression of the poor. Third, the book really struck a tone - its humanity, its cynical treatment of all the henchmen of capitalism, and its message (stop the oppression). Fourth, the book is, simply put, one of the building blocks of our modern world.
I can truly recommend teading this book - it would be great if more people had an inkling of an idea about what Marx actually wrote (and what not), instead of all the mainstream propaganda - pro or contra.
I'm just like everyone. I heard and read about Marx. In school, and later when reading about philosophy and economics. Being a child of the 80's, I grew up with the idea of Western supremacy and the failure of marxism. Some years ago I watched a BBC documentary on the economic crisis of 2008, in which the host of the show used Marx, Keynes and Hayek to explain the different views (on both cause and solution) on solving the financial/banking crisis. In this documentary, it became clear to me that Marx wasn't some nutjob who simply wanted revolution; he seemed to be a clear-minded and consequentual thinker. Ever since, reading Marx has been on my list.
In this review I won't outline the whole book - this would be impossible, since the book itself contains 840 pages (and this is just the text). Besides impossible, it would also be highly obscure, since Marx's message is pretty clear and short, and he uses more than half of the book to offer detailed descriptions about the conditions of the worker, the statistics of economic trends and cycles, etc. Simply put: the message of Capitcal can be summarized rather quick.
According to Marx, in the fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe saw a major shift. Before this time, Europe consisted of mostly regional agricultural societies, in which most peasants owned some land, had to work on the land of their landlord or give some part of their produce to the landlord in order to pay rent, and lived a fairly decent live, in which family and community were important pillars of stability.
During the fifteenth century, things started to change. Due to local power shifts, the possessors of land started to confiscate the lands of peasants and expulse these peasants and their families to the towns. This trend was intensified by the Reformation, when most of the European states started to confiscate the enemy church's lands and divide these lands among the wealthy nobles. Later on, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the aristocracy (for example in Britain) started stealing lands from the state, as well.
Almost at the same time, there happened a shift in agriculture. No longer was arable land needed; pasture was what would be the future. Further, due to technological improvements, farmers could do with fewer and fewer hired personnel - meaning even more trekking to the towns. In these towns, guilds and cooperations were the protection of artisans and traders. This meant that these ever-growing towns were put under more and more strain of an increasing population of poor, unskilled labour force.
But even though these huge shifts in European societies created a totally new form of living for many, they didn't radically change the relations between labour and production. This changed with the scientific and technological breakthroughs in the seventeenth century, combined with the economic changes (for example, the origin of the banking system, the system of public debt and the colonization of the New World, etc.). Now it was possible to apply the newest technologies and inventions to produce more efficiently and cost-effective. The owner of the means of production - the natural resources/materials and the machinery - could buy labour force to create value. This is - according to Marx - the very foundation of capitalism.
Before capitalism there was division of labour, in the sense that each labourer produced a product. Later, when manufacture became possible (i.e. putting a group of labourers together in a building), the output could be increased. But the social division of labour only happened when the Industrial Revolution started: now the making of products was broken down in sequences of tiny steps, in which first each labourer would be selected for one single step in this process of production, and later on the labourer was replaced by machinery that could accomplish those tiny steps in the process of production much faster and much more accurate. This was capitalism at its finest: before this time, the labourer used to tools to produce, now the capitalist bought machinery that used up labour force to produce. Human beings went from creators to being simple input into machinery to produce value.
I should rather add some important caveat to this last point. This is Marx's second main thesis in Capital. The labourer is used up - as labour force - by the means of production (i.e. the machinery), in order to create value. But value for whom? According to Marx, this is the main stumbling block in (contemporary) economics. The economists before him - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc. - thought value was created by the laws of supply and demand: the capitalist would sell his products on the market above the cost price and make profits off them (Smith's 'invisible hand'). But Marx claims these economists either were mistaken, or worse were frauds and henchmen of the bourgeousie. According to Marx, value is not created by the law of supply and demand, but value is created by labour.
How does this work? Well, due to the economic and social changes in Europe, capital accumulated in the hands of the rich few - the capitalists. The masses were driven to the towns, creating a huge potential labour force. The problem is, all men - capitalist and proletarian alike - need to eat, drink, live in a house, raise a family, etc. This means that every man, woman and child needs to earn enough to procure these means of subsistence. Before capitalism, this wasn't a problem: everyone could produce his own means of subsistence and live off the land (so to speak). Now the situation was drastically altered: in order to buy the means of subsistence the masses had to sell their one and only product - labour force. The capitalist was the buyer, the worker the seller.
But the labour market is no free market (in the sense of Adam Smith's invisible hand): the capitalist has the monopoly on the means of production, meaning, in effect, that he could demand anything from the worker. If the worker had to work 5 hours in order to earn enough wages to procure the means of subsistence for him and his family, the capitalist wouldn't be happy. He wouldn't make any profit. So what happened? The capitalists demanded - over decades and centuries - ever longer working days. At the time of Marx's writing, men, women and children had to work (slave is a more appropriate word here) for 14-18 hours in factories and industrial plants, in abominable conditions (safe and decent conditions cost money...). This meant that all the hours above the fictional 5 hours were hours in which the worker produced value for the capitalist without getting anything in return for this.
And now we see immediately what is the foundation of capitalism: the capitalist creates value by buying more and more means of production, which continuously use up labour force.
There is an intrinsic drive to extremities within this capitalist system of production. According to Marx, capital consists of two parts: constant capital (i.e. the macinery, the natural materials used in production, etc.) and variable capital (i.e. the labour force). Over time, the capitalist will invest his generated capital into more constant capital: he will buy more, and more sophisticated machinery and natural resources. You might think this is good news for the worker, since this means more work. No so fast. Technological improvements lead to replacing the worker - who was degraded to doing insanely routine micro-steps within the process of production anyways - by machines. Machines need to be tended to, but one doesn't need as skilled a person to watch a machine compared to a person who needs to produce with his own hands. This meant that the male work force was steadily sacked; women, and preferably children (some as young as 5 or 6 years old), were now demanded. Lower skilled workers; less wages. Capital wins.
Over time, capitalism uses up the Earth and its inhabitants as material; its only goals is creating value, creating more capital. Or rather: letting the Earth and its inhabitants create more value - at the cost of themselves. Since capital attracts capital, capitalists will take over rival capitalists - leading to an accumulation of more and more capital in the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists. But since the capitalist only can produce value (or rather: let others produce it for him) when there's a market for his products, throwing more and more people into abject poverty is not really good for business. This is the internal contradiction in the capitalist system of production, at least according to Marx. The system will break down eventually, when capital cannot create any new capital anymore. The machinery has consumed itself, so to speak.
This is when the workers need to scare away - or kill off, Marx never was that clear on this - the remaining capitalists and confiscate the means of production for themselves. According to Marx, who applied so Hegelian dialectic on the system of production, capitalism was the negation of the former state in which the individual worker produced for himself and his family. Eventually, capitalism is negated by another negation (a 'negation of the negation'), namely the taking over of the means of production by the workers. Communism as a Hegelian dialectical end-state - how convenient.
The above is, in a sense, the main message of Das Kapital. The strength of the book lies in that fact that Marx doesn't just offer us a technical analysis of capitalism - he backs up his arguments with facts, statistics and illustrations. So when he talks about how the poor are being used up by the system as material (i.e. labour force - literally dehumanized beings, only counted in labour hours), he cites report after report by British Commissions send to investigate the working conditions and life standards of the workers. It is really shocking and heart-breaking to read these stories. Young boys who would work 20+ hours in mines - without light - and be 'lived up' when reaching 20; the housing conditions of the poor, where tens of people would sleep together, crammed up, only to switch beds with the workers returning from night shifts; the brutal working conditions, including all the injuries and deaths, of men, women and children; the continuous lobbying of capitalists and economists to increase the pressure on the poor; the diseases and epidemics running rampant in the poor districts and workplaces - in a word: the awful dehumanization of human beings.
No matter how touching it all is (it really is, in my opinion), one should also ask questions of truth when such radical claims are made. There are some major points in the book where Marx's moral anger seems to fly out of control. For starters, he divides up society in capitalists and proletarians. This is much too simplistic: there's always a huge room for graduate and intermediate positions. Not everyone was equally effected by the capitalist system of production - for better or for worse. Next, his labour theory of surplus value is wrong. Commodities can't be bought and sold to create value; but neither can capital create value. At least not in the sense that Marx mentions (maybe the modern day global banking system is a vindication of Marx's theory?).
Also, Marx's view of history as a process of dialectic progress towards communism is a Hegelian illusion. Hegel thought history follows a law (the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis; this synthesis forms the start, a new thesis, for a new dialectical process, and so on), and this law would result in the end-state. For Hegel, this was the Prussion state. For Marx, this is the Communist state. No matter what state one prefers, the claim is based on the assumption that history follows a law (or laws). This is proven to be impossible (cf. Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism [1957]). History doesn't follow laws, so Marx's fundamental assumption is false. Last, Marx put forward his theories on capitalism as scientific. The problem is: Marx's predictions (for example, the revolution coming in the most highly developed countries; the revolution coming - at all; etc.) were falsified by experience. In the USA, people like Henri Ford started to treat and pay their workers better, so they had a bigger market for their products. If you pay your workers better, they can buy your cars, and you will earn even more. In this sense, the solution of the horrors of industrial capitalism were (and are - in my opinion) to be sought for WITHIN capitalism, rather than throwing away the baby with the bathwather.
Anno 2018, Marx is usually brought up in highly intellectual debates on eceonomic policies or some such subject. Reading Das Kapital really made me see this is such a distorted view. Das Kapital is, first and foremost, an analysis of a capitalist system of production that crushed millions of people - worldwide - under its wheels, all for the benefit of the upper echelons. Second, it made me realize the unscrupulous attitude of the economists, especially in the UK and France, to support oppression by distorting the truth and giving politicians fance arguments to increase the oppression of the poor. Third, the book really struck a tone - its humanity, its cynical treatment of all the henchmen of capitalism, and its message (stop the oppression). Fourth, the book is, simply put, one of the building blocks of our modern world.
I can truly recommend teading this book - it would be great if more people had an inkling of an idea about what Marx actually wrote (and what not), instead of all the mainstream propaganda - pro or contra.
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