INTRODUCTION
An ongoing series going through Marx, Capital Volume 1. Access free electronic copies of Volume 1 here or here. [Capital Volume I, Chapter 1: The Commodity, pgs. 126-177 of Penguin Press]
Why are people so heated about capitalism?
Does there have to be a 1%? What does it have to do with those other things? Why the fuck everything cost money?
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Welcome to my series on Capital Volume 1 by Karl Marx. We'll go through the book in its entirety, with a highlight reel that covers each part of Volume 1. I will be working off of the Penguin Classics 1990 print edition because reading anything longer than an article on a screen hurts me as a person. If I reference page numbers, it’ll be to that. But there are online places to follow along for free (hey we’ve found something that doesn’t cost money!) here and here. Since this is the introduction, it might be helpful to answer:
Why Marx? Why Volume I? Some folks seem to think of Marx as an authority. Maybe they don’t usually say that out loud, but they act like it’s true in other ways: maybe disagreements get settled by arguing about which person’s point sounds more like something Marx would say, or maybe quotes from shit he’s written about get used to decide what we’re going to do or talk about in the first place. |
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Having read (or pretending to have read, yes shade) what dude wrote is treated as a credential in some circles, sometimes even one that trumps ones that ought to matter just as much or more (e.g. real world experience with stuff relevant to that circle. At the end of the day, Marx was just some guy - a smart guy, an influential guy, well-read guy, a guy who maybe was right about some stuff that mattered - but just a guy.
So why Marx then? Why Capital Volume 1? The short answer is that, since people think it’s important, it is: that is, a lot of ways people talk and think about capitalism come from this book, and so it would help make sense of what those folks are saying even if it turns out that the ideas weren’t great. And some of them aren’t. But some of them are, and so dealing with them directly instead of trying to work backwards from insular, jargon-y conversations that people “in-the-know” have with each other could help level the playing field of discussion. The long answer has to do with my overall guesses about how the world works and how we need to understand it - I think the ideas in this book is on a fairly short list of things we could combine in a toolbox to make a workable understanding of things. Feel free to ask why in the comments section, though as the parts progress maybe it’ll make itself evident.
Final remark: an incredible amount of shit has been written about this guy and his ideas. No one has read all of it, least of all me. People have strong feelings about what the *right* interpretations of certain sections are, which are important and which are not, et cetera. People will strongly disagree (that is, if anyone bothers to read this at all!) with large parts of these little summaries and whatnot, and I will consciously or unconsciously be positioning myself in long standing arguments between sides on these issues. That’s life. Better to actively hash these things out, I think, than to just treat your particular understanding of things as a background assumption, never to be directly challenged but to be used to judge people, actions, and opportunities. But that said, this blog won’t itself be about hashing out those disagreements. Let's go!
So why Marx then? Why Capital Volume 1? The short answer is that, since people think it’s important, it is: that is, a lot of ways people talk and think about capitalism come from this book, and so it would help make sense of what those folks are saying even if it turns out that the ideas weren’t great. And some of them aren’t. But some of them are, and so dealing with them directly instead of trying to work backwards from insular, jargon-y conversations that people “in-the-know” have with each other could help level the playing field of discussion. The long answer has to do with my overall guesses about how the world works and how we need to understand it - I think the ideas in this book is on a fairly short list of things we could combine in a toolbox to make a workable understanding of things. Feel free to ask why in the comments section, though as the parts progress maybe it’ll make itself evident.
Final remark: an incredible amount of shit has been written about this guy and his ideas. No one has read all of it, least of all me. People have strong feelings about what the *right* interpretations of certain sections are, which are important and which are not, et cetera. People will strongly disagree (that is, if anyone bothers to read this at all!) with large parts of these little summaries and whatnot, and I will consciously or unconsciously be positioning myself in long standing arguments between sides on these issues. That’s life. Better to actively hash these things out, I think, than to just treat your particular understanding of things as a background assumption, never to be directly challenged but to be used to judge people, actions, and opportunities. But that said, this blog won’t itself be about hashing out those disagreements. Let's go!
WHY EVERYTHING COSTS MONEY
OLÚFÉMÍ O. TÁÍWÒ
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