I've already read a couple of books, but they were all light reading or straight to the point. Today I started volume 1 of Capital. I read for about 2 hours and I realized I feel like I can't do this; it's very dense and abstract. Are there any habits, thoughts, or other helpful things that keep you focused?
The thing about academic theory books is that they are work of technical writing, not novels. That means you don’t need to read in order from beginning to end. If the introduction seems dull, skip to the chapters that actually get to the point. If you’re not sure where the arguments are going, read the conclusion then go back to see the reasoning behind it in an earlier chapter. There’s no such thing as spoilers, and no need to keep yourself in suspense, so you don’t need to shackle yourself to novel style reading of one page after the next in order. You can jump around back and forth as you like.
just gotta sit down and do it, tbh. With things that I'm having trouble parsing or absorbing, I will force myself to stay with a paragraph or a page until I've really parsed it, even if it means re-reading a few times. Though if you aren't firmly in the habit of reading for comprehension, jumping straight from light reading to Capital is probably pretty rough, especially a blind read with no context. I also think for something as dense as Capital, taking notes or highlighting important sections is probably important, but I'm not good about actually doing that myself
I may as well highlight things I don't think are important at this point and save some ink
I always buy used books, and my first copy of Caliban and the Witch came 90% yellow lol
get someone to watch you and whack you with a stick every time you lose focus
Lots of great advice in thread already. One thing I would say is don't feel the pressure to understand everything the first time you read it. For texts you want to go deep into I would suggest reading it three times.
First time you just read/skim it, try to read it uninterrupted and don't get hung up on details or footnotes. Second time, you do annotations and write questions about the text in the margins. Third time you read the text to answer your questions.
This short article on how to read philosophy also gives good pointers. https://philosophy.arizona.edu/sites/philosophy.arizona.edu/files/Rosati%2C%20How%20to%20Read%20a%20Philosophical%20Article%20or%20Book.pdf
My primary habit is not reading Capital and instead reading literally anything else.
I think it’s important that you read what interests you. I cannot force myself to read something I find boring. It’s funny you bring this up now because today I restarted Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, a book I have previously tried and failed to read past a few dozen pages. His style is so dry with a lot of listy descriptions. However, the subject matter is interesting to me and I sense there is a lot to gain from reading it. So, my new strategy is listening to an audiobook instead of reading with my eyes. I almost never use audiobooks, but they work well in some cases. (I wouldn’t recommend it with dense, footnote-heavy authors like Marx, though.)
Anyway, back to my point: read what interests you. I have lost interest in books only to return to them years later when life experience allows me to connect in a way I couldn’t before. For example, I have been thinking about gender issues a lot lately, and suddenly I’m thinking about Marx’s German Ideology in a new light; it makes clear so many of today’s issues including religion, gender, immigration, racism, and more. Maybe I’ll make a post about it here at some point.
On that note OP, let me know if you want to discuss Capital. It is one of my favorite bits of theory (I know, so unique).
I'd be glad! I'm just getting started so I've been reading on the different value forms. I had a bit of trouble understanding how the equivalent form differs from the relative form? Doesn't the relative form express the same equivalence relation by putting 2 quantities of different commodities up as equal to each other?
Yes, algebraically, the equivalent form and the relative form are interchangeable or "accidental":
Whether, then, a commodity assumes the relative form, or the opposite equivalent form, depends entirely upon its accidental position in the expression of value – that is, upon whether it is the commodity whose value is being expressed or the commodity in which value is being expressed.
The difference between the forms is purely semantic. If I exchange 5 apples for your 3 oranges, that is a value relation. I am equally correct in saying that your 3 oranges express the value of my 5 apples, as you are correct in saying that my 5 apples express the value of your 3 oranges. Each statement is correct but the meaning is different. The equivalent form is the commodity which expresses value, whereas the relative form is the commodity whose value needs expressing. It seems like a trivial distinction at first, but its significance is in the emergence of the money commodity. If any commodity can take on the role of the equivalent form, then it follows that one particular commodity may in practice take on the role of universal equivalent. This is money. And in its full development, we do not regard money in its relative form; we regard money as a pure embodiment of value, as being value in itself, and not needing to express its value in another equivalent.
Since the relative form of value of a commodity – the linen, for example – expresses the value of that commodity, as being something wholly different from its substance and properties, as being, for instance, coat-like, we see that this expression itself indicates that some social relation lies at the bottom of it. With the equivalent form it is just the contrary. The very essence of this form is that the material commodity itself – the coat – just as it is, expresses value, and is endowed with the form of value by Nature itself. Of course this holds good only so long as the value relation exists, in which the coat stands in the position of equivalent to the linen. Since, however, the properties of a thing are not the result of its relations to other things, but only manifest themselves in such relations, the coat seems to be endowed with its equivalent form, its property of being directly exchangeable, just as much by Nature as it is endowed with the property of being heavy, or the capacity to keep us warm. Hence the enigmatical character of the equivalent form which escapes the notice of the bourgeois political economist, until this form, completely developed, confronts him in the shape of money.
The first three chapters are tough. Very tough. But like climbing a mountain, they are also rewarding. Some of the most brilliant insights into capitalism that have ever been written. But it’s not easy. But some suggestions before you jump back in:
- Check out David Harvey’s lectures on YouTube regarding the first 3 chapters
- Listen to the first few episodes of the podcast “Reading Capital with Comrades” (ignore what Derek says about listening after you read).
- ignore those first two suggestions and read Wage Labor and Capital and Value Price and Profit first. They are great introductions to the concepts Marx lays out in Capital, Marx even says those lectures were meant for workers who had no prior knowledge of economics
- Ask questions here! I’d love to hash out questions (and learn more in the process)
It helped me to take notes as I was reading. Sometimes I would write out whole quotes with their page numbers so I could look up the context again. I think it helped me slow down and absorb the material. Here's the digital copies I uploaded broken out by chapter.
There's a lot of different strategies depending on your needs and goals.
Micro strategies:
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meditate before reading
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leave phone and any other distractions in another room (if focus is an issue)
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plot out a chunk of time where you don't do anything except focus on reading
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get a notebook and write a ~1-sentence summary of each paragraph as you read. This forces you to absorb the information before moving on, rather than scanning over the text and eventually getting lost. although if you're struggling with understanding a paragraph, read further and then come back, since often it takes larger chunks of information to grasp a concept.
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actually google or write down words you aren't sure the meaning of. this usually becomes necessary if you're doing the 1-sentence summary thing. Can even do the same with concepts if you don't quite get them.
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some people vibe with a more Hermeneutic method, where you quickly skim a larger chunk before coming back and studying smaller parts in detail.
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don't waste your time: definitely try and push your limits so you can get better, but it's okay to take breaks and adjust your methods if they aren't working.
Macro strategy:
Make a list of questions that you want answered, then find the specific parts of Capital that answer those questions (or videos, or discussions, or podcasts, or secondary reading). Add questions as they arise. Reading Capital front to back is a good but lofty goal. A person could spend their whole life studying it. But when it comes down to it, your goal probably isn't to become a Marx scholar, it's to better understand capitalism so that you can better engage in praxis. So rather than force yourself to absorb every gritty detail, give yourself achievable goals: do you understand commodity fetishism? do you understand labor theory of value? the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? dialectical materialism? Choose a topic that interests you and do a deep dive, using whatever resources you need. Maybe do a quick-ish readthrough of Capital so that you can say you've read it lol.
Secondary reading has pros and cons but I often find it very useful. A big con is obviously that you're filtering the original information through another person and their ideology. But as long as you don't treat it as the authoritative source of information, but one of many tools in understanding a concept, it can be worth it. It's also nice in some contexts to have concepts brought up to date or given useful context that wasn't available at time of writing. And usually you aren't yet interested in the hard theoretical proof that original writing requires (because it's talking to / arguing with other theorists), but just the concepts in light-reading form. Then once you get a better handle on the concepts you can always do deeper dives later.
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At risk of sounding like I'm telling you to give up, Capital is about as dense as it gets. Most other theory is easier to read, and while reading some Marx and Engels is a great spot to start, Capital itself is less so.
Leftypol has a pretty good reading list I've been using, but there are lots of other good ones scattered around the internetOh I've read some other stuff to prepare, that's what I meant in the post. I read Wage Labor and Capital a while ago, read Imperialism, I read Towards a New Socialism, Blackshirts and Reds, the works.
I download digital copies of the works, and highlight parts I want to come back to later, re read, or found insightful using an app like moonreader. I only read for 40-80 minutes at a time, unless I'm engrossed in it.
If the work is relatively recent, I'll look for explanations or lectures by the author about the concepts I'm struggling with on the internet. With books by Michael Parenti, Samir Amin and Vijay Prashad, this is pretty easy. There's plenty of stuff on YouTube, etc.
I would not recommend starting with capital. Starting with more contemporary works, and working back is how I did it.
Awesome advice, thanks. I am not starting with Capital, I started with Wage Labor and Capital way back in the day, and have read several books on history and political economy since then, but nothing that was nearly as dense.
I don't get a lot of time to focus enough to read anything substantial. If I'm reading a book with my eyes, I'm probably doing it in some kind of waiting room at a rate of 1 standard book per 3 damn months. Realistically, most of my theory intake comes from summaries in podcasts like RevLeft Radio
That said, there's nothing wrong with taking a break while reading. Personally I'm more likely to finish a book if I don't try to force myself to read more than I feel up to
