Finally finished the third volume of Capital. Not going to lie, it was a challenge and quite a journey, but well worth it. Rip to the many, many highlighters that gave their lives for this endeavor.
AMA!
Damn comrade you're officially stronger than most marxists(including me, pathetically tapping out at vol 2).
Honest opinion, is volume 3 worth it? I've never gone for it, but I'm also one of those weirdos who loves the young Marx and stuff like the German ideology....
Overall, I'd say yes. It has some of his most important insights that really build on the basic analyses in Vol 2 to show how capitalism is a historically transitory mode of production that contains within itself the seeds of its own abolishment. If anything I'd say if you've already gotten through Vol 2, which can be pretty dry at times, you might as well.
On the other hand, it also has some difficult parts. The stuff about ground rent is kinda
and some parts that are fragmentary (like Vol 2)Are you referring mainly to the falling rate of profit, or are there other conclusions worth knowing about?
That's the big one, but discussions of the credit system and ficticious capital as well
Oh god, that's bad. Surely you can think of something better.
I have no idea what people do to the spines of their books to where they're all fucked up when they finish with them. All the wear on these is just from toting them around with me everywhere
I fold them in half when I read. But I'm abusive and have needed to glue pages back in before lol
Tbf, it depends on the publisher. I've never had to glue in pages from Zone Books for example. Some publishers really cheap out on binding
Easy, with these same books use whatever I can find as a bookmark (or more than one rando thin thing) while I hunt down whatever I was typing or scrawling notes on, maybe if said thing was a 2000s laptop slap it down on the book while I reflect on my notes. Then another good one is jumping from page whatever to the references to see the full context and then taking note on that, then flipping back, paper books hate that.
I crack the hell out of the spine before reading cause it keeps the book open easier
Apparently there are some people who tear out a page when they're done reading it
I'm not saying that there's a book hell, but I am saying that you would definitely go there for that
Apparently there are some people who tear out a page when they're done reading it
Goddamn, I was coming here to call you a blasphemer for defacing your books with highlighting but that is some ninth circle shit.
Marking up books is good and everyone should do it when reading. Fiction and non fiction. You're actively engaging with the material. Of course unless it's a shared book or ya just don't want to
I get why people do it, especially for dense texts like these, but to me it’d be like hard-coding a commentary track from someone who hasn’t seen the full movie.
I think that’s part of the fun. You go back and read and see what you missed or realize you still don’t understand a concept or learn that you now understand and want to dig deeper. If now you understand and find the commentary unhelpful you erase.
I don't generally highlight when I'm reading for my own edification, but I can't read something dense like this without doing so. It just helps me slow down and think about what is actually important in what I'm reading
My Volume I is littered with post-it notes that stop abruptly after Chapter 10.
That is incredibly strange behavior. Books ain't cheap and the library really won't approve of it.
Do that but use every page to roll a joint and try to finish capital
You can 'break in' a spine without breaking it!! You stand it on its spine, ready to read, with all the pages closed. Then you open a few pages from the front to the table. Then a few pages from the back. Then a few from the front. Then the back. Etc, etc, working towards the middle. It stops the spine warping, too.
The respective thicknesses reminds me of His Dark Materials. Sorry I had to go all lib there.
Now I start working on my backlog of books, which has been accumulating. I already started Some Desperate Glory the other day, which is the diary of a WWI British officer. Probably the next commie thing will be Hammer and Hoe, which I already have. After that maybe some Gramsci
Roughly what ratio do you suppose it could have been condensed by while conveying 90% of the information?
Really hard to say, but you could probably cut out like 20%. Except that 20% is mostly review and summary that's really helpful to the reader. There's certainly stuff I just skimmed, particularly the detailed critiques of other economists like Adam Smith. But it's not like that that stuff is unimportant per se
Appreciate the answer, I didn't really expect one! I had trouble with the first few chapters where I felt like I got the picture but he kept on about it. Others have said Marx takes the garden path quite a bit. Do you think it was worth reading or would you recommend the marx engles reader instead?
I'm most of the way through Vol 1, and it got a lot more engaging. The mass of repetition and minor variation to establish concepts mostly ended (and when it comes up it's in much smaller chunks) and it got into some infuriating and fascinating historical analysis. Perhaps try skipping to those chapters to see if they work for you?
I think it was worth it. But generally I would recommend everyone read the first volume, which is the most complete and engaging. Volume 2 gets much more technical, and believe me, I appreciated him pausing to review and summarize when that happens. Honestly it's a lot more accessible than the literary theory I was trained on in that regard
Those are some fun stickers I put on there to celebrate my favorite OS
No, you have to read The Dialectics of Dependency by Ruy Mauro Marini. I'm not kidding. Do it soon.
It's my answer to the meme question "which book is Capital vol. 4" so I rate it over any kind of Adornoid navel gazing or MMT authors' 400 pages of "wow did you know neoliberalism is stupid?"
Also bump this one up as it may help you eliminate some others off the list
A Deep Plough: Unscrambling Major Post-Marxist Texts from Adorno to ŽižekMore on reading list nuking certain traditions https://monthlyreview.org/2023/06/01/the-myth-of-1968-thought-and-the-french-intelligentsia-historical-commodity-fetishism-and-ideological-rollback/
What level of preparation do you think someone should have before reading these volumes? Any good prerequisites?
I have a friend who told me last year he was going to read them all because he studied economics and was interested in that aspect. I wasn't sure that was really a good idea as their first exposure. But I did not study economics.
ive read it
most of it is REALLY dry and boring economic stuff
so id say pace yourself and dont be ashamed to skim a little over the super indepth parts about specific economic shit. marx actually makes a few mathematical errors himself in those parts anyways (it doesnt alter his arguments) but if you arent studying it academically then just getting the main concepts is good enough (it was for me)
I agree with most of this, but not that it's mostly dry and boring. It's difficult at times, and complex, but also passionate and funny. Mostly I felt like I was finally understanding things that had been in front of my face my whole life without me really seeing them, and that was what was compelling enough to keep me going
But yeah I skimmed the less relevant stuff. I'm sure the critiques of Adam Smith are devastating but maybe I'll come back to them some other time
fair enough
what i found impressive is how you see all that, the extent of which the marxist critique of capitalism is explored in those three volumes and then you realize he really did manage to compress it down and simplify the ideas pretty fucking well in the manifesto
It is pretty impressive. I don't think everyone will want or need to see exactly how he reached his conclusions, but it's a staggering achievement
I'd say that they teach you how to read them in terms of content. Vol 1 prepares you for Vol 2 and so on. I don't have an economics background at all, but I do have a background in literary theory, and it is helpful to have personal strategies for parsing dense texts. Personally I highlight and annotate to force myself to slow down and parse the text and think about what the key points being made are
There's a lot in there. Marx' brain was filled to the brim. He's not like a modern academic with one specialty. A background in economics might prepare you for the economics parts. But it's a critique of political economy and he's a great storyteller so there are loads of literary references and historical parts.
These aspects might be lost on a 'mathematical economist'. The book will challenge a lot of what an economist thinks they know; that presents it's own difficulties of cognitive dissonance.
A background in literature or history will prepare someone well for those broader narrative elements but perhaps not the equations. (I'm not a mathematician but Marx holds your hand through the equations so I understood his argument and my maths ability has shot up to the extent that I can now read and understand other economic and political economic texts.)
A background in liberal theory made Capital a fairly straightforward work for me. I started with some chapters in Part Eight on Primitive Accumulation. These are really juicy. Then I read the chapter on the working day. Equally juicy. Then I wanted/needed to know how it all fit together and how someone could have such insights. That's when I started from the beginning (including the prefaces, etc) and read to the back cover.
David Harvey talks of teaching Capital as an elective to CUNY students from all different disciplines. He was surprised to find how differently it was read by people with different expertise. The literature/creative writing students got loads out of Marx' metaphors of vampires, for example.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's something in there for everyone. Really it's a text for the whole family.
One thing that a reader will need to get accustomed to is the historical materialist method. As it sees everything as interconnected, historical materialists can sometimes flood you with information that doesn't seem to be connected. It's necessary because himat is a 'many-sided' approach.
You don't always see how all the sides connect together until the end of a chapter/book. It's frustrating at first but some writers are better at building the connections as they go and, in any event, you get used to it and then wonder why everyone doesn't do it this way. For this reason, I'd suggest reading the 'Eighteenth Brumaire' first. Because it's shorter and will demonstrate the himat structure.
Otherwise, Capital was written for the working class to get stuck into. It's far more accessible and interesting than many people think. I honestly couldn't put it down. Give it a go, you and your friend, and discuss your different perspectives and what stands out to each of you.
David Harvey talks of teaching Capital as an elective to CUNY students from all different disciplines. He was surprised to find how differently it was read by people with different expertise. The literature/creative writing students got loads out of Marx' metaphors of vampires, for example.
There's a massive Gothic strain especially in the first Volume which is fascinating, and there's a body of critical work analyzing it as well
If I was planning to write on it or teach it I would have definitely done tags
