Literally what was I waiting for, that shits so good :marx
Protip as you continue reading: Post inspirational and informative bits as you go instead of telling everyone to "read theory". You'll be educating people and that's praxis. 😎
Also, good job on picking it up! I'm about to start as well! :)
You can skip/skim the first bit and come back to it later, with a better understanding. A lot of reading groups do this.
I find this to be true a lot with more theoretical/philosophical works. Before they get to the meat and potatoes, they first take the time to explain wat they mean when they say "meat" or "potatoes". This bit is generally dry, but when you get to the part where they start applying the terms the started defining, then it gets interesting and fun. So keep reading, even if have no idea what you just read. It will make sense later.
Chapter three kills literally everyone. Honestly, I'd advise doing what you're doing (re-reading it), making notes if you're not already, and either using the Harvey guide book or his lectures
David Harvey. See my other comment in this thread :) . One thing I would ad here is that he says the first three chapters ar the hardest. I'm like halfway in now and I've found that to be true. Hope that helps!
Plz dont read David Harvey
It adds 300 pages to a 600 page book and he gets a lot of it wrong. Just pick up a notebook and highlighter and make notes and study it like you would when learning something new
Couple this with his recent ridiculous video where he declared "capitalism must not be overthrown otherwise millions will starve"
Imagine studying Marx your entire life and becoming a shitlib.
He said what now? His podcast/YouTube is called the Anti Capitalist Chronicles... Where and in what context did he say this?
Harvey cautions against the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism on the grounds that such a strategy is outmoded. His central argument is that capitalism is “too big to fail” and thus the best we can hope for are incremental reforms to prop up the system. Since capitalism is too big to fail, Harvey argues, it is necessary that we not allow it to fail: “We have to actually spend some time propping it [capitalism] up, trying to reorganize it, and maybe shift it around very slowly and over time to a different configuration. But a revolutionary overthrow of this capitalist economic system is not anything that’s conceivable at the present time. It will not happen, and it cannot happen, and we have to make sure that it does not happen.”
One of Harvey’s arguments on the need to tame capitalism rather than replace it is that perilous internecine conflict worldwide has to be avoided at all cost. He calls on the left to try “to manage this capitalist system in such a way that we stop it being too monstrous to survive at the same time as we organize the capitalist system so that it becomes less and less dependent upon profitability … so that the world’s population can reproduce in peace and tranquility, rather than the way it’s going right now, which is not peace and tranquility at all, but eruptions. And these eruptions can, of course, also lead to conflicts between different parts of the world, and geopolitical conflicts, and the like.”
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/david-harveys-new-thesis-is-that-capitalism-is-too-big-to-fail-is-it
Imagine claiming to have studied Marx inside out and becoming a reformist lol
From the same video he says:
So there is that way of looking at things. I don't share that view. I think yeah, there are some acute problems with the neoliberal form of capitalism, but there are certain parts of the world where you don't really have strong neoliberal capitalism and you've still got the judgment that the economic system, the economic model, is not working, and that economic model is that of capitalism.
So I guess we're still good but I'll listen to the whole thing later today to see if this holds water. I've been listening to his podcast regularly and he is always talking about progressing from capitalism so I do not believe that he was saying that. From the part I just read it sounds like he was just saying people make that argument sometimes.
Edit:
Okay, so this is the point he is actually making and it's really not a bad point:
So that is, if you like, one half of the problem. But the other part of the problem is this: that in Marx's time if there was a sudden collapse of capitalism, most people in the world would be able to feed themselves and reproduce. Because most people were self-sufficient in their local area with the kinds of, you know, things they needed to live on – in other words, people could put breakfast on their table irrespective of what was going on in the global economy. Right now that's no longer the case. Most people in the United States, but increasingly, of course, in Europe, and in Japan, and now increasingly in China, and India, and Indonesia, and everywhere are dependent entirely upon the delivery of food to them, so that they get the food from the circulation of capital. Now, in Marx's time, like I say, that would have not been true but now this is a situation where probably around 70 or maybe 80 percent of the world's people are dependent upon the circulation of capital in order to assure their food supply, in order to deliver them the kinds of fuels which are going to allow them mobility, going to actually deliver them all the necessities to be able to reproduce their daily life.
So this is a, I think, a situation which I can really summarize in the following kind of way: that capital right now is too big to fail. We cannot imagine a situation where we would shut down the flow of capital, because if we shut down the flow of capital, 80 percent of the world's population would immediately starve, would be rendered immobile, would not be able to reproduce themselves in very effective ways. So we cannot afford any kind of sustained attack upon capital accumulation. So the kind of fantasy that you might have had – socialists, or communists, and so on, might have had back in 1850, which is that well, okay, we can destroy this capitalist system and we can build something entirely different – that is an impossibility right now. We have to keep the circulation of capital in motion, we have to keep things moving, because if we don't do that, we are actually stuck with a situation in which, as I've said, almost all of us would starve.
And this means that capital in general is too big to fail. It is too dominant, and it is too necessary to us that we cannot allow it to fail. We have to actually spend some time propping it up, trying to reorganize it, and maybe shift it around very slowly and over time to a different configuration. But a revolutionary overthrow of this capitalist economic system is not anything that's conceivable at the present time. It will not happen, and it cannot happen, and we have to make sure that it does not happen. But at the same time, the other side of the coin is capital is too big, too monstrous, too huge to survive, that it cannot survive in its current form. So on the one hand, we can't do without it; on the other hand, it is on a suicidal path. So this is, if you like, what I think the central dilemma is.
So there are numerable contradictions in a capitalist system right now. One of the big contradictions, as I've mentioned, is incredible class and social inequality. The second is the environmental aggregates. But then comes the kind of question of this too-big-to-fail, too-monstrous-to-survive contradiction. And I think that that is the major contradiction that we should be addressing. And therefore a socialist program, or an anti-capitalist program, of the sort that I would want is one about trying to manage this capitalist system in such a way that we stop it being too monstrous to survive at the same time as we organize the capitalist system so that it becomes less and less dependent upon profitability and becomes more and more organized so that it delivers the use values to the whole of the world's population – so that the world's population can reproduce in peace and tranquility, rather than the way it's going right now, which is not peace and tranquility at all, but eruptions. And these eruptions can, of course, also lead to conflicts between different parts of the world, and geopolitical conflicts, and the like.
So there it is. I think we need to think about this idea that capital is too big to fail, but at the same time that it's too monstrous to survive.
Its a fkn terrible point given how 9 million people starve to death each year while food is buried to keep its market price high
He's not saying that's good. He's saying if the forces of capital would be to just stop producing now 80% of the world population would not be able to feed themselves. That's 5,600,000,000 people starving. This is a fact we will have to reckon with. This does not mean capitalism is good. It means we're way deep into it.
This is literally the same argument every anti communist or revisionist has made since 1917
To not "rock the boat"
Actually Existing Socialism has proved itself a much more efficient system than capitalism. The fastest countries to industrialise were Marxist-Leninist ones that achieved in 10-20 years what took the Western capitalist states 100-150 years to develop
Harvey is garbage and I'm convinced the only people allowed to practice Marxism in bourgeois Academia (in the US) are Marxists that spread nonsense like a firehose like Harvey, Wolff etc
That's not how I read the argument he's making at all. I would urge a little caution before completely discarding some of the most powerful voices we have on the left, even if they're not left enough for your taste. I think calling a man garbage who has been spending his entire career railing against capitalism and teaching Marxism is very unwise from a strategic perspective. I think that's doing a service to the bourgeoisie and we can find more constructive ways to critique points we don't agree with.
I’ve been listening to it in audiobook form, so a decent amount of rewinding lmao
Honesty I think it’s good to not get too caught up in the fine details of it, if one particular bit is hard to grasp (like the fucking quantitives and qualitives switching back and forth at light speed), if you can pull the general meaning from the topic that’s good enough. Obviously that doesn’t mean sparknotes the whole thing, but giving yourself leeway is useful
That's good. Congrats on getting one of the biggest foundational texts under your belt.
For those that also want to tackle it and find reading a little you know. . . David Harvey does have a lecture type reading companion that he recorded while filming Family Feud. Another option is a podcast by the name of Marx Madness. I liked to put them on when I went out for my morning runs. They then moved onto State and Revolution then Imperialism. So that's pretty dope, cool cool cool. But what ever it takes to get that first "read" under your belt. Read it, watch youtube, listen to podcast. What ever just get all the highlights in your noggin. At the very least if anyone is throwing shade at you, you can casually ask "have you read kapital?" Awesome flex, great theory. Looking thick. Solid. Tight. Keep us all posted on your continued progress with any new theory read or vid clips. Show us what you got comrade. Wanna see how freakin' huge, solid, thick and tight your praxis can get. Thanks for the motivation.
What's really helping me is David Harvey's Reading Capital class on YouTube. Apart from being an intellectual powerhouse and an absolute stallion, the man has been teaching this class annually since like 1970, so he has has some things to say. What it also does is change it from one huge book to get through into a few chapters before I get to watch Harvey again. It's great stuff.
Getting different opinions generally seems like a good idea. Thanks, I'll check it out. Out of curiosity, was this said in the context of "I think Harvey doesn't have the right take" or more in the spirit of "it's always good to hear different takes" ?
Awesome, I never heard that. You've definitely peaked my interest. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing, seems like a really good resource, I’ll have to look into it more!
Well done comrade
The book should be seen as almost a car manual
You see Marx pulling out pieces of the capitalist system and turning this way and that way and explaining their function and how they can't be anything else
It starts to fit a bit more together though
Have a pack of post it notes handy to fill up ur pages and make notes
Fun fact, the only reason Lenin was communist was because of all the lenin math