On the whole, the book gave me some motivation to try (again) to crack Capital.
Max Sawicky ------------ I tried for several years on and off to break into the stone wall gibberish that confronted me with Capital v.1. It was a very old translation, 1909 in a very well bound hardback that had survived numerous readings. I bought it at Moe's back in the early 1990s. I tried Bender's The Essential Writings and The Cambridge Companion and got pretty much nowhere. These were honest attempts reading say a hundred or more pages and I still got fed up. I really couldn't understand why Marx started a revolution and turned into a titanic monster of the whole western world for a century going on two. If I was my enemy, I never would have mounted such a fuss. Without a big stink, there would not have been enough people who read Marx in the US to even take over Berkeley. So how on earth did it get as far as the potential to destroy the planet and end civilization in a millennial nuclear winter? All of this over scribbling I couldn't understand? Finally, I sat down one night four years ago and watched David Harvey's lectures and DID THE HOMEWORK which was doing the assigned reading. It took over a month to get to chapter 15 going at it every other night or so. I went back to my student habits and kept notes on the sections to keep track of the sequences. I finally just pooped out. Later that year I finished it off. You have to get that far before it starts to break the pace of a agonizing repeative slog. I had stopped just short of where the text straighten out and began to roll. (I realized early the reason for the repetition. It's based on Hegel's method of dialectic to exhausion. You need to study Hegel to see it and that is a very annoying journey I wouldn't recommend.) Finally, I started to get it and understand why the fuss. Now there is probably a whole anti-Harvey school, but frankly fuck them. Harvey did it for me, got me over the mountain. I am not interested in endless quibbling over what Marx meant, whether he was right or wrong on this or that. The blunt point of all that writing was we are going to live in a god awful nightmare until we beat the holy shit out of the capital death grip on our society. Here is the lecture series. Pretend you are going to nightschool. http://davidharvey.org/ My copy was a different translation, varied in read passages, and was a pain to orient myself during the lectures. Get this translation: http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Classics/dp/0140445684 The page numbers might differ, but the quotes will be the same. Don't argue with the text. Just relax and accept it. Argue and interpret later, after you've finished it. This is like school, so stop interrupting the class with all your butts. (Just read Jim Devine's post, so there are the answers to your buts, but stop all that and get through the text. Julio's comments are also great and together they reminded me of various sections. I read it in so short a period that a lot of the fine points just blew over my head. If you can study it on that kind of detail, so much the better.) Try to remember Marx is writing against the economic theories of his moment, which are not much different from our own. Since I spent most of my working life in obnoxious small business maintenance shops, that was the world that I used to understand Marx. In that context, Marx was right on. I could see the points directly from work memory. Study aids. This course needs motivation and you can get that through internet sources. Put some Lewis Hine photographs up next to Harvey and look at them every once in a while. Type Lewis Hine photography of child labor and click images. You'll get several pages worth. Click the thumnails for enlargement. Read the wikis on Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. They are short but help a lot on historical context. For extra credit, watch Germinal (1994) with Gerard Depardieu. I could only find a spanish language version for free. I had already read the novel and remembered the general sequence. I would suggest the novel, but reading Marx is enough reading to get through. When Marx finally drills home, you can get that feeling of adventure again. I did and watching Egypt blow up was like watching something I never thought would happen again, only on a much more vast scale. It died or has apparently, but for those weeks several million people were living on the edge, breathless, going to the square. Then I read Trotsky's monument, The History of the Russian Revolution, I could see the demonstrations, the all night meetings, the ceaseless movements through the city stirring the gods of history from their slumber. Another fantastic jolt. C'est possible. It is possible! CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
