for a future article

Why read Karl Marx "as literature"? At first glance, this is not an especially promising pursuit--as literature, it's not much. There are large swaths of Capital's three volumes than which it is difficult to imagine anything more boring. And, from a Marxist perspective, subjecting Capital to close-readings seems like a death-knell for the book's political relevance, its furthest removal from practical engagement in the world. To declare Capital a "literary" artifact is to neutralize "the working man's Bible" by installing it in the same canon as "Pippa Passes" and "What Maisie Knew." Lastly, reading something "as literature" is very close to reading it as fiction, which Capital assuredly is not. In fact, I undertake these brief remarks rather to insist upon the vitality of Marx's economic writings than to bury them in a filigreed formalism. For one thing, to speak about the literary aspects of a work at least implies that one is discussing the entire work. No one would write about Anna Karenina without having read to the last page; nonetheless, very few people read Capital to its last page. I will make a case for doing so in this study. Secondly, any "return" to Capital seems apropos at this political moment, for this book is not just a toolbox for cultural critique in the sense fashionable after the Frankfurt School. Capital is a line drawn in the sand, asking: will capitalism overcome its internal contradictions and survive until the end of time, or (as Marx argues) is another world possible, and our historical task to make that world? These are implicitly questions of narrative, of temporality. Without this time-element, Capital would just be a piece of Hegelian muck-raking, a static and somewhat abstract picture of Victorian industry. But the nihilating force of time is at once our entry into academic "narratology" and the locus of Marx's explosively revolutionary thought: that capitalism has an expiration date. Needless to say, to abolish the factor of time, intellectually, then as now is to apotheosize capitalism in the eternal order of things, with all of its appalling brutalities and indecencies.

Sartre's existentialism is not now in vogue, but it is a truism from that philosophy that every project is constituted by its projection of a future state of affairs. What is projected in Capital is the overcoming of capitalism--a project which is not without temporal, futural significance for us today. And so it is in anything but the spirit of withdrawn aesthetic contemplation that one should attend to these narratological questions in reading Capital.