Introductions

As I hope is evident from the title "Reading Capital," this blog will consist of Seth's and my simultaneous readings of Karl Marx's Capital over the coming weeks. My name is Ben, I am an English PhD student, and this will be my first time all the way through the book.

The original premise of this blog is that it would be fun to collectively read a difficult book on the internet; a similar project is imaginable for Finnegan's Wake , The Arcades Project, Clarissa, the Cantos, etc. Exclusively long works, you see, because my aim is not a "close reading," as in a seminar that very slowly parses out a text. It is more along the lines of, "How does this work?" And the specific genesis of this project, in my mind, is that Capital is something that we all "know" as a great work, as a reference point, and of Marxism as a school, as an -ism, as a political affiliation, as a pose, an inflection, etc., without having read it or really even being able to talk about it. Marx has so many great shorter works-- The Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Theses on Feuerbach--that any "overview" of the subject is afforded the luxury of skipping Capital altogether.

I am coming to this from an English "background," but I should immediately disavow the possible implications of that. I am not overly interested in reading Capital "as literature." As literature, it ain't much. I would even go so far as to feign ignorance of what "as literature" means. Certainly Capital is in a different class than Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Republic , or Fear and Trembling in terms of the literary (readable) merit of philosophical texts. And if the phrase only connotes a naive-deconstructive idea that the divide between philosophical and literary readings is blurry or non-existent, well, that need hardly be brought up.

I have a busy semester already without this 900 page book thrown on top, but I will try and also look into some other texts (Althusser, Lenin, Lukacs, Derrida) when I have time, although obviously the secondary literature on the subject is overwhelming. Needless to say, the aim of this endeavor is to learn something and to clarify Marx's thought, even if only for ourselves.

I will be reading the Vintage edition of the Ben Fowkes translation.