The Marx Read Along: Capital v. 1

Right now this is only a discussion between me and Capital. But anybody is free to join the discussion. Right now I mediate comments, if any shall come. If other people want to share in the mediation task, they only need let me know. Comments, such as the last made by Richard Tebrick of sorglosenacht.com (server still down ;-( !) which still demand attention, will be addressed only as I can afford time to give them attention -but of course they are always there for others to respond to. With luck I can even weave my response into this more structured environment. 

Be nice, and break all the rules, (”but, don’t really break any rules” -as the sketch comedy troupe, Mr. Show, has the petit entrepeneur, ‘Marilyn Mozzerella of the Marilyn Mozerella pizzeria franchise’, tell us in an employee training video. 

I promise you. There will be no bloody diapers in this discussion. But to keep a diaper free environment means we have to keep the blood and shit outside. Don’t be belligerent; drink your Orange Juice. And on that ‘natural’ though actually manufactured sugary-orangy substance, let us begin.

Preface to Volume 1 of Capital.

I think it is vital to dwell on the Preface to Volume 1. In fact. Expect this ‘introductory’ discussion to take several posts. I will try to spend an hour on it a day, and post every day the product of that hour.

1  Historicize (ha ha Jon. Remember Dr. Carrol(l)?)

Marx only lived to write three introductions for Capital -preface to first, second, and French editions. Engels drafted all subsequent Preface material for other editions of volume 1 (including the first English edition) as well as for volumes 2 and 3. Karl Kautsky of the German Social Democratic Party did so for volume 4 -which right now seems a very distant place. Fortunately Marx did live long enough to write the most important preface -the one to the First Edition.

I say this because I feel this particular preface represents Marx’s studied justification for engaging in this line of activity, advocacy, and thought. If Capital was to be the ‘magnum opus’ of his critique of political economy, he needed to produce an abstract to the much longer answer to the inevitable question: Why are you doing this Karl?

We’ll get to that. First more biographical nonsense that previous discussions (in the classroom no less) force me to reproduce here.

Marx was sick on and off throughout much of the time Capital, in all its volumes, was written. He was dead when the majority of it was published. In adopting the role of activist, he subjected himself and his family to a great deal of poverty at the hand of state as well as a sizeable share of social-academic censorhip (which also [partially] precipitated Marx’s ‘canonization’).

He was exiled from Germany, Belgium, and I think France as well (hazy) [i'll wiki this] before England gave him his final home in working class London. One does not live well when fleeing from one ghetto to the next. Marx and family were no exception.

Some people are tempted into (sometimes extensive, and often not beyond novel) biographical evaluations and critiques when it comes to any literature body. The more controversial the figure (it seems to me) the greater people bring biography to bear. 

I have heard Marx’s work criticzed on the grounds he himself was a selfish individual. He pursued a line of study and discussion despite the very poverty it imposed on Jenny and his children. He made ’self-destructive’ and ’irresponsible’ choices. When does integrity and principle have a threshold, beyond which selfishness and irresponsibility rear?

Personally, I tend to agree with Orwell’s observation that ‘all writers are ‘vain, selfish and lazy’. Sure. Marx could have made other choices. Whatever. Progeny aside, what remains of him and his fall-out left a great deal of text. Regardless the psychology or ‘misdeeds’ (ha ha) which put this text in existence, it has (at the very least) a number of points interesting enough to not be so easily dismissed with platitudinal judgements on biography alone.

In much the same way a blow job is not really relevant to the job of President of the United States, it seems many people feel a blow job can make a ‘bad’ president. Marx is no Napoleon, and I feel Marx’s ‘bad’ blow jobs are just as irrelevant to his texts on political economy as ‘bad’ blow jobs are to the performance of heads of state.

Another real annoying one. I have heard people reduce Marx’s work to a ‘cranky exhibition’ of his own impoverished status -a mentality of having been denied a reward for which no (or the wrong kind of) work was done. What’s all that whining?! We people who obtain the privilege of complaining of work mainly (or so it seems to me) comtempt or pity the people who complain about not having it.

It is really curious to me that both these biographical arguments aimed at Marx are based upon very similar popular characterizations of ghettoized people in general -the bums, the gangsters, the Muslims, the Blacks, the white trash. Wrong choices. Wrong cultural markers. Always whining but never doing. A segregationist mentality of the process of a society’s reproduction, but a segregationist mentality that likes to adorn itself with jingles of consumer choice.

Well. The 1 hour write, 30 minute 1st edit is over.