How Nobody Actually Reads Karl Marx and Capital
Executive Summary
- Why Read Marx?
- The Importance of Writing Clearly and Completely
Why Read Marx?
After being criticized as a socialist by several critics, or worse a communist because I disagree with the bailout and the increased financial corruption of the US, I thought I would take a shot at reading Karl Marx. I downloaded the following PDF documents off of the internet:
- Capital: Book 1
- Capital: Book 2
- The Communist Manifesto
After reading parts of them I was actually quite surprised in that these books did not match my preconceived notions of them. Not that I necessarily thought they were not good work, only that my interpretation is that they would be more readable. The two books on capital read more like an economics paper with lengthy explanations on commodities and labor’s contribution to the resulting value of commodities. The Capitalist Manifesto is closer to what I expected but here again, the language used is quite surprising. On a number of occasions, the paper refers to the lower classes as “scum,” which must be how the author thinks the bourgeoisie see the lower classes (which is probably true). While the book has a number of legitimate points, it undermines itself with a lot of extreme language and a lack of coherence. This actually gets to one of our main conclusions about Karl Marx and Engels (who wrote a good part of some of these books), whatever the merits of their ideas, neither of them are very good or very clear writers. (The books are translated from the original German to English; however, German is quite close to English, so this is not much of an excuse.).
This fact is borne out by the fact that I needed to repeatedly go back and re-read sections, and even after doing so, was not clear as to what the author was saying. All three documents lack a coherent flow and seem to be more compilations of essays rather than books, and all of them could really benefit from a professional editor. One gets the feeling that both were rather undisciplined. The general flow seems to be that they got an idea, and wrote a chapter or section, then got another idea and wrote another chapter or section. After enough time passed, they had enough material for a book. If blogging had been around back in Marx and Engels’ time (of course they had newspapers and periodicals) this probably would have been a better outlet for their writing. What we learned from exposure to these books that that very few people are capable of reading any of them. It takes an extreme interest and extreme patience to get through them, and this is probably mostly limited to academics that are required to read them in order to complete their understanding of economic thought. One of the best explainers or interpreters of Marx we have read is Michael Hudson, a quite sophisticated economist who specializes in the history of economic thought. When Michael Hudson refers to and explains the ideas of Marx and Engels they seem to make sense, but when Marx or Engels explain them themselves without an interpreter like Dr. Hudson, they don’t seem to have the same resonance.
The Importance of Writing Clearly and Completely
Alan Macfarlane, a professor at Cambridge University, states that Marx’s work is particularly easy to understand. However, he recommends David MacClellan who extremely effectively interprets Marx.
https://www.amazon.com/Thought-Karl-Marx-Introduction/dp/0333639480/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2
MacClellan’s books on Marx is recommended, which may provide the editor that Marx should have had.
The listing on Marx in Wikipedia indicates that Marxism has always been greatly fractured with many different interpretations and fighting factions. In this way, it is similar to the Bible, another work that is poorly written and quite unclear. While the bible is completely schizophrenic (due to multiple authors, the fact most the stories are second hand over 60 years after the initial events were to have said to have happened, and the recipient of multiple translations), Marx work is less so, however, it also comes across as incomplete. One gets the strong feeling that Marx was a streak writer and probably wrote more from the perspective of inspiration than discipline, and in many areas, his reach was greater than his grasp. (in fact, Marx was at least 10 months late in producing the manuscript of Capital to his publisher and they threatened to find a different author.) By leaving out so much, this allows opportunists to come in and fill in the holes and in general interpret Marx work as they see fit.
This highlights the importance of comprehensive writing. Neither the Bible nor Marx’s works are internally consistent or coherent, and it has lead to a great deal of arguing because of this. This is not to say there are not good ideas in the Bible and in Marx work (as well as some bad ideas), and in fact, many things Marx predicted have come true, however having good ideas is not really good enough. Especially when people will try to implement your philosophy, it’s important to be clear and to admit the areas that you have not addressed rather than ignoring them. Here are a few interesting points of Marx’s work:
- Marx predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing investments in capital expenditures and a decreasing investment in labor. How Marx determined this is hard to see, however, he turned out to be correct. Since 1973, there have been great increases in the cost of capital equipment necessary to obtain new levels of productivity, but average wages in the US have actually gone down.
- Marx saw economic activity as a constant class struggle between those that own the means of production “bourgeoisie” and those that sell their labor “proletariat.” This is true, and is this class struggle, is essentially ignored in current economics in preference for tedious dissertations on interest rates and their effect on the economy. The lack of understanding of the class war nature of economics blinds Americans to the corruption of the financial system that is nothing more than government-granted concessions that favor politically connected groups. In this way, current conventional economics is essentially bankrupt, only asking those questions that concentrated power allow to be asked. However, one thing that Marx did not see, according to Michael Hudson, was that the financial industry would actually subordinate the rest of industry to its will. So while labor is subordinated to capital and industries, the industry itself is now subordinated to financial interests.
- Something that Marx predicted was that eventually hierarchy would fall away and people would be free. This has never happened and does not sound even remotely likely to ever happen.
Conclusion
Our conclusion is very few people have read Marx and that what is known about him is almost entirely second hand. It is a mark of ignorance to have a pre-judgment about an author simply on the basis of association or hearsay without ever having firsthand experience reading the author’s work. In this way, we think that the lauding of Adam Smith’s A Wealth of Nations (which is also mostly unread due to its extremely convoluted writing style that may be related to the fact it was written in the 1700s) is similarly based upon association, and not firsthand exposure or understanding. A while ago we wrote how people do not read Adam Smith’s A Wealth of Nation. As Noam Chomsky once pointed out, “it’s a book you are supposed to worship, but never read.” See this post, which proposes that Adam Smith is in fact extremely rarely read.
Reference
Interesting video on Marx
Interesting quote from Wikipedia on Marx
The American Marx scholar Hal Draper once remarked, “there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike.” The legacy of Marx’s thought has become bitterly contested between numerous tendencies which each see themselves as Marx’s most accurate interpreters, including (but not exclusively) Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism,Luxemburgism, and libertarian Marxism.– Wikipedia