I've finally decided to tackle this thing over the next few months.
Other than just reading it, what have you found to be the best supplementary sources that explain it?
-I've heard David Harvey's lectures and books are pretty good.
-and that Althusser's reading of it was fairly influential to marxist literary theory today
Any suggestions?
What was your experience with Capital?
Abandon ship and read Human Action
marx is a waste of time; dont do it mate
his writing is extremely clouded by the dominant ideology and values of the time and place he was living, he just seems to repeat those same values back, which doesn't add much.
he also doesn't seem to have a very interesting, or transferable, methodology.
>extremely clouded
I disagree completely. Austrian economics has survived history which is not the case of Marxism or Socialism.
>no transferable ideology.
What is praxeology?
I mean have you even read the book or are you just going to throw adjectives at random?
what does he call it methological individuality? which basically ruins all of macroeconomics, which is a problem when writing this kind of overarching theory. Plus, if you've read any structuralism or poststructuralism or anything about social constructionism/constructivism it comes across as extremely naive to give that much agency to individual actors.
"surviving history" has nothing to do with the complaint i made about being clouded by dominant ideology.
ok this might be a bit idiocentric but this is my opinion
David Harvey and Althusser are/were infected with elements of post-modernism and should be ignored. Althusser didn't understand Marxs value theory any better than Bohm-Bawerk did and that made everything he said worthless. Harvey rejects the tendency of the rate of profit to diminish and other core elements of Marx which makes him a non-Marxists and more of a nu-Keynsian
Read the first chapter of Rosa Luxemburg's "Anti-Critique" (which was a response to her critics) which is pretty much a summary of her much longer work "The Accumulation of Capital" which builds off of Marxs schemas in volume 2
marxists.org
"Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory" by Paul Mattick (Harvey would disagree with most of this)
libcom.org
The "Law of the Falling Tendency of the Rate of Profit": It's Place in the Marxist Theoretical System and Relevance to the US Economy
archive.org
Don't make the mistake of only reading volume 1 and thinking that's it. Read all 3 volumes even though volume 2 is very boring and dense. The first 2 volumes are very theoretical and abstract but volume 3 is more practical and relevant and Marx deals with the dynamics of fictitious financial capital there which you're probably interested in.
Some of the terminology Marx uses can be confusing and overly philosophical with weird technical Hegelian terms or economics terms which are no longer used so maybe grab the following PDF's for when you come across weird terms:
A Hegel Dictionary by Michael Inwood
A Dictionary of Marxist Thought by Tom Bottomore
why the fuck do people act like Capital is some esoteric grimoire that needs explaining
just read it
thanks that is Great help. fucking saved.
It is quite esoteric if you are not familiar with hegalian terminology or classical economics which most people are not. You cannot just tell someone to "read" Capital
why would you read an economic text with no knowledge of economics
Praxeology is not macroeconomics. It's about individual choice and motives. A choice is a preference, whether it's objectively rationnal or not. A preference in the moment is the only thing that matters in an economical transaction. From this you can arrive to some kind of supply/demand equilibrium that is constantly moving.
Sure that you can sum all these to get to macroeconomics but that's giving away all the nuances and individual reasons for the transaction. It's putting the cart before the horse: you first need a transaction before arriving at an analysis of macroeconomics and the framework of praxeology is perfectly suited for that.
>Taking post-structuralism seriously
Post-structuralism is a self-defeating position. Nothing that came out of it should even being taken seriously. I'm sorry you haven't made pass this fog of confusion.
>surviving history
>being clouded by dominant ideology
Pick one and strictly only one.
Austrianism is interested in a very different object than classical economics was. Classical economics was interested and put under inspection the industrial process as a totality and the creation of new value. Classical economics wasn't that interested in transactions as such because they knew that had little to do with actual value creation. Industrial production created value by applying waged-labour to fixed-capital and this was the source of real wealth... not bidding up real-estate prices.
Individuals swapping objects back and forth in a closed system can infinitely inflate their exchange-values but this isn't the real substance of value. You cannot understand capitalism by mere circulation but you need to understand productive relations which cannot be done with marginal utility.
The objective process of the creation of value is the dirty secret capitalism has to hide and mystify.
...
1. Capital isn't a "textbook"
2. no one has been more empirically wrong than Keynes, governments even with all the policy "tools" he provided haven't been able to tame the anarchy of the business cycle and capitalism is still prone to reoccurring crises because crises is innate to the accumulation of capital itself and cannot be overcome without overcoming capital itself which is more obvious today than when Keynes was writing
youtube.com
good playlist on the LTV
didnt mean to quote him...
>What was your experience with Capital?
A regrettable waste of time.
Shit stopped being relevant after the industrial revolution became the industrial norm. I don't know how (or why) this idea that Capital contains eternally applicable criticisms, has continued to persist.
It's the economic/political equivalent of viewing modern Physics through the lens of Plato.
Yeah, it's totally like that. That's why modern physicists are more platonists than ever.
I don't know why you shitpost without kwoning a shit. Fucking morons.
>That's why modern physicists are more platonists than ever.
>
I can imply things too, m8. Try me.
OP here,
about irrelevancy I hope to follow up a good understanding of marxism with next the neomarxists and then the postmarxists or even nonmarxist left and so on. This is for literary and political theory work.
mostly it just seems to me like so much goes back to marx