Letter: Capital – difficult? (2010)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital – difficult?

Dear Editors

I’m all for anything that widens the attention to Marx. But is Capital really difficult – “most give up by chapter 3”, these “undeniable difficulties” referred to (Socialist Standard, July, Book Reviews), have I missed something? Marx himself does indeed say in the introduction that, excepting the subsections of chapter 1, the reader will have no reason to complain that it is difficult to understand – to learn anything new will have to be willing to do something on their own account.

After the materialist conception of history, commodity production, the source of profit or surplus value, the add-ons of absolute and relative surplus value and the simple relationships between constant capital, variable capital, surplus value, etc, Capital is a straightforward read and after about half way it broadens out into history, philosophy, sociology and wanders through all sorts of interesting perspectives.

I’m trying to think where the “difficulties” are, have I made assumptions where I should have found more meaning? To say that Capital is difficult must already put up a deterrent to would-be readers. But there are none that are not overcome by a few moments’ thought. But maybe it’s because today, if information is not transmitted by TV or DVDs and reading is only for trash newspapers and novels, that no one now simply lies back with a book, such as Capital, for just the sake of a good read. A good read is where you take your time, think about what’s on the page, even leave it for a while, come back to it, read it through, then read in parts picked either at random or of particular interest.

With a book like Capital, you can play with it, pick up on the secret of primary accumulation or the swindle of the national debt or the conditions of the working class in medieval times or contemporary times and so on.

I’ve just returned to Capital after thinking again about “most give up before chapter 3”. Well, even if that’s true, having got that far the basics are covered and the rest expands on that basis.

Please don’t continue this idea that Marx is difficult, it’s less difficult than a cookery recipe or flat-pack instructions. It’s a good read just taken as that but the explanations and ideas that come off the page are even now mind-blowing and change your own conception and perspective of the world around you. It applies not only to its time but to current events and explains these.

And if I want to know how much land the “free” peasants were entitled to, and how even that and the common was thieved off them in later times, it’s a history book in its own right. So where’s the problem, please explain.

Stuart Gibson, 

Dorset

Reply: 

The “undeniable difficulties” of the early chapters of Capital are so undeniable that, as you say, Marx felt it necessary to warn his readers of them in the introduction to his great work. William Morris, hardly an intellectual sluggard, said the book caused him “agonies of confusion of the brain”. But the difficulties are mostly over by the end of the third chapter, and the rest of Capital is, we agree, fairly straightforward but rewarding reading – Editors.