Karl Marx Das Kapital 50 greatest books

Kapital crimes
FRANCIS WHEEN http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080229.w50bookskapital/BN Story/Entertainment From Saturday's Globe and Mail March 1, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT "Of course," the French theorist Louis Althusser wrote, "we have all read, and all do read Das Kapital." Of course, we haven't and we don't. Even Althusser himself, who produced a book on the subject, eventually confessed in his memoirs that he was a "trickster and deceiver" who had read no more than "a few passages of Marx." Yet, in a broader sense, he was right: Ever since the publication of Das Kapital's first volume in 1867 the only one completed in Marx's lifetime we have read it in the world about us, in the dramas and conflicts of contemporary history.

Karl Marx Like Moliere's bourgeois gentilhomme, who discovered to his amazement that for more than 40 years he had been speaking prose without knowing it, many have absorbed Marx's ideas without ever noticing. Think of the famous slogan that Bill Clinton's campaign staff stuck on their wall during the 1992 presidential election: "It's the economy, stupid" a perfect prcis of Marx's Page 1 of 3

Karl Marx Das Kapital argument that we are creatures of our material circumstances, and that changes in the methods of production profoundly affect all our social relations far beyond the workplace. Though many who haven't read it assume that his unfinished masterpiece is an economic treatise, Marx himself regarded it as a work of art, breaking through the narrow conventions of political economy with a radical literary collage that juxtaposes voices and quotations from literature and mythology, from factory inspectors' reports and fairy tales. Das Kapital probably has as many allusions to Shakespeare as to Adam Smith. It mixes satire, melodrama, Gothic horror and reportage to do justice to the irresistible, yet mysterious, force that governs our material motives and interests. Which is probably why some readers find it such a struggle to get beyond the first few pages. Nothing has prepared us for a work like this: It's rather as if a mid-Victorian gent in a London gallery suddenly came upon a Jackson Pollock drip-painting. Marx made the task harder by placing one of the most abstract and head-spinning sections the essay on commodities as the opening chapter. "I assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself," he replied testily when his friend Frederick Friedrich Engels begged him to shove it further back. But there was a purpose in his perversity. Look at his choice of verbs in the very first sentence: "The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an 'immense collection of commodities'; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form." (My italics.) We are entering a world of apparitions, of delusion and hallucinatory topsy-turvydom, in which inanimate objects commodities, whether an iPod or a fashionable handbag acquire tremendous life and vigour, while the toiling humans who produce them are reduced to the status of inanimate machines. They are menaced by their own creation, like Frankenstein and his monster, as Marx reminds us. In his chapter on The Working Day, peopled by weeping women and exhausted child labourers, he presents the human cost of the apparently impersonal formulas brandished by classical economists, giving us scenes reminiscent of Dante's Inferno. Das Kapital is not holy writ, despite the strivings of some Marxists to present it as such. There are silences and omissions, errors and misconceptions. The fact that he brilliantly discovered a new continent the terra incognita of industrial capitalism doesn't mean that he mapped it all correctly. Even so, by penetrating the veils of illusion, he exposed for the first time the exploitation, alienation and creative destruction by which capitalism lives.

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Karl Marx Das Kapital After the end of the Cold War, some critics suggested that Das Kapital was now obsolete, irrelevant, exploded but not for long. At the time of the 1998 market panics in Asia and elsewhere, the Financial Times wondered aloud if we had moved "from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade." The article was headlined: Das Kapital Revisited. As long as capital endures, Das Kapital will never lose its resonance or its power to bring the world into a new and sharper focus. Francis Wheen is the author of "Karl Marx: A Life" and "Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography."

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