The Joy of Reading Marx

In many conversations about reading Marx's Capital, most of the people in my particular circle seem to assume that the desire to read this monstrous book is evidence that I am a Marxist.  This is not the case.  I know as well as anyone that Marx's revolutionary ideals failed in practice and am certainly not going to advocate for a return to Leninism or whatever.  Closer to the truth is the fact that I am deeply interested in Marx's analysis AND critique of capitalism and am eager to know more about his analysis since I understand from scholars that where he failed in providing an effective response to overthrowing capitalism, the man understood capitalism and its many dimensions better than any economist of his time.  

I would not be so arrogant as to read the book completely on my own knowing that my ability to understand economic theories and the like is average at best and probably more like below average.  So, I'm reading along with David Harvey's online lectures because I read parts of Harvey's The Postmodern Condition last year and appreciated his manner of thinking and the way that he communicates his ideas.  I'm learning a lot about key points of Marxist theory that I didn't quite grasp before, especially the term "circulation" and why this term is so important in contemporary theories of affect and the notion of movement in postmodern theory in general.

Aside from the insights, I'm also finding the reading of the book to be less onerous and more intriguing than I thought it would be.  Marx has a way of using strange similes and metaphors that give one pause...sometime because they have the air of anti-semitism (Marx was born into a Jewish family that converted to Christianity the year before he was born), but more importantly because these metaphors are glimpses into the subjective side of Marx's thinking beyond his methodical dialectic examination of capitalism.  

My favorite metaphor so far is from Chapter 10, The Working Day: "Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." Oh la la!  Vampires?!  His vitriol toward the capitalist who he understands to value capital more than workers/people comes out in full force only in these metaphors.  His voice of general outrage is only hinted at when he explains algebraic formulas for pages and pages to illustrate how workers are exploited by basically being paid for 6 hours of labour each day that he works 12 hours (and yes, the gender is important because the book also nods toward a misogynistic view in which women entering the workplace would devalue the labour of men...).  These metaphors often come at the end of a mathematical analysis and help to punctuate his point in a manner that I'm not accustomed to reading.

I'm really enjoying Capital way more than I thought I would, and the good news is that because I'm not reading it for a class I can focus on the parts that interest me most.