let's read 'Capital'

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > let's read 'Capital'

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

Really looking forward to this. I have all three volumes of the Penguin edition along with the Grundrisse.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2017 23:46

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:16

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

Librivox entry on Capital. It doesn't match up perfectly for all translations, but for anyone looking for an audiobook, here ya go.

https://librivox.org/capital-volume-1-by-karl-marx/

# ¿ Apr 11, 2017 05:16

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

I'm actually thoroughly enjoying Mandel's introduction thus far.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 23:16

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

The difficulty from chapters 1-3 to 4-6 is the difference between night and day.

# ¿ May 5, 2017 04:37

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

Motherfuck this is a long chapter.

# ¿ May 30, 2017 04:16

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

Oh poo poo I only got like 15 pages left out of the whole chapter so I'm like crazy ahead. I thought the whole chapter was the week's assignment.

# ¿ May 31, 2017 03:29

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

Peel posted:

god drat

My favorite bit of the chapter so far is when he talks about the English children dying young from opiate use and Marx said, "India and China have had their revenge."

# ¿ May 31, 2017 17:04

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

Ruzihm posted:

As much as I would like to say I get it, there's just a lot of nuance to try and digest. It's a good book to read and re-read and re-read

My dad used to always read a few things of the bible every night to meditate on before he went to bed. I have a feeling this book will be that for me.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2017 23:31

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

Also, please articulate how his conception of the capitalist class system is NOT exploitative.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2017 22:56

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

Electric Owl posted:

Tbh the dialectical method wasn't really clear to me until I read Zizek's "The Sublime Object of Ideology" which I recommend for anyone interested in the course contemporary Marxism is taking (focused more on the economy of desire and the social apparatus involved in repressing and elevating certain desires rather than a focus on modes of production). But in it he lays down a sort of easy to intuit way.

He first starts his examination of dialectics off quoting Lacan saying "It was none other than Karl Marx who invented the notion of symptom." And then examining in what relation commodities (Marx's interest) and dreams (Lacan's interest) intersect and how is it that dialectics as a method seems applicable to so many things beyond Marx's narrow interests of economy.

So, the basic premise is therefore that there are latent tensions always in existence of the body of the Thing [capitalism / dreams] because the rules to the Thing that necessarily define it (i.e. it's text) can also be understood to determine it. That is, so long as we're in the realm of business-as-usual as it pertains to the Thing (and not in its pre-conscious radical "anything can happen" state) there are necessarily regularities one can point to and describe certain inevitabilities of the system's functioning (i.e. symptoms) simply as a result of those regularities functioning according to its own rules. From that perspective one can see at what point certain contradictions to the system's whole functioning are already "built-in" at the moment of its conception.

For example, it was Marx's idea that bourgeois people are necessarily aware of the latent contradictions in their system, even if only at first. In the case of Marx's discourse on primitive accumulation for example, the first movers simply had to be aware of their intent to separate working people from their means of production. And then what follows is a form of psycho-social repression whereby the latent tensions of the system become obfuscated under so much absolutely necessary (according to Zizek) ideology meant to insure that the "suture points" of the system remain unacknowledged, because their existence inherently threatens the legitimacy of the system itself. It presents as a neatly closed-loop so long as nobody really takes the time to look at it in a way that "lays its contradictions bare", so to speak (in this case the contradiction would be that the colony of workers one gets having "freed" them from their own means of production means that you create a class of absolute dependents that will become inevitably replaced by machinery ((b/c of the pursuit of surplus value)) and given an ever depressing wage ((in real-terms)) that inevitably will erode their bargaining leverage with their employer and will directly threaten their livelihood as a class of dependents and create the space for a locus of social unrest; all of which is a natural conclusion based on the understanding of how latent and opposing desires, within the structural framework of the system, lead to certain predictable results and antagonisms).

I don't know if that cleared anything up so the best I think I can do is recommend that Zizek book lol

I like it. Though I think instead of "commodities" you'd be better off looking at the fetishism of commodities specifically. If only because fetishism is more universal and ripe with problems than the (in this case, commodity) form it takes.

Are his books easier to follow than his speaking manner? He goes off on a lot of tangents in his lectures. Ironically, I'm a person that goes off on a LOT of tangents.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2017 22:23

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey

Dare I say some Zizek? Freud? Althusser? Foucault?

Hilario Baldness has issued a correction as of 04:39 on Nov 6, 2017

# ¿ Nov 5, 2017 22:32

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:16

Hilario Baldness: Feb 10, 2005; Grimey Drawer

SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:

Reading hegel is masochistic imo

I tried to read Phenomenology of Spirit and I got galaxy brained in a bad way

# ¿ Nov 7, 2017 01:27

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > let's read 'Capital'