Two Ways of Approaching Marx's Capital

In his 1886 preface to the English edition of Capital, Marx’s longtime collaborator Friedrich Engels says that the book was already becoming known as “the Bible of the working class.” Sadly, he may have been more right about that than he realized. In the thirteen decades since he wrote that line, a great many socialists and communists have treated Capital more or less exactly the way the most fervent believers treat the Old and New Testaments—which an adamant atheist like Engels should know is the last way a book full of valuable insights should be treated. Like the Bible, Capital sits unopened on a vast number of bookshelves. Both are treated with great reverence by people who’ve never read past, in one case, the interminable lists of “begats” in the Book of Genesis or, in the other, Marx’s examples about the exchange value of yards of linen in Ch. 1. Just as Exodus is a better read than Genesis, Capital really starts to hum around the beginning of Ch. 4. But many people who enroll in study groups with the best of intentions lose interest too early to find out.

Part of the problem is that too many of these readers don’t read Capital for the arguments, but to hear conclusions announced to them as if the gods of dialectical materialism had delivered them to Marx at the top of Mount Sinai. When you read him, instead, for what he was—a brilliant but fallible historical thinker who got a lot of important things right—you tend to start talking back to the text. No differently than when you’re reading Aristotle or Kant or, I don’t know, Max Weber, you start to ask yourself questions while you read, like:

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