I decided to read Capital for two reasons. The first was my reading this spring of To The Finland Station, a passionate, idiosyncratic book about passionate, idiosyncratic people, especially Marx. I wanted to see the result of his long, proud, penurious London years and his bookwormery in the British Museum reading room; I wanted to see how the unquenchable fury and bottomless well of bitterness portrayed by Edmund Wilson could possibly find expression in a "critique of political economy". The second reason was a drunken argument I had with the CFO of my company not long after. I can't remember how it started, I think I was saying that the best cities had room for people of all socioeconomic classes and he was saying fuck that, Singapore is the best city because they flog vagrants there, but before I knew it he was reaching for the enduring pejorative epithet recently given new vigour by the ascendant crypto-fascists of our times (that's crypto as in Bitcoin — there's nothing crypto about their fascism): "Marxist." Don't be ridiculous, I said, of course I'm not a Marxist, and anyway, have you even read Das Kapital? And as I slurred that out loud, I was slurring to myself, I really must read Das Kapital. And then I read something about a new translation and duly coughed up sixty bucks to the capitalist exploiters doing business as Princeton University Press.

Many things surprised me about Capital, but one that didn't was the ham-handedness of Marx's try at economic theory. His insistence on the "use-value" of a thing correlating with the amount of human labour that's gone into it — his "labour theory of value" — is just head-spinningly wrong-seeming from the outset, and you get the sense that he's secretly a bit embarrassed about it himself, from the way he takes every opportunity to dress it up in kindergarten algebra and restate it backwards, inside-out and upside-down. But there's something exhilarating about this. We sense from the get-go that we're in for a weird time here, and that all this strange preamble about congealed labour and the nature of the commodity is a kind of dialectical borborygmus, presaging a crisis we want to be in the room for when it erupts. The backward, inside-out and upside-downness of Marx's economics is also illustrative of his literary technique, I guess influenced by the rhetorical fluidity of his beloved Greeks. Marx can't take anything, or state anything, at face-value — he has the permanently aggrieved mindset of the constitutionally paranoid — and so all his axioms and formulations end up flipped, doubled, reversed, paired off in a grotesque Doctor Moreau-style freakshow. Everything in Marx has a "double nature"; he's an inveterate turner-over of stones, and it's both horrid and compelling to watch. It can result in absurd sentences like this:

Insofar as the surplus-value that makes up capital Number 1 arose when labor-power was bought with part of the original capital, a transaction that conformed to the laws of commodity exchange and, legally speaking, presupposed nothing but that on the side of the capital relation, the worker could do what he wanted with his skills, while on the other side, the money or commodity owner could do what he wanted with the value he owned; furthermore, insofar as surplus capital Number 2 is merely the result of surplus capital Number 1 and therefore a consequence of the relation described above; and, finally, insofar as all transactions continue to conform to the laws of commodity exchange, which means the capitalist continues to buy labor-power, and the worker continues to sell it (at its actual value, we will assume), the law of appropriation or private property based on commodity production and circulation is obviously inverted into its direct opposite by its inexorable inner dialectic.

Obviously.

But what's especially good about Marx's mad theoretical contortions is that his subject — that monolith, its name derived from "head" — is equally double-natured, equally slippery, equally paranoid. Marx portrays capital as an elemental entity, as relentless as a force of nature but feral and cunning and insatiable, alien to and ungovernable by humanity. He calls it, in a triumph for Paul Reiter's translation, a "sensuous supersensuous thing." He's too successful at this (his vampire metaphor is pre-Stoker), and his success undermines his assertions later on that other economic paradigms are no less inevitable. Marx believes in progress — another weakness he shares with his arch-enemies — so he thinks that Capitalism is perforce a passing phase. He sees it as a hideous growth that will be its own undoing and be superseded by, or give birth to, fairer things; whereas to us the capitalist end-state looks more like mere depletion, a blob of corium beneath a blown reactor core. Marx's optimism is both understandable, given his relative proximity to the birth of Capitalism, and necessary to power the polemical side of this book, which is what really makes it worth reading. Because for everything Marx gets wrong about economics, for every mutation (e.g. branding and the information economy) of the capitalist hippogriff that he fails to foresee, there is an incontestable analysis of some intrinsic aspect of it still in evidence today: its dependence on an immiserated "surplus labour army", or its instinct for bucking all restraint and proceeding like a dysregulated peristaltic Moloch, gulping down its victims and vomiting their undigested remains back up for reprocessing. The "apologists" in this paragraph for example — about how new technology never really "sets people free" — could just as well be the current apologists for what's laughably called artificial intelligence:

We will recall that when new machines are introduced or old machines are enlarged, part of the variable capital is transformed into constant capital. The apologists take this operation, which "fixes" capital, thereby setting workers "free," and turn it around. According to them, it sets capital free for the workers. Only now are we in a position to fully appreciate the apologists' shamelessness. For the workers directly cast aside by machines aren't the only ones set free: so are their future replacements and also the additional contingent regularly absorbed when, supported by its old foundation, industry expanded as usual. Old capital isn't set free for workers, but workers are set free for "additional" capital.

It's this monumental polemic, this unwonky cri de coeur at the crapness of life under Capitalism (specifically his kind of industrial capitalism, but equally applicable to post-industrial societies) that gives Capital its enduring appeal. Marx, son of a lawyer and grandson of a Rabbi, writes sometimes like a priest, more often like a vituperative prophet. He draws on the researches of his friend Engels (the only friend he never succeeded in repelling) into the "condition of the working class in England", as well as reams of official statistics, government inquiries, court transcripts and obscurities dug up from the bowels of the British Museum to assemble an identikit portrait, like the police used to do for suspects, of Capitalism. His style is consciously lawyerly, and his favourite prosecutorial techniques are the thespian-flamboyant — the righteous, Rabbinical denunciation — and the evidential overload, the "my book will be a million words and you can't try to refute it until you've read it all". Like many a literary rhetorician, he indulges his baser urges in the footnotes, peppering them with sarcastic insults, second-edition score-settling, and tangential veerings-off in pursuit of ulterior targets. Capital is like capital: complex, elusive, resisting categorisation, a mess, a self-perpetuating system that conditions its participants to accept it, if not to understand it. Great books train their readers how to read them; Capitalism inures its victims to their own victimhood; Marx's Capital does both of these things. Will I read it again? Under no circumstances. Will I read volumes II and III? Not if I live as long as the Capitalist system itself endures. Did I laugh when Marx described the Ancient Greek Xenophon as having "characteristic bourgeois instincts"? Yes — it's funny because it's true!

Capital

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