so as to not continually derail the reading thread
Well I'd say that's essentially parroting as it takes what Marx is saying as simply true without any regard for an explanation as to why. Now maybe that's what is necessary in order to get through those chapters and further on where they are explained but it's an extremely frustrating approach that many people struggle with because they prefer to approach texts in an active manner, trying to actually grasp the arguments, solidify them, relate them to concrete things and examples rather than simply accepting assertions on the promise of all being revealed much further, infact as a paedagogical approach I find it rather woeful.
well for that you have to blame the author, that's exactly the intentions of the way marx wrote the thing, his method of exposition is different from his method of enquiry, such that it seems that in the beginning he's simply stating a load of a priori things without any justification for him doing so. it can be off putting, but these things are not properly understood until you work your way through them throughout the whole book as it gradually illuminates and expands upon them as you move through it. in my experience of reading the thing, it does work. If the purposes of this discussion group is to understand capital the way marx intended it to be done, then you have to really stick to what I and others have suggested here which is to contain yourselves to the concepts introduced in each chapter without bringing in other concepts that you may well be aware off, but have not yet been introduced in the unfolding conceptual argument that goes on in the book.
this is perhaps a problem of any reading of capital by anarchists/lefties who have had a wide exposure to terminology and concepts used in capital but have never read the thing, this leads to a jumping ahead based on the preexsiting knowledge which can, as seen by a lot of the discussion above, lead to more confusion than clarification. of course it's natural to jump ahead and it's frustrating to not be able to, but that's all part of the experience of reading something which takes a very dialectical approach to it's structure & exposition. you can't change the way it's been written and the way it's been written is designed in a very specific & purposeful way which requires a certain amount of discipline in sticking to what you've actually learned first from the text that's actually been read before attempting to do anything else with it, this is especially true of the first three chapters of the thing. Also what i'm talking about here is purely to be able to grasp what marx himself actually thought about all these things, once you are in a position to know that then by all means rip it apart, but there's no point in trying to do that until you get the former cracked
(and also listen to BillJ, he's saying exactly the same things as i was saying to you on the other thread about theories of value)
someone who is grounded in classical economics (or any economics) has the same problems to an extent, just from a different perspective - as the whole point of marx's technique is that it takes (predominately english) classical economy, (predominately german) critical philosophy and (predominantly french/english) utopian socialism and rubs them altogether to produce a unique critique that is only properly understood if you do not over emphasis one element at the expense of the others. So economics students/economists, who tend to have a very cold deterministic, logical positivist approach to things and if they take that position when reading capital, will come away with a very one dimensional and deterministic reading of the thing, a reading which misses out on all the richness of the dialectical method (both of enquiry & exposition) and all the other arty farty stuff that you are good at. so the positioning of one aspect over the other leads to a reading of capital that was not intended by the author
i'm not quite sure what you mean by a frozen snapshot of capitals workings, there's two ways of interpreting this statement. firstly it could be a position as discussed above tended to be taken by classical economists that relations actually are fixed, everything is deterministic etc.., or it can be seen as the method marx uses when looking at one element of capitalist economics at certain junctures of capital across the volumes, i.e. to assume something is fixed or constant or a given to remove the clutter from the analysis of something else - this in no way means that he thinks these things are fixed & deterministic in real life, but is just a product of the fact that he is looking at things from a particular 'window' and for the purposes of that he assumes certain things (or he's forced to adopt these assumptions as he's accepting the premises of classical economics and seeking to demonstrate that even accepting these assumptions the thing is still shite), as he moves on throught the volumes he changes this position as he looks at things through different 'windows'.
This method is not specific to capital and indeed it's used largely in most areas of philosophy, science and modelling etc..I think the misunderstanding of this method by people who criticise marx as being deterministic causes no end of confusion as it's a criticism based on a distorted view of what he's doing. Any reading of capital shows how deliciously fluid and dialectical the thing is and how things like nature, technology, labour, capital, mental conceptions etc.. are all wrapped up as internal relations of each other and there's no way that anyone should come away from it with a deterministic view of things, however given that is the type of position that most economists are trained in this is what they tend to come away with - it's also very easy to take quotes out of context and say look this proves he's deterministic but that's a poor way of critiquing the thing. The whole point of capital is that it's not a handbook that you can just open up at a particular section and get the information on it and then leave it and go off and critique it, the whole thing has to be understood in it's totality and then you're in a much better position to then either accept or reject marx's positions on things. This is both a strength and a weakness of the book, which one it is largely depends upon the position & approach taken to reading the thing by the individual reader. I would hazzard a guess though that if you did a straw poll of people who have read volume 1 completely they would say it's a strength, however if you did the same poll amongst those who started to read it but then gave up because of frustuations of some sort (which usually happens in chapters 1 to 3) they would say it's a weakness