reading das Capital

I personally recommend Harry M. Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically. Cleaver is an autonomist Marxist who wrote the book as an introduction to Capital to reveal how Marx's understanding of capitalism can be applied to the direct ways the capital class colonizes every aspect of the social factory, and thus how we can subvert that. It is entirely written from the first chapter of Capital, and even comes with an introduction that lays out the development of autonomist Marxism from the early 20th century. It's an amazing book, and an excellent libertarian marxist intro to Capital. I believe LibCom even has it up here for free, though that version doesn't have all the nifty graphs as in the book. Any infoshop near you will likely have the book.

yeah Cleaver's book is a good intro (the 'introduction' of Reading Capital Politically is actually half the book, and is quite a good introduction to the libertarian emphasis on class struggle. Marx isn't actually that difficult to read compared to say Negri & Hardt's Empire or pretty much any philosophy - but Capital is very long (3 volumes = 3,000 pages!).

the main thing to grasp is Marx's dialectical method, which is easier than you'd think. It (very) basically means that something, a commodity say, can have two different/contradictory charicteristics at the same time, and that by tracing these contradictions the truth of it can be discovered. A good book on Marx's dialectic is Felton Shorthall's The Incomplete Marx (which isn't an introductory text unfortunately, but is still easier than Empire or post-structuralist stuff imho).

Cleaver also has a study guide for the rest of volume one on his website. http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/357ksg.html

.... not to mention the whole of Reading Capital politically, free to download. I really can't recommend that book highly enough.

Cleaver is a good place to start.

Also it helps to read Capital using some case study: I've been using open source software, P2P, collaborative filtering etc. to re-study Capital (and Grundrisse) again. Also looked into factory occupation/ self-management in Argentina.

I thought it was more than just two contradictions, that it is open ended in the possibilities of contradictions. But I agree in principle.

I would recommend Dance of the Dialectic by Ollman for dialectics. Also not an easy read, but well worth it especially as it covers the philosophical foundation of dialectics (philosophy of internal relations).

yeah but he tends to pair them up, certainly according to cleaver; use value & exchange value etc

I'm pretty sure Cleaver, like most autonomists, is anti-dialectic.

Pete

there's a full page diagram of marx's dialectical categories, paired up, in Reading Capital Politically, so he reads marx dialectically because you can't really understand it otherwise.

That is true. Ollman does this as well. Wasn't contradictions Mao's main thrust into Marxism? (at least in his theories on people's war).

I've tried to entertain more than one contradiction in a dialectical scheme, but it just gets confusing.

damn i seem to be blagging this ok

the only two books i've read on dialectics i've already mentioned on this thread, and i don't know anything about Mao for that matter

I really find it strange when people say people are anti dialectic, I mean the dialectic isn't a real fucking thing, it's a conceptual basis for mapping social relations and dynamics. Cleaver isn't anti dialetic rather he recognises the dialetic in relation to capital and see's the whole point breaking it eg use value & exchange value.

I saying your pro dialectic or anti dialetic seems to be pretty fucking idiotic, the equivalent of saying you skate goofy foot or regular, just a means to an end.

Surely people could be against this conceptual basis.

I could be wrong about Cleaver but from stuff that came up over the years on the aut-op-sy list (which Cleaver sometimes contributes to) it seems that he wasn't much in favour of the dialectic. Certainly not compared to John Holloway.

Pete

yah but that's my problem, I couldn't give two flying fecks about arguments over the dialetic or non dialetic, i'm interested in what provides the best analysis. It makes no sense to talk about dialetics without relation to a concrete object of analysis.

It just seems like a silly lil argument various theorists fanboy's have invented.

also as i said Cleaver understands the dialetic to refer to the dynamic of capitalism and hence he see's the dialetic not as a model for a movement but rather a real contradictory process that needs to be broken.

i mean it all depends on the level of analysis. Like the argument over alienation, yes there is a "essential" alienation of being a subject, and then on another level there is the dialetic between the universal and the particular which i don't think can overcome, but then there is the dialetic of capital and i want to see it smashed.

Seems very strange, do you have the link to the aut-op-sy postings? Dialectics stretches all the way back to Heraclitus, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel and many more so people certainly used dialectics (though not necessarily materialist dialectics) to understand stuff and shit.

I agree with Revol68 here in the sense that I will use dialectics for the purpose of analysis and as a method. IMO dialectics basically tries to account for change and interaction when using "categories" (or Relations as Marx often referred to them as). This is very different from typical social science that sees change as the difference between two moments frozen in time and interaction as something that happens between isolated parts. What dialectics does is to include change and interaction into the "definition" of categories or phenomena.

Cleaver on the dialetic.

Unfortunately, self-proclaimed "Marxists" have made the dialectic a really tricky subject. I personally feel "dialectical materialism", taken as a driving force in history, is bullshit. I do think, however, that in regarding capital itself, as it has to resolve an infinite internal crisis, the dialectic is a very useful tool. Cleaver's description of the contradiction between use value and exchange value, with the first being the worker's interpretation of capital, and the second being the bourgeoisie's interpretation of capital. Capital is therefore both a use value and an exchange value, even though the two are in dialectical contradiction.

While I'm strongly anti-diamat, one cannot be anti-dialectic. The dialectic is an intellectual tool for analyzing contradictions. Saying you're anti-dialectic is like saying you're anti-screwdriver; you're not going to use a screwdriver to tighten a bolt, but you're not going to refuse to use it when it fits.

exactly!

great post!

Hi Booeyschewy and good question. I've been meaning to ask something similar. I think I'm gonna check out Cleaver's book soon.

Cannot agree more. This view of class struggle being inevitable is basically transforming the working class into the object of history, and transforming dialectics into some determinist notion so that it almost becomes religious. It is definately apolitical and IMO not very dialectic at all.

Read that. It gives you a lot of the capital in a nutshell.

Well, us dialectics advocates would say that analytical philosophy only accounts for appearances and thus not reality. IMO dialectics is better at representing reality, though it is of course in the abstract. It is not any less unscientific than bourgeoisie science. The problem with dialectics is that you cannot fix the boundaries of categories, they are all open ended as inherent in their ontology is change and interaction. Analytical philosophy on the other hand accounts for change and interaction postteriori because of an ontology that fragments the social into little isolated pieces of moments - i.e. it tries to emulate the hard sciences' "controlled experiments".

One can only welcome booeyschewy friends determination to seek to understand Kapital.
I have not read Harry M. Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically so cannot comment. However, there is no beating reading the original. It is not a short read, but if you spend some time studying the first capters of vol 1, which deal with value, you can then on onto the rest with confidence. There are many 'guides' to reading capital, much of it from within the massive academic structure based on 'interpreting' Marx and Marxism i.e., ripping the revolutionary guts out of it. But it is important to always bear in mind that Capital was an unfinished work which laid out the framework and method, but Marx had no illusions about having the final word on how the dynamics of capitalism would unfold. Thus, along with read Marx, it is important also to see the important effort made by the revolutionary movement to use Marx's method to analysis the development of capitalism after Marx: Luxemburg, Lenin, Bukarin, Louis Boudin and the development of this by the Communist Left.
Engels in a letter to Victor Adler -March 16, 1895(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_03_16.htm laid out a 'study guide' of the order in which to read Vols 2 and 3 of Kapital for his comrade who was in prison at the time.
The main thing about reading Kapital is not to see it as an academic work, but as the radical critique of capitalism that it is. It shreds all of the bourgeoisie's mystifications about its economy and its eternal nature whilst at the same showing how it is laying the bases for the future communist society.
Reading Kapital is a very rewarding, stimulating and inspiring process, but if it is done as an aim in itself outside of being part of a wider process of seeking to understanding the totality of the Marxist praxis, it becomes a barren academic process. Many circles were formed in the 60s and 70s in order to discuss Kapital as the starting point of process of understanding Marxism but became stuck in sterile academic discussions because Kapital was seen as something separated from the wider revolutionary method of Marxism and the revolutionary tradition of the working class i.e. understanding Kapital became the basis of any further revolutionary committment. Understanding Capital is not and has never been a criteria for becoming a militant of a communist organisation, because at the core of Capital is the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for communism; and agreement with this is the fundamental basis for all revolutionary activity.

Your comments are very informed. I think there are two points for further development though. First: You say dialectics represents reality 'in the abstract' as if a representation could be anything but an abstraction. The point of dialectic is that our concepts of things get the world wrong by their very form. We have to represent to ourselves objects, but because we do this, we begin to believe - or rather the analytic philosophers and their herd do- that the world is really constituted atomistically (when this is really just the form of our cognising, and perhaps experiencing, it). Dialectic recognises that our abstractions - representations - are nothing more, that whilst we have to pick aggregates of relations out and see them as objects/things, or in Hegel's terms 'particulars', these remain just abstractions from a real network of relations which constitutes reality. This is the network of relations, processes etc which you referred to previously, and it enables dialectic thinkers to see the static as a phenomena to be explained where analytic philsosophers scratch their heads wondering how change is possible at all (ie causation, induction, time).

This seems to be representative of the idealist strain running through interpretations here of 'the dialectic'. There are i think a number of positions to be distinguished. Dialectic means for different people: 1 a way of thinking about, analysing (dialysing surely?), or processing reality, or more specifically contradictions (this is the idealist version - that dialectic is 'all in the mind'; it is also distastefully instrumental); 2 a characteristic of human societies which makes it possible for human agents to intervene in the historical processes thanks to the self-reflexivity of critical engagment with socio-historic forces, (that is 'praxis'); 3 a characteristic of some natural things also.. a process by which some things change or develop through the resolution and sublation of contradictory tendencies in the structure (this might be the view of Engels in Dialectic of Nature); 4 an ontological thesis, a view of what the characteristics of real being at the most general level are, revolving around the central idea of relationality, interpenetrating identity - that things mutually constitute each other - and of the dynamic flux's that such a view necessitates. This is basically the realist ontological view, which is roughly that of Ollman.

1 is idealist; it is unclear how dialectic could tell us about the world if there wasnt something about the world that was dialectical, just as the concept of causation would not be of much interest if it wasnt for the fact that causation is 'out there' in the world; it goes on. 2 is also idealist; how exactly do we create this dialectic in society? How do such relations come about in society when they did not exist in reality before? 3 i think is of little real interest - there may be strict dialectical schema in some natural objects, have a look for them. 4 ~Ollman's is the stongest reading of dialectic and also reads it in the most fundamental way. It is important to note that it views dialectic not as some useful system for understanding contradictions, but as observing some of the fundamental - ontological - features of real being. it is sweeping and radical.

I'm afraid i don;t accept that there is a dialetic at work in the world outside of human interpretation. A dialectic depends on contradiction and conflict, but these are subjective positions. It isn't idealist at all to see the dialectic as a conceptual framework, it certainly refers to "material things" , to "the real" to be Lacanian, but only in so much as these things are mediated through subjective perspective ie the dialetic is a real process in so much that it is a feature of the symbolic order, but it has no existance outside of this. Hence I'd accept the dialetic in terms of your second definition, but since all human societies are dependent on communication, interaction and interpretation then I think the "idealist" (in your opinion) definition can be reprieved somewhat.

Dialectic schmialectic. If folks find Hegel helpful in reading Marx, then more power to them. He's not necessary, though, for understanding Marx or capitalism, nor is any other philosopher.

The way I was finally able to read Capital was to start with chapter 26, on primitive accumulation, read through to the end, then start over with ch1. The ending is so good that it gave me the patience to wade through the really hard stuff in the beginning. That's what Cleaver recommends in his online study guide, that's where I got the idea.

I've read about 100 or 150 pages of volume 2, that's really concise and I found it way easier than a lot of volume 1, it summarizes a lot of the passage in v1 that I got lost in.