About

feel free to delete that after reading it, I didn’t realize it would get post here rather than sent to you… sorry…

I would also be interested to know what you think about this often quoted statement from a letter written from Marx:

“I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.”

Does he emphasise the importance of the plight of the working class and actual revolutionary activity? Does this resonate with you and your work in anyway or is the working class movement something you are not interested in at the moment.

Marx famously responded to his daughter’s question ‘what is your idea of happiness” with the answer ‘to fight/struggle.’ Perhaps this is notable in someway as well.

Thanks!

Thought this might interest you. The following excerpts are taken from Robert Wolff’s ‘The Thought of Karl Marx’

“Although, as I have remarked, Marx wrote at least 5000 pages of economic analysis [and maybe more, as one commentator noted], everyone, I think, will agree that the central text is Volume One of CAPITAL. When we open the pages of this extraordinary book, we are immediately confronted by a problem of great complexity and difficulty. Marx purports to be writing in the tradition of Smith, Ricardo, and dozens of lesser lights, but his language bears almost no relation to theirs. It is complex, convoluted, rife with metaphors, ironies, literary allusions, and metaphysical crochets. Ricardo’s language is recognizably like that of Smith, and Smith’s language looks not very different from that of Quesney [although it is, of course, English, not French], but Marx’s language is absolutely nothing like that of any of his predecessors. What on earth is going on?
In my opinion, this question is of such importance that it needs, and deserves, an entire book devoted to it. So I wrote one. MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY is my attempt to confront, engage with, and answer the question. Each writer must choose a language whose syntactic and literary possibilities are adequate to the complexity of the object of his or her discourse. The classical political economists were children of the Enlightenment, and believed that when the fog of superstition was blown away, what would remain was a simple, clear transparent world whose structure could successfully be captured by a plain, non-metaphorical prose. To them, the marketplace was a transparent world of rational calculation and exchange.
But Marx believed that capitalist economy and society is deeply mystified, presenting itself as transparent when it is in fact opaque, as rational when it is in fact irrational, as the end of history when it is in fact just one more stage in the unfolding of history. What is more — this is really difficult and important — he is convinced that although we can, by great effort, see through the opacity and the irrationality, we and he as inhabitants of that world can never entirely rid ourselves of the effects of the mystifications. To express the full subtlety of this insight, he needs a language that can, at one and the same time, reproduce that surface opacity and irrationality, analyze and explicate it, and yet acknowledge our bondage to it, with full and appropriate intensity of emotional articulation of each level. His solution, unique among social scientists of any discipline or persuasion, is a complexly ironic discourse, rich with cultural allusions and resonant with overtones and implications. No one had ever written social science like this before, and no one has since, or perhaps ever will again.
This is not the customary view of Marx’s language, of course. The reaction of the British, as exemplified by Joan Robinson, has been to subscribe to what I elsewhere call the childhood polio view of Marx’s writing style. This is the notion that when he was young, he contracted a nearly fatal case of Hegelism, which nearly destroyed his ability to move gracefully from the beginning to the end of a sentence. Long years in England facilitated a partial recovery, but the effects lingered, with the result that he never succeeded in achieving the limpid clarity of a David Ricardo. Never mind that this view is offered with respect to the man who wrote THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, arguably the most powerful piece of political prose ever penned. We know for a certainty that the theory is wrong because while Marx was preparing Volume One of CAPITAL for publication, he wrote, in ENGLISH, an exposition of his views, published as the pamphlet VALUE, PRICE, AND PROFIT, which is as transparent a piece of Ricardian prose as one could ask for. Clearly, Marx chose to write as he did because he believed that only thus could he communicate his richly complex ironic vision of capitalist society and economy. And, I am quite convinced, he was correct.”