/lit/ - Literature

>>16057504
Its dry boring and ultimately worthless read

>>16057504
I'm halfway through vol 1. All quite relevant to today, although I did skip much of a section on the working day that was detailing factory conditions which don't really exist currently except I guess in China or whatever.

>>16057504
1 essential
Other 2 aren't
A lot of people only read 1.

It's a pilpul on Anglo economic theory (Smith by way of the heavily derivative but coethnic of Marx, Ricardo), which divines the origin of profits from the extraction of surplus labor time from workers by the bourgeoisie, with the purpose of the pilpul being to prove to northern euros that YOU DON'T OWN NUFFIN AND AIN'T COOL despite creating the modern world.

>>16057564
really? why aren't the other 2 essential?

>>16057616
Woke af

>>16057616
Based retard

>>16057623
Because they're so wrong that even Marxists don't want to read them

>>16057632
can someone give me a serious response?

>>16057637
>https://oyc.yale.edu/sociology/socy-151

Watch the lectures on Marx. He'll point out the valuable insights, and spare you the shit that sucks. Worth noting, that professor not only read all volumes of Capital, but has read the entire 50 volumes or whatever of Marx's collected works, so he's certainly not "anti-Marx".

>>16057637
Capital vol. 1 is pretty complete by itself. Each volume is 1000 pgs each and you don't read them, you study, so ofc that takes a fuck tonne of time and commitment. Such a deep analysis isn't necessary for most socialists or even marxists

>>16057690
>Szelényi studied at the External Trade Faculty of the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, where he graduated in 1960

He even graduated from an honest to goodness communist college, haha.

>>16057616
>the origin of profits from the extraction of surplus labor time from workers by the bourgeoisie
oof what a retard
>northern euros creating the modern world
oof what a retard

>>16057623
They kinda are desu. It's just that people pretend read, name dropping is more important. Second volume on the circulation process is important because you find out about all the instances where capital streams and production you saw in Vol. 1 can break down. Plus his attempts at economic 5-year plans (not really 5 years) are kinda interesting in light of later history. H also foresaw a socialist bureaucratic dictatorship but kinda wished it away. Volume three gives you further distinctions with merchant capital etc.

>In capital — profit, or still better capital — interest, land — rent, labour — wages, in this economic trinity represented as the connection between the component parts of value and wealth in general and its sources, we have the complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the conversion of social relations into things, the direct coalescence of the material production relations with their historical and social determination. It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things. It is the great merit of classical economy to have destroyed this false appearance and illusion, this mutual independence and ossification of the various social elements of wealth, this personification of things and conversion of production relations into entities, this religion of everyday life.
What more would you want?

>16057623
Marx didn't publish them himself because they never quite made sense despite spending half his life working on it. Engel's threw them together and published it anyways.

Did Marx not know how to edit a book or does Das Kapital really have 3000 pages of pure content? I can’t imagine any idea/system that would take longer than at most 1000 pages to summarize

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiPxPHNrIek

>>16057803
Haven't read the whole thing, but of what I have, each chapter is the intellectual equivalent of an Olympic decathlon, he's majorly on one, too smart, student of aristotle, the most fuck shit up philosopher of all time (other major student was Alexander)

>>16057803

>>16057765
>>16057695
>>16057782
so do i read all 3 volumes or not?

>>16057891
Read them.

>>16057891
Well, like >>16057695 wrote,
>you don't read them, you study
So, you'll notice going through Vol. 1 whether you can muster more.

>>16057891
Are you doing a masters on Marx? If not, why are you wasting your time? What do you think you're going to get out of it? No hot chick at a BLM protest is going to fuck you because you read some 19th century manuscripts, and it's not going to help you do anything since it's just an idiosyncratic and cranky framework for analyzing capitalism which may or may not be insightful. If you were smart, you'd just read a critical secondary source, but ...

>>16057958
>/lit/ board
>lmao why u even want to read a book xD

>>16057958
Based retard

>>16057637

Volume I was the only one that Marx completed during his lifetime. After he died in 1883, Engels took Marx's thorough drafts of the next two volumes, and edited them to get volumes 2 and 3, completing the task just in time before his own death in 1895. Regardless of one's opinion of communism and leftism in general, Engels was one of the biggest bros, one of the greatest friends in history.

The thing about Marx is that he was constantly drafting stuff, writing several-hundred page drafts on or related to the Capital project, which he conceived as mammoth. Historically, the significance of the first volume is that he completed it during his lifetime and it's a broad, in-principle self contained treatise. Even people with patience enough to read Volume One often say to themselves "okay, I'm actually conversant with Marx now, no need to do the others since no one talks about them anyway." The proximitiy of the publication of Volume One (1867) to the American Civil War is also notable as two beats in a world-historical arc. Marx tossed off letters and other writings having to do with the American situation around this time.