He says that Melville's novels can be tracked parallel to Marx's writings and reflect on the same questions. If you start with Redbern, a heavily autobiographical novel about his first shipping job, which is a study of brutal class relations with Irish sailors and English officers; go on to Typee, about colonialism; then, on to Moby Dick, which combines Reburn and Typee thematically, and finish with Confidence Man, a blast of venom at American capitalism, you can not miss the point he is making: the system stinks. Unless of course you are an academic and then everything is about metaphysics and symbols. Also, throw in Billy Budd, a meditation on capital punishment and Bartleby the Scrivener, about the misery of office work.
My own consideration of Melville which is heavily geared to indigenous questions is at:
http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/mydocs/indian/melville.htm
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)