"This would throw, oh just to pick a random example, most of Marx's Capital out the window. So all the phenomenal categories of visible capitalism - wages, interest, profit, dividends, rent - are all you need to know, and their sources and uses completely transparent to the uneducated eye. How can such a smart man make such a deliberately shallow argument?"
No, it wouldn't throw it out the window, it would just reduce it from a "religious" text or a "scientific" text...to a text that helps us critique capitalism in an interesting and useful way. I teaches us how to recognize the social and historical layers upon which certain apparent "common sense" notions -- like labor, money, property -- are built. What makes "Capital" hard is not the jargon, but the depth of the analysis and the intricacy of the relationships it seeks to describe.
Joanna