Eric Beck wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 9:58 AM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Explicitly not tooting my own horn but did others here find the first three
> > chapters difficult? Maybe it was who was teaching it (I'll always be
> > indebted to Richie Schuldenfrei and Braulio Munoz), or maybe it was how I
> > was raised (anti-reductionist spatial-thinking via dad's physics and mom's
> > anthropology), but I remember that first reading as absolutely thrilling
>
> My approach to Capital was the opposite of yours: I read it without a
> teacher and with a literature background, but my reaction to the first
> three chapters was the same: I was absolutely thrilled, on an
> emotional level. Seriously, I remember feeling lightheaded. It hit me
> like only a few books have. It felt like all the mysteries were
> unlocked for a little while. Of course having reread it, I know that
> it *is* difficult and dense, and I'm sure I understand at best ten
> percent of it, but I found it far from opaque.
In a way, I read it for the first time twice. The first reading was prior to any involvement in politics, the second aftter I had decided, from such involvement, I would be a Marxist when I found out what Marxism was! But my first first reading was something like Eric describes: I was reading it as "literature." I had developed a literary interest in what Frye called the anatomy (from Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_) and I thought of as "big books." I bought _Capital_ and _The City of God_ at the beginning of the Christmas break, and it was only when I got ready to read one of them that I picked Capital first! I found it wonderfully convincing -- but the _political_ conclusion I drew from that reading was that perhaps we needed a return to something like feudalism!
And if Luxemburg, Benjamin, & Lowry are right, and if we can't bring off a socialist overthrow of capitalism, perhaps something like a return to feudalism will turn out to be the best escape from barbarism. We've, sort of, survived the most barbarous century in human history, beginning with the European invasion of China (Boxer Rebellion) and the pacification of the Philippines through two world wars, countless pacifications, the holocaust, the famines, and ending with the ravaging of Yugoslavia and Iraq. Could neo-feudalism be any worse?
Carrol