Joanna wrote:
>
> A few things about reading Capital.
>
> 1. It's a great book.
>
> 2. The first two chapters are the hardest part. Once you get past those,
> it gets a lot easier.
I reac volume 1 about a year before becoming involved in politics, and the impact on me then was the stray thought that perhaps we needed to return to some sort of feudal system; that is, the book (and primarily I think those early chapters) gave me a vague sense of the impossibility of capitalism, but did not in the least move me towards socialism.
What is horrible about capitalism as presented in Capital is NOT its exploitativenature and it is NOT the cruelty of most capitalist regimes and it is NOT imperialism; it is the way human activity excapes from human control under capitalism, including the cotnro of the capitalists themselves. The Ricardian socialists, Robert Owen, Mark Twain a ll do as well as Marx in "exposing" exploitatin, imperialism, or the various mean things capital does. But only Marx latches on to the horror of a system that operates wholly independently of human will. I think I vaguely sensed that when I first read it, and that was why it made me speculate on the possible advantages of something like feudalism.
Carrol