As the Conter Reading Group prepares to read the new edition of Karl Marx’s Capital, Michael Doyle argues for its enduring relevance and why reading Capital is fundamentally a collective experience.
When Louis Althusser formed his reading group at the Ecole normale superieure, he proposed an arduous reading program: ‘But someday it is essential to read Capital to the letter. To read the text itself… return ten times to the first chapters… and it is essential to read Capital… in the German original’. Whilst for us non-German speakers reading the German original would be nigh impossible, we can at least settle for the first English translation in fifty years – and the only translation of the last version Marx revised. Whichever version of Capital one reads, it remains a challenging text to read. From the example of the commodity fetish to the circulation of commodities and the formula M-C-M and C-M-C, a collective approach best yields a thorough understanding for each participant.
Another benefit of reading Capital in a group is the sense of belonging. By being part of a reading group, it is builds confidence in knowing that there are others who share the same analysis of the world. Marx – and later Althusser – demonstrate how all encompassing capitalism and its inequities are, and that it is easy to become demoralised and succumb to the old Thatcherite adage that there is no alternative.
Yet there is an even more important and practical reason for participating in reading groups: political education. As Stuart McIntyre documents in A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917-1933, a precursor for the working-class organisation was the formation of classes or reading groups. Government commissioners who enquired into the war-time unrest during the First World War in Scotland concluded that the spread of Marxist education was having a deleterious impact on the workers, and the secretary of the WEA wrote to the Cabinet to request state support to counteract the spread of Marxist education.
Reading groups do not just form to read Capital because of its demanding content, they also form as a result of a particular political moment. Althusser’s group, like other reading groups, was formed on the crest of the wave of political radicalism in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Gramsci’s works were translated into English and captured the imaginations of many socialists who drew on his work to devise theories about the state and civil society. The Miliband-Poulantzas debate seldom referred to Capital. The anti-Vietnam war movement did not refer to Capital but to Lenin’s theory of imperialism. The revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada raised the question of whether Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution would be vindicated or not.
The utility of Marx’s Capital was perhaps not considered as relevant and thus not at the top of one’s reading lists when approaching these examples. Fast forward to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the rise of post-modernism and the embrace of ‘New Times’ amongst prominent socialist intellectuals, Capital, a book that raised from the abstract to the concrete the functioning of nineteenth-century capitalism, seemed to have no use in explaining the ‘post-Fordist’ political economy.
But there was a resurgence of interest in Capital in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and in the subsequent years that followed. As income inequality becomes wider and more entrenched, Marx’s line in Capital that ‘the abyss between the life situation of the worker and that of the capitalist keeps widening’ is as empirically valid today as it was during the writing of Capital. Capital has retained an enduring relevance because, at its core, it explains the reified and naturalised social relations that are fundamental to the functioning of the capitalist mode of production.
The brilliance of Capital is that it reveals how capitalism conceals those social relations. We may not use the example of 20 yards of linen being worth a single coat, but there is a multitude of examples in the contemporary world of how money emerges from the value relation when commodities enter into exchange. The brutality of the conditions Marx documents in Capital of 19th Century Industrial Capitalism: The twenty-hour working days, the premature deaths, and exploitation of child labour, are common in parts of the Global South today.
As 2025 approaches, socialists will have to remain optimistic and hopeful that our endeavours can improve the world. We can feel completely alone, bewildered, and depressed as capitalism generates multiple social crises which are naturalised by our ruling class. Or, we can feel that the mounting challenge from the far-right is somehow insurmountable. A reading group not only brings like-minded people together and engenders solidarity, but it also helps us deconstruct capitalist social relations via political education and reading. There is no better work than Capital to do that.
Click here to join the reading group, or email: editor@conter.scot for further information.
