This is one of those great books that takes feelings and intuitions you’ve had your whole life and explains them better than you ever could have. These kind of books also can be ones that you put off reading forever because they are so ingrained in our culture that they can seem obvious. In my experience, it’s usually worth going back to read that kind of book, as I’m often surprised at how vibrant is the spark of genius that made it a classic in the first place.

If you want to be cliché, you can criticize this book for being boring or pedantic, but I think that would be underestimating the task that Marx is undertaking. Sure there are parts that are dry, but Marx is encouraging us to look at society from a granular level. After all, many of the concepts he is critiquing or outright refuting are taught to most of us when we are still children. What is money? What is a job? Why are some people rich and some people poor? If a child asks you this you may be tempted to fall back on some hollow explanation, or even just pat them on the head and say “that’s just how it is”. Of course what makes Marx a visionary is he isn’t content with either of these options. You can see why Marx would feel compelled to flesh out his ideas with mathematical formulas and endless examples; he knew that his critics would come at him exactly with this kind of ammunition. And yet the most compelling parts of this book are the simple concepts that make you think, why did I never see it that way before? If you get through the first few hundreds pages of him explaining what is a commodity, you will realize it boils down to this: money is a physical representation of a relationship between people, no more no less. Therefore the price of a given thing is based upon how much time was needed to bring that thing into existence, spent by a person or group of people with which you are conjugating a relationship of exchange. As simple as this sounds, it’s a bolt from the blue in a world where we are actively encouraged to forget what money really is. A classic stoner thought is “money isn’t even real”. Of course it is, but it’s definitely not what we’ve all grown up assuming it is. This is just one example of many simple observations in this book that made it so revolutionary.

Another thing to know, is that Marx’s writing is actually full of personality, and sometimes even deigns to a kind of hyperdroll black humor. You can feel his incredulity as he lays out how the capitalist class has (and will) pushed humanity into a new kind of hell, as if he too is shocked and appalled by what he is writing. Some readers may complain that his many examples of contemporaneous abuses by the capitalist class are out of date, but I’d encourage the reader to follow these threads to the present day. We no longer have child labor in the west, but one of capitalism’s strongest points is it’s ability to absorb criticism into itself and find ways to continue making profits. Marx is once again ahead of the curve in having little hope that “regulation” with have any real effect on the real situation. We live in a world now where capitalist abuses are on going, they are just covered with a thick film of what passes for “decency”. ( )

A masterpiece (although I guess it'd be weird if I said otherwise, given that I consider myself a Marxist. WHATEVER) It's sometimes tough to read - which is kind of inevitable given the subject - and sometimes I feel that it could have used a good editor to help fix a few minor issues with chapter ordering and stuff (I'm sure Marx would have appreciated an editor and more time to work on it too) but taken overall it's incredible, enlightening and, even for a relatively into it Marxist, constantly thought-provoking. Marx touches on a lot of stuff that isn't talked about so much now and it's pretty amazing how much of what he talks about is more relevant now than when he wrote it - the "Marx isn't relevant today" argument completely falls apart. One interesting thing is how much he talks about history - it's interesting from a history perspective as well as making it absolutely clear that capitalism is a historical thing.

The one big thing that he doesn't really talk about is gender - he mentions that women are in the workforce and stuff like that but goes no further and explicitly treats the "default" worker as male. It's disappointing but it'd be ridiculous to expect him to cover everything and given how our analysis of these issues is still awful it's understandable at least. His analysis of a few things (particularly colonialism) is really limited in this but it's essential to understand that this was meant to be the first of 6 books (maybe more or less depending on the scheme used) - of which he only published one in his lifetime, two more were mostly finished, one was mostly notes and the last two weren't started. Some of what he doesn't cover he intended to cover later on. The introduction to the Penguin edition covers this well.

If you're only mildly interested in Marx's ideas you're probably better served with a secondary source (I recommend Marx's Capital by Ben Fine, which is an excellent book and helpful as an overview before diving into this at any rate) but if you have a serious interest you'll find this fascinating. I think Marx still brings up important issues that aren't adequately addressed even today, as well as focusing on stuff that the conventional left tends to ignore. I read this with a Companion to Marx's Capital by David Harvey, which really helped me at certain points - it's not essential and I disagreed with some of his analysis but it will help things like the difficult starting chapters not seem so impossible.

(note to myself: Still not read the whole appendix because it seems to repeat a lot of the main text, if not directly. Something for later) ( )

Still important today. It only takes a minute to extrapolate Marx's findings to today's reality. ( )

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Excellent information, but you'll either want to start out with some sort of abridged version or the podcast 'Reading Marx's Capital' by David Harvey. It's extremely dense and very obviously written in the mid 19th century. ( )