Are You Guilty of Reading Capital?

The Dialectic at Work

In this episode, “Are you Guilty of Reading Capital?”, the Dialectic goes to work to begin a series of discussions on Marx’s magnum opus, Capital. This episode and the next few will build the foundations for an analysis of Capital and Marx’s theory of surplus-value.

Building on our discussion on Althusser and overdetermination in Episodes 2 and 3, we now turn to how this new way of thinking about dialectics will impact our reading of Capital.

We begin with the following idea: “There is no neutral reading of Capital. We are all guilty of a reading of Capital” (Althusser, Reading Capital). If indeed it is the case, then there is no ‘one’ singular reading of Capital. Rather, as Rick Wolff demonstrates, within the intellectual canon there can be and have been multiple trajectories that Marxist scholars have adopted in the last century-and-a-half while grappling with this text.

We then dive into the following issue: Why did Marx begin his intellectual journey in Capital with the commodity? What is it about the commodity that makes it such a ‘mysterious’ thing with mystical properties? Viewers will begin to see that Marx’s idea of the commodity, and labor-power as being a unique commodity within the world of commodities, is crucial to his overall project of understanding capitalism.

About

The Dialectic at Work is a podcast hosted by Professor Shahram Azhar & Professor Richard Wolff. The show is dedicated to exploring Marxian theory. It utilizes the dialectical mode of reasoning, that is the method developed over the millennia by Plato and Aristotle, and continues to explore new dimensions of theory and praxis via a dialogue. The Marxist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic that not only seeks to understand the world but rather to change it. In our discussions, the dialectic goes to work intending to solve the urgent life crises that we face as a global community. Follow us on social media: X: @DialecticAtWork Instagram: @DialecticAtWork Tiktok: @DialecticAtWork Website: www.DemocracyAtWork.info Patreon: www.patreon.com/democracyatwork