Rev Left Radio - Understanding Marx's Capital w/ Liberation School

Episode Date: July 31, 2021

Breht talks with Derek Ford about the Liberation School's new podcast/online class "Reading Capital with Comrades". All 12 episodes of "Reading Capital with Comrades" can be found here: https://liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/ Outro Music: "Conversations at the End of the World" by Kishi Bashi ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have back on the show Derek Ford to talk about a new podcast project that him and some comrades with liberation school I put together called Reading Capital with Comrades, a liberation school podcast series that systematically walks you through volume one of Marx's capital. So as I say throughout the episode, it does it in a really engaging, succinct, systematic way. It is my personal favorite sort of walkthrough of capital that I've come across. Cannot recommend it enough for individuals or organizations.

I'll link to it in the show notes. Definitely check it out. As a side note, I am sort of, as you might be able to tell, a little congested. I think it's just a regular old allergies or head cold. So I apologize if my voice is a lot. little off throughout this episode, but it should not be by any means distracting. So yeah, this is a great episode. I really encourage people to check out Reading Capital with Comrades. And in this episode, me and Derek just sort of touch on some highlights, you know, talk about the main

themes of Capital, how it's applicable and relevant for us today, and talk about some other things. But to really dive into the content of Capital itself, Reading Capital with Comrades is a wonderful, wonderful source. So hats off to everybody behind that project. And without further ado, here's my discussion with Derek about Marx, Capital, and Reading Capital with comrades. Enjoy. I'm Derek, and I am a teacher and researcher in addition to being an organizer. So I teach at a small of the arts college called DePaul University and live in Indianapolis. And, you know, I mean, in terms of my sort of professional work, it's really about the connection between pedagogy and political movements.

So, you know, the books that I've written are, you know, primarily about that. The next one coming out later this year is about, it's called Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect Beyond the Knowledge Economy. And it's ultimately, like, shows that there's a certain pedagogical logic undergirding the capitalist knowledge economy and then shows that there's some sort of, that much of the left wing work on the knowledge economy basically has the same pedagogy. And then, you know, makes the claim that, well, we have to have an alternative pedagogy for an alternative social system. And so then I developed some resources in that direction. And then I've been organizing more or less since I was in middle school. I organized my first sort of protest in eighth grade and later organized a protest in the next year where, when Giuliani, who was then the mayor of New York, was running for governor of New York State. And it wasn't really until, and then in college, I organized, we started a labor action committee, and through that work, we began participating in the anti-Iraq war movement, which is how I met the PSL, and I joined the PSL in 2007, and started a branch in Baltimore, and later moved to Syracuse where I was for several years and organized there.

and then I was in Philly for a quick year and then I've been in Indiana in Indianapolis for the last several years and we have a really great vibrant branch here as well and then since 2016 I've been editor of liberation school which is the PSL's sort of online Marxist university slash kind of like more theoretical journal and I work on that with a really great collective of comrades and so I'm really excited about the future of that project in particular. So hopefully that's a little bit about me, unless you have any questions or anything I want me to go into more. Yeah, no, I think that gets at the basics of it. And longtime Rev-Left listeners will remember you from a few years ago. We had you on to talk about a visit you did to the DPRK, and that was a wonderful conversation.

I can't believe it's been several years already, but we're glad to have you back. And especially with that new book coming out, of course, you have an open invite to come back on the show anytime and discuss and promote that. And I really appreciate the topic of that book as well. So I'm excited about that. But today we are going to be talking about a podcast series

that you put together with your comrades over at Liberation School called Reading Capital with Comrades. And, you know, I'm going to obviously link to all the, to the podcast and the show notes. And I highly encourage people to check this out. As I told Derek before we started recording, this is the single best systematic walkthrough of capital that I've personally ever come across. The sound quality is high.

The little interspersions of like questions that sort of take you out of the text and ask a question about it is really wonderful. When you do extended quotes of marks, for example, there's a background music to let you know that that is being done. So like sometimes when you're listening, somebody will jump into a quote and you won't know, is this the person talking or is this the quote again? like when does it stop those little things can make a big impact on people's ability to learn a topic especially one as capital or as as complicated as capital so i mean i really love it really encourage people to check it out and um on today's episode we're just going to be talking about it so maybe the best place to start with regards to to this conversation overall is just sort of why did you want to make the podcast in the first place and why did you want to

focus on on marx's work capital yeah so i mean thanks so much for that, those sort of words of encouragement definitely means a lot and, you know, it's really what we hoped would happen. So, I mean, you know, capital's been a guiding resource for the workers movement since its publication. And it's been the subject of a lot of debates within the movement and with really important political implications, right? And in the U.S., over the past few decades, much of this sort of debate has been confined

to academia, right? And the main political impact of that has been to control. tribute to Marxism's isolation from the people's struggles. And this is what we in the PSL referred to as the break in ideological continuity that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because not only of the collapse, but also the way that it happened, right, the fact that it was sort of managed by the leadership of the Soviet Union and without any mass, you know, street-based resistance, right? So this was really demoralizing to the international communist movement and, you know, that combined with the ideological onslaught against Marxism, it really,

you know, discredited the Marxist vision of transformation in the eyes of many. And so in its place, right? I mean, prior to that, Marxism had been, you know, the or one of the primary guiding forces in people's struggles, various people's struggles. But after that, right, it was, you know, a lot of sort of academic theories that, whatever their merits, weren't really premised on the, on the, the struggle and the necessity for the working in a press class is to actually take power into their own hands, you know. And so that's changed a bit in the last few decades, right? And even more drastically in the last few years, more and more people are, you know, favor socialism, call themselves socialist, are joining socialist organizations and parties or working alongside

them. And so now that socialism is gaining a popularity, we have this momentous opportunity, right? And so our tasks are one to sort of give definition to socialism, to, you know, show what it is, what the struggle is. And then also to reestablish Marxism as a guiding poll in the various struggles that our class is engaged in. And, you know, not everybody needs to read Capital to do this, but I think the more organizers to read it, the better we can understand and then intervene to change the exploitation and oppression that we deal with and fight on a daily basis. So, you know, and also organizers want to read the text, right? And that's, I think that's evidence by the, you know, growing resources available for it. So I've,

taught capital in various settings over the years and we ended up putting up a version of an online class on liberation school and it had you know it was good because it included worksheets there were some video lectures but it wasn't super appealing um because like the powerpoint slide it's basically like watching powerpoint slides a lot right and then uh you know there were things you wanted to change and at the same time podcasts as you know are like increasingly popular right um and there's a there's a a few podcasts on Capital, but, you know, they're quite a commitment because they tend to be really long. And some of them are just audio versions of lectures. So like the speaker will reference a diagram on the board and you have no idea what is happening. They also aren't really from the

perspective of like revolutionary organizers trying to apply the text to struggles today. And so we wanted to address these issues, right? We wanted to create an inviting, an accessible podcast that was professionally designed, professionally executed, that was made for those who are reading along, but also for those who just wanted to listen along. And it was from, you know, the perspective of militant communist organizers. And so the idea came from Mike Prysner initially, who has a lot of experience as a producer, who currently produces the Empire Files. And we brought in Patricia Gorky, and who does a lot of work on audio. And the three of us were the editorial team. So I'd record the episodes. They'd listen to them and think about edits to make, right? What kind of

questions to ask, uh, what we needed to spend more time on. And then, you know, ways to break up the episode like you had mentioned. So, you know, Nick De La Riva did a lot of the sound editing and anahedron made the music for it. And I think they did a really good job focusing on those minor details. Uh, and then Nathan Schmidt made all the graphics for it, right? And we made, you know, like compelling titles, uh, and, uh, descriptions of each episode. So I think all that to makes it, you know, like really unique. It took a long time. It was about, I don't know, six, eight months or whatever, but I think it turned out well. It's great to hear your positive feedback. We've gotten others. And it's interesting. In June, somebody sent me like some

listening statistics from the different platforms it's on. And on SoundCloud, the city with the second most listeners was Baghdad. The fifth was San Francisco and the seventh was Berlin. So it's got an audience beyond what we had originally anticipated. Beautiful. yeah i love it and and your teaching skills particularly are wonderful and they shine through when it comes to to this podcast and specifically how you molded your already existing teaching skills for the platform as you say there's sometimes these lectures that get put into an audio platform that they otherwise or they initially were not meant for and that can make the learning process a little more jagged and rough um but on every level from production to the way that the material

is presented. It is perfect for the platform of audio-only podcast. And then the reason that I focus so much on podcast and I think that the medium is so popular is, among other reasons, you can listen to it while you're at work. I got into podcasts working shitty jobs in retail and fast food and kitchens as a delivery driver, as a dishwasher. And it kept my mind stimulated intellectually while my body went through, you know, the sort of rope procedures of any low-wage labor job. And I got into it very early, and I think that that's a unique advantage of the podcast platform itself. And what better way to spend a day being exploited at your wage labor job than to dive deep into a critique of capitalist political economy. Yeah.

Yeah. And one thing you mentioned also in the intro episode is, and I think this is true to learn anything, but specifically difficult texts like capital, is these things are very helpful, but also reading in a group is. very helpful. The attempt to try to tackle capital by yourself, especially with limited historical context and not really knowing what you're getting yourself into can be very difficult. Adding a group, even one or two other people, to read it together can be very helpful. And adding a group plus an educational platform like reading capital with comrades and mixing all those elements together, I think is the best approach to it. And you make that clear as well. So well done on all fronts. How many times have you personally read through Capital and or taught it?

So I think I taught the book about maybe six times to, in various settings. So to like, I taught it once at school. And I taught it a couple times for like, you know, just workers, wherever and, you know, comrades, wherever I was living. And I taught it to party members once. And then I guess this was the last time, my most recent time teaching it and the most difficult because you don't know who's listening to it you know so in all the other in all the other iterations of teaching it you could like uh you know you know what people are you know what their jobs are you know what their interests are so you can bring those in and make it a more sort of you know dynamic and applicable thing so we had that was definitely a challenge um and then i don't know i think

i've read the book maybe 10 12 times like all the way through um and you know each time i read it i I learned something totally new, you know, I mean, there's just so much in it. And that was another difficulty, right? We wanted to make the episodes, like, not super long. And so, you know, we had to figure out, like, all right, what are the key points? And then, you know, what are the few sort of, you know, I don't know, arguments or applications that we want to make explicit. Yeah. And I think all told, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but there's 12 episodes and all of them are under an hour, right? Yeah, I think so. I think so. And like, you know, some of them might be 30, 40 minutes and then some are closer to the hour mark.

Yeah. So it's really like approachable and succinct in that way and you pull out the major themes, but you do so in a way that doesn't drag on for two, three hours, which, you know, is off putting to a lot of people and it makes it more difficult to engage with. So the systematic approach, the production levels, the way that it's taught, the person who teaches it, and the amount of sort of individual episodes that it takes you to go through volume one, all of it is wonderful, can't recommend it enough. But now that we've talked about the show and the reasons for doing it. Let's go to talk about the content of the book. Now, obviously, in a one-hour podcast, we're not going to be able to get super deep. If you want

to get super deep, check out Reading Capital with Comrades, which I'll link to. But just to touch on some things and to help people approach the overall topic, I guess the place to start here is just a question that's very general, which is, what is capital, right? The namesake of the title itself. And why and how and when was it written? Maybe just some historical context that can help us understand the era and the milieu in which Marx wrote capital. Yeah, sure. Good question, important questions. So, you know, capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, right? The first volume is on the process of capitalist production. And this was the only volume that was published and republished and translated during Marx's

lifetime. And so, you know, it's sort of the most complete, I don't know, overall. synthesis of really Marx's studies that we have. And Marx didn't want to, like, critique political economy to, like, you know, out of some academic interest, right? I mean, he needed to because the workers movement needed it. Because, you know, after the uprisings throughout Europe in 1847, 1848, which Marx and Engels and others participated in, some of which failed and there was a period of intense reaction afterwards, which, where, you know, Marx was kicked out of Germany. So he eventually ended up in London. And basically, Marx and Engels didn't really think that they were in the Communist League at that time. A lot of people in the league believed there would be

an immediate resurgence of struggle after the counter-revolution, right? And Marx and Engels disagreed. And they were like, well, there's going to be a period of, you know, sort of reaction for a bit of time. And one thing we need to do is we need to study why the revolution's failed and how we can better arm our class for the next battle, right? And this doesn't mean, you know, so Marx started engaging this real systematic study of political economy and of capitalism, you know, holding himself up in the library quite often, and transcribing and translating all these reports and, you know, studying, you know, the bourgeois political economists and more. But obviously, he was still involved in sort of day-to-day organizing. So it wasn't disconnected,

right, from the struggle. But it was a bit of the struggle. But it was a little bit of the struggle. It was, again, it was all oriented towards, like, defeating the influence of what Marx earlier called social democracy in the workers' movement. And so it's really the book that makes us, makes it possible to talk about Marxism as a theory, right, which I think is important. At the same time, right, it's, you know, Marx doesn't talk about everything that capitalism is. One, he's talking about the production of capitalism predominantly, but, you know, he's not trying to present, he's not saying that, like, this is all that's consistent. And I think that's important because that's evidence in the text, right, where he'll say like, well, in reality, this happens, but I'm not considering it because I'm assuming like a perfectly functioning capitalist system, right? So the idea was kind of to critique capital on its own terms and have a lot of different people speak through it, factory inspectors, bourgeois political economists, opponents in the workers movement and others. So and, you know, so those are some things that made it possible. And, and, you know, so those are some things that made it possible. And, and. It was, you know, was written really in the 50s and 60s, published in 1867. He was working on two other, well, several other volumes at the time, right?

Two was almost done. So we have that. Angles finished that. Three was in, you know, I don't know, it's kind of a mess. There's debates about, you know, just how much of it is Marx is, how much is angles or whatever. But, you know, volume one is really what we have, right, of Marx's most sort of systematic and comprehensive study of the dynamics of capitalist production in the class struggle. Yeah. Do you know much about the initial reception of the text when it first came out?

Yeah. Well, I mean, so it was received, I mean, so in the workers movement, it was read very widely. But it was also, it was read really widely. And so it was subject to, like, ruthless critiques by, you know, the bourgeoisie and their political economists. And so, like, one, in the last, like, you know, preface to the book, which is by Engels, it's, I think it's the preface to the fourth German edition. You know, it's basically Engels just, like, defending Marx from, you know, this Cambridge professor who, Engels refers to as our little Cambridge man, you know, who had attacked it in the Times and these other places. So it was like, it was, yeah, it was immediately subject to, like, you know, the bourgeoisie didn't want it out there for sure. And that's because it, you know, it would be the, the.

the Bible of the working class movement. Yeah, absolutely. In the intro episode of Reading Capital with Comrades, you talk a little bit about dialectics and the famous phrase of Marx turning Hegel on his head. Can you just talk a little bit about that and how dialectics plays into the structure and the approach that Marx took when it came to writing capital?

Sure. So I think that one of the most important categories, conceptual, like, or methodological principles is that of abstraction, right? That, you know, capitalism is, one, it's a dynamic system. Two, even in Marx's time, it was like, you know, it was an incredibly comprehensive system that had expanded and was expanding over increasing parts of the globe geographically and in other ways. So to look at something like that that's moving, right?

And also that you're inside of, you know, it's really difficult. So the process of abstraction is basically like, you know, beginning with what's called the real concrete, right, you know, the world as it is, and then breaking it up into discrete units and the ones that make sense, right, and that follow and they are like historically specific, right? And that's really one of Marx's major innovations, right? Previously, right, political economists had talked about labor. They talked about capital. They talked about profits. But, you know, Marx was like, well, these aren't the best abstractions because profits are a subcatches. category of surplus value, right? So he made these abstractions and then he sort of used them to reconstruct the totality, right, or the real concrete, right, which doesn't change it, right? It's just sort of what's called the real concrete and thought. And the, you know, I mean, in terms of, yeah, turning Hegel on his head, obviously there's a lot of debate about this. I mean, I personally think that, you know, by turning Hegel on his head, marks meant that, you know, he had sort of broken from Hegel significantly.

But, you know, Hegel's understanding of really historical transformation and the dialectic was that it was guided by ideas, which had a sort of objective, you know, external relationship to the world. And that the way that we change the world is through, you know, changing ideas, right? And Marx, you know, said that, well, that's not the case because we can actually look at the historical, political, economic reasons why Hegel would say something like that, why people would, you know, sort of go to that kind of methodology. And so instead, he, you know, he begins and he's like, well, the dialectic means that, you know,

everything is in transformation, right? And that things are being negated. Things are coming to birth and dying at the same time. We can't understand, you know, anything in isolation, right? We have to understand it not only in relationship to other things, but also in ways that that relationship actually defines what the thing itself is, right? So I think that those are a couple of the key. points. Did you, what do you think? Do you, did you have anything else you wanted to, you find it found, find or found important? Yeah, I liked, I liked particularly how you talked

about how capital and the way that Marx approaches the mode of production of capitalism was scandalous to the bourgeoisie in that it saw capitalism, not as an end-all, be-all of political systems or an end state of cultural evolution, but as largely a historically contingent process that has a birth and by sort of definition also has a death. And that I think is incredibly important. And that's one of the first steps that I think lots of Marxists make is busting themselves out of the sort of ideological assumption that the way things are today is more or less the best humans can do.

It's the best system we've ever created. It is presented to us as if capitalism is synonymous. with freedom and democracy so why would you even want to think about replacing it with a different system and when you talk to people liberals conservatives libertarians the presumption that they have often unexamined is that they truly do see capitalism as a static state of affairs it's like we've reached this and you know maybe if i'm a liberal i want to reform the edges maybe if i'm a libertarian i want to take away some of those reforms and let it rip maybe if i'm a conservative i have some other cultural concerns that I want to approach within the confines of capitalism.

But the question of whether capitalism could possibly have an end, you know, almost never comes up. And when you present that as an argument, and then you show how capitalism, you know, grew out of the early mercantileist machinations coming out of feudalism and et cetera. It's sort of, it just opens them up and their sort of unexamined prejudices come out. So I really like that point. and I think it's just important to reiterate it. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, that's because the abstractions they made were, like, inaccurate, right?

So, like, they would talk about the individual. And then they would, like, project that individual back throughout, you know, history, as if it, as if all of history was leading up to this, you know, and this is the culminating social system. And, you know, yeah, so what Marx does is really he just takes that apart. And he shows that, no, this is, like, the individual itself is the product of the 18th century. and that, you know, our very conceptions of freedom, equality, you know, justice, these are sort of superficial and contingent definitions.

And, yeah, and we need to interrogate that, critique that. And destroying the just so story of capitalism that you talk about in the series of, you know, this, it's like the hardworking, frugal person versus the lazy squanderer, and the people that are successful in capitalism are successful because of, you're really, individual characteristics, um, not systemic and historically contingent variables that prop some people up and make it impossible for others to, to move upward at all. Yeah. So, yeah.

On many fronts, it's, it's important. I want to, I want to move on and I want to say that, as you've said, capital is not just a critique of political economy. It's, it's a huge work that spans history, philosophy, et cetera. And that can make it more difficult for people to approach the tech. given the largesse of what it covers and the different approaches that it takes. So with that in mind, how did you personally approach the text? Do you have any perhaps recommendations for people when they are coming into approach the text

that might not have as much knowledge in, let's say, philosophy as they might in history or political economy as they might in philosophy? Yeah. So I think, you know, one thing is to try to like is to read it carefully because when you read the text carefully, you recognize the moments where Marx is explicit. about what he's doing and what he's not doing and what he's assuming and whether those assumptions are actually viable or not and like what he isn't taking into account. So to sort of really try to see, you know, like on Marx's terms, what he's trying to do. And then also to read it as a text

that isn't the work of an individual genius, but is really, you know, a work that wouldn't have been possible without the class struggle, without the experiences and organizing the Marx and angles and others have. And, you know, recognizing that that's like, you know, in the same way that reading Capital with Comrades isn't the work of any one individual or even the collective of individuals who worked on it, right? That it's a book of by and for the workers movement. That's really what Marxist theory is. I mean, Marxism is like the workers movement reflecting on itself. And then, you know, approaching the text, I think just reading it as like, for what it's trying to say in the context, the time in which it was written, and, you know, what we today can,

you know, how it can help us build the different movements that we're involved in, right? Advance the class struggle. Yeah. And let's talk about that a little bit, because this is a text from the 1800s. And for some, this question will be obvious, but I think it's worth asking nonetheless, especially to people who might be unsure about this. So what is the relevance of this text for us today? Yeah. So I think, you know, the first thing is that you were still in capitalism, right? And, you know, the sort of overall dynamics and logics the Marx articulates are still with us today. Automation, for example, you know, Marx talked about why that happened in the 1860s. And it's different today, but it's the result of the same logics, right? The same law of value. And things have changed, obviously, right? But there's a lot that hasn't. You know, for example,

But there's all this talk about the precarious today. But if you read what Marx was writing about the impact the capitalist industrial production had on the working class, it was making them precarious, right? And so there's a lot of continuities between Marx's time and ours. And then including like, you know, the function of the states and more. So, you know, it's really about how can we identify the capitalist contradictions the Marx shows us and see how they play out historically and today and how can we season them, you know,

to raise consciousness and to create more effective campaigns that really attack the structural and root causes of any issue. And so that our campaigns are not, you know, well, they appeal to broad sectors of the working class. They're not based on the very categories that Marx was critiquing, right? Like morality and humanity and all that kind of stuff, right? But they're based on the structural logics

that produce the problems that we're trying to solve. Generally, to effectively confront and overcome something, you have to have a deep understanding of it. And so if we want to confront and overcome capital, we have to understand how it works. And importantly, we have to understand how the seemingly disparate problems of modern-day society have common roots and that they can be traced back to a common sort of structure

that imposes these problems and disallows us to effectively solve them. One of those problems that is increasingly relevant and is probably going to be, if it not already is, the issue of the 21st century is climate chaos, the climate crisis. In what ways does this text, does Marx's understanding and the explanation of capital help us understand something like capitalism's connection to climate change? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, and there's a lot, you know. I mean, one of the most basic, sort of processes that Marx identifies is abstraction, right? So the way that capitalism abstracts, like, particular things and makes them all equal. So, you know, capitalist commodity

production makes different kinds of labor equatable, right? Which is why I take my wage, which I get from my labor, with selling my labor power, and I go to the store, and I can exchange it for all other kinds of, you know, forms of specific forms of labor power. But capital doesn't really care about those specific forms, right? It cares about exchange value, which is an abstraction away from all use value. And it does the same thing with the environment, right? It takes the world and basically presents it as sort of an abstract, you know, geometric, you know, body that is a resource, right? to just to further capital accumulation.

Obviously, there's also Marx acknowledges and like pays a lot of attention to the environmental preconditions, right? What makes capital sort of more profitable in one place or a certain kind of production more likely to develop in one place rather than another place, right? In other words, like what are sort of some of the roots of uneven geographic development? And why is it that the first centers of production sprang up on portside towns, for example? Well, because transportation was easy and because it had access to water power. But then with the invention of sort of electric machinery, capital was able to further abstract the globe

because it was able to sort of produce sources for its production processes anywhere. It didn't have to be located. And that's really, you know, capital is all about movement and flexibility, right? That's why I was able to defeat feudalism in England because feudalism is tied to the land. Capitalism isn't, right? I mean, that's why it can outsource industries overnight to another, you know, area without any consideration of the impact of that, right? And so just by viewing everything as a potential exchange value and as a potential sorts of profit, that's why we're in the situation that we are today. Absolutely. And I think a core tenet of denialism in all of its forms lurking behind it is a dogmatic commitment to unfettered capitalism.

And so you'll see almost everybody across the political lines. accept that climate change is happening. Even fascists, neo-Nazis, they accept that climate change is happening and they're ready to take full advantage of the chaos to spark their race war, what will amount to just hurting innocent people, et cetera. The one segment of the political spectrum that refuses to acknowledge it is precisely that segment that is most committed to unfettered capitalism, the conservative libertarian sort of milieu.

And they know, if not consciously, that subconsciously, that to meaningfully address climate change would require us to meaningfully address capitalism and to change those structures to make it more in line with a more sustainable approach to the world, et cetera. And so instead of becoming aware of that cognitive dissidents and working through it, they just turned to various forms of denialism. Now, for most of our life, that denialism was explicit outright rejection of the science. This isn't happening.

If it is, it's not human caused, etc. That's falling apart. And now I think the new line that some of them are taking is, well, there's nothing we can really do about it, you know, just adapt to it. Now, of course, if you ask them to pass a bill to allow us to tax the rich so that we can make our communities more resilient to climate chaos, they'll say, no, that's socialism, we're going to filibuster it, et cetera. But there is this shift recently where they can't outright deny it because it's so objectively obvious to everybody. And so their denialism takes on a little different form. And so I think in a million different ways, we could have an entire episode on just capitalism's connections to climate change and how it affects our politics. But that's certainly one of them.

I personally would love to bring, you know, marks and angles into the 21st century and let them see things like the 2008 financial crisis, the handling of the pandemic, the inaction globally from especially capitalist states when it comes to climate change. And I think more or less, they would be, I think, horrified on one level. But it would completely make sense to them that this is the sort of logical conclusion of another 150 years of capitalism. Do you agree? Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that's another place where there's so much continuity, you know. Marx talks about pandemics and capital, talks about financial crises. And, yeah, we can't explain and understand these current crises that are, you know, gripping us and determining so much of our of our lives and directions without understanding these core logics of capitalism that, as you say, is something that, you know, sort of connects.

so many different forms of exploitation and oppression, including the exploitation of the earth and all of its inhabitants. Absolutely. So I want to talk about common misunderstandings, because I think this runs the gamut, right? There are good faith and bad faith misunderstandings of Marxist theory. There's misunderstandings of Marxist theory on the far left, all the way to the far right and everything in between.

But just generally, I guess, what are some common misunderstandings of the Marxist theory? and how does capital clarify those misunderstandings? Yeah, well, I mean, what's interesting is so many of these misunderstandings come out of readings of capital, right? But I think that, you know, they're ones that don't do what I was talking about earlier, right? Which is like, you know, reading it carefully and seeing what he's explicit about and what he's, you know, not taking into account and why.

And for example, right, Marx writes that he focuses on England because it's where capitalism is most developed, but also where there's the most official statistics on it, right? like factory inspector reports, right, which are cited at length, especially those of Leonard Horner, who Marx gave like really, really high praise to. But, you know, he also says that as much as capitalism has developed in England at the time, other modes of production exist, right? So the very first sentence of the book is like the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, right? So a lot of people point out that Marx says appears or presents, which means it's not really true.

But also Marx says capitalism prevails, right? Not exclusively reigns. And so this is an important acknowledgement, right? That there's other modes of production existing in any one given social formation. And it's also important because England provides the basis of it. So it's not a universal theory or story imposed on everyone equally. You know, he later wrote to a Russian journal that success will never come with a master key of a general historical philosophical theory. And that would be anti-Marxist because it would be a historical, right?

But it's often read like that. And I think another is to distinguish what Marx's ideas are, what his vision is, from what capitalist realities are. So, for example, like when he talks about productive labor as labor that's directly productive of surplus value, that's the capitalist definition of productive labor. That's not the Marxist definition of productive labor. And but then again, right, later on, he says that all workers, whether they're employed or not, whether they're waged or not, are just as much appendages of capital. They're just as much a part of capitalist production as others. So he's definitely just not concerned with like malfactory workers or like England or whatever, right? And in fact, he writes about how industrial capitalism changes gender and family relations.

So, you know, the introduction of machinery, for example, right, made the employment of small children possible. And so he says that, you know, that the man became a slave dealer, right, of the labor of his wife and children. And he talks about, you know, the general law of capital's accumulation is the production of ever more and more, you know, unemployed workers, right, who are just as much a part of the working class as those who work for a wage or work as productive labors or whatever. And then again, you know, I think one is Marxist, the last section on primary accumulation, how the original capital was accumulated through expropriation and murder, pillage, legislation, individual acts of terrorism, genocide, slavery, right? But he says that this history is different in different countries and goes through different phases, different orders, and so on. So again, it's not a universal presentation, right? And it's not something that's over. It's not the same everywhere.

For example, he, you know, he denied that he didn't think that pre-capitalist India was feudalist. So it really prevents us from reading like a unilinear progression of history in the accounts. And, you know, even when Marx presents general laws or tendencies of capitalism, he'll immediately say that, you know, they're modified in a million different ways. So they're not immutable and like permanent mechanical processes, right? And of course, the entire book is about class struggle, which includes the abolitionist movement, anti-colonial struggles, right? And all these modify how capitalism plays out on the ground. So I think that, you know, obviously there's so many others.

But I think to me that those are some of the ones that come to my mind first. Yeah. And you said earlier that every time you read the text that you sort of learned something new. And I was just as you were talking there, I was sort of wondering, this last time that you read through it. Does anything particularly jump out in your mind as like, oh yeah, I might have missed this the first several times that I read it or maybe even just put a different spin on something that you already sort of understood but hadn't really seen from a certain angle or anything like that? Yeah. So, I mean, I think that one of them is the, is the, the coexistence of different

modes of production and any given social formation. This time around reading it, it's not that I, yeah, like I really focused and I saw so much of marks appreciating. and either taking into account or at least acknowledging this isn't a universal unilateral theory and it's it isn't a sort of you know stages progression of history and like if you just read certain sections and isolation from each other you can come away with that right but i think when you read the text as a whole you really see that the Marx is constantly taking into account like the great differential sort of developments of capitalism the you know the ways that resistance relates to capitalism and the way the capitalism relates to resistance.

And, yeah, the way that it's sort of not confined, that it isn't taking a study of, you know, capitalism in England and trying to say that this is it for everywhere. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I personally have been trying to articulate recently, specifically thinking about the importance of decolonial struggles within the Marxist framework in a revolutionary struggle is I started talking about the foreheaded beast of capitalism. A lot of people

on the left know that, you know, capitalism is inherently linked with fascism and imperialism. That's very clear. And therefore, to be anti-capitalist also requires of us to be anti-fascist and to be anti-imperialist. I think it also requires us to be anti-colonial

and to support decolonial struggles, which Marxism historically has played a huge role in and continues to. So, With that in mind, and the sort of foreheds, to be very clear, is capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and colonialism, which sometimes can get left out of the conversation, and bad readings of Marx or, you know, sort of white social chauvinist angles on reading Marx can sometimes leave out the role that racism and colonialism and other forms of oppression play, so what does

capital say about these things, specifically racism and colonialism? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the most famous, right? line, one of the most famous lines is, you know, that labor in white skin can't be emancipated where it's branded in black skin. That, you know, the working class in the United States will never be emancipated while there's slavery. And so that's why Marx himself, you know, was really concerned with the U.S. Civil War, wrote a lot about it, advised Marxists who were participating in the abolitionist movement on tactics, strategies, and so on and so forth. And because he

is always aware of the way in which capitalism differentiates and pits the working class against itself, right? When he goes in, when he talks about the industrial reserve army, he talks about the various Lazarus is the word he uses layers of it, right? And the different functions they can play. And from, you know, those who are temporarily unemployed to those who are, you know, the sort of dangerous classes who don't want to be employed. And, you know, how those different elements can sort of be pitted against those workers who are waged. And the other thing is that Marx ends the book with a chapter on colonialism, right? And interestingly, I mean, you know, there's a lot known about his relationship to the Irish question.

Obviously, he's in England at this time, and England is a colonial power still today over Ireland. And initially, you know, Marx and Engels thought that, you know, they had to have a socialist revolution in England. And then Ireland would be emancipated. But later, right, after actually acknowledging the, you know, the deep-seated chauvinism amongst English workers against the Irish, they were like, no, no, no, no, we have to fight for the, you know, for the liberation of the anti-colonial struggles in Ireland as part and parcel of the socialist struggle in England. And, you know, his notebooks also show that, you know, the class struggle was global and included anti-colonial struggles in China, for example. So in one of his notebooks, he wrote that China's rebellions in the, you know, mid-19th century, you could throw a spark, this is a quote, throw a spark into the overloaded mind of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis. So his theory of value, his theory of class was one in which, you know, that was not confined to the colonizing world, but that actually located the centrality. And in fact, you know, acknowledged that the sort of detonator of the class struggle could be in an anti-collarious.

colonial struggle. And I think this is, you know, especially important for Marxist theory of value, right? I mean, which has to do with the constant expansion of value and the ways in which value can't constantly expand forever and has to then destroy a bunch of value, right? And that helps explain, you know, imperialist wars today. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that from the sort of practical organizing that they did to support anti-colonial movements and, you know, anti, you know, the abolitionist movement, for example, by organizing workers to prevent the, to prevent England from intervening on behalf of the South and the U.S. Civil War, which they were about to do. And, you know, England at the time had the world's largest Navy. So it could have

really impacted the way that the Civil War played out. So they were not only thinking about these things, but they were actually fighting them on a sort of day-to-day basis. Yeah. One of the things of my political development that really stood out to me and made me commit to Marxism and then, you know, get really interested in Leninism and Maoism is the role that Marxism has historically played in decolonial movements and its effectiveness in those contexts specifically, and still to this day, are continuing to play huge roles. And so there is this sort of like this ignorant, sort of neoliberal identity reductionist who like to sometimes throw out these claims of like stop reading these white men.

and they have nothing to offer us. And I think it misses so much. It sort of betrays an ignorance about the methodology of Marxism and the historical role that it's played in precisely overturning racist forms of oppression, colonialist forms of oppression, etc. But with all that said, there's obviously no doubt that Marx and Engels, given their epoch

and where they're writing from, have some blind spots. But that's the beauty of Marxism, is that it's not this dogmatic doctrine handed down to us by marks and angles, it's an analysis and a methodology that we, that we take and we build on and we apply in our own circumstances. And I think that goes a long way to, to rebuking some of that. And like I said, you know, they never said they were going to analyze everything, every single thing, right? And I mean, there are forms of oppression today that we can understand by reading capital. We can better understand by reading capital, right? But there are forms

of oppression that, you know, marks and angles during that time, you know, that maybe weren't as sort of, they weren't in the consciousness, right, of the masses, for example. Yeah. And just structurally, because you do you talk about this in reading Capital with Comrades, why do you think Marx put the primitive accumulation chapter at the end? I just think it's worth touching on. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, throughout the book, Mark says, like, we're assuming that, you know, the presuppositions of capitalism are here, right?

And then we finally get to the chapter, the long part, the last part, right, the various chapters on, you know, how the original capital was accused. accumulated. And I think that this really brings together, like he's talking about the case in England primarily, right? But capitalism in England, he shows, couldn't have developed without slavery in the United States, right, without the colonization of India, without the colonization of China, without the subjugation of so much of the world, right? The genocide and the indigenous peoples. And, but again, you know, he's saying that this isn't like the only way that it plays out he isn't saying that it's historically over and then what's interesting though is that yeah so the

second to last chapter chapter 32 is uh is like the uh historical tendency of capitalist accumulations a couple short pages and it's like a really quick succinct you know overview of capitalism in england right um and it's really compelling and like if you read it in isolation you might be like oh my gosh this is a little deterministic and like whatever but you know when you take into account all the other things you see that it's not but you know it ends with the call right for like expropriating the expropriators it's sort of a militant call to arms and then you go to the last chapter which is about this guy's theory about colonialism and you know colonization and it's like you know it it ends on that and so you're kind of like what's going on you know and like david harvey has a has an interpretation of it

that has something to do with hagel's reading or hagel's logic and how Marx is reproducing that or whatever, but, you know, in my mind, Marx is saying Marx, and not just mine, but others, too, is that, like, well, you know, we talked about capitalism in England, but we talked about how it depended on colonialism, but it can continue to depend on colonialism. And it can, you know, it's the story that he told in chapter 32, right, where, you know, the means of production and the relations of production, like, they're disjointed, something has to give way, you know, they're holding production back, they're holding, you know, the world back. But then by ending with the modern theory of colonization, he's, you know, he's basically saying that,

well, there's other ways the capital can sort of delay, but also heighten these contradictions by bringing them to a more global level. And that's really where Lenin's theory of imperialism originates, right? And, you know, without Lenin's theory of imperialism, which integrates, right, the national question with the class question, shows that they're not separate, but they're part and parcel of each other. And the ways in which that contributed so much to the liberation of so much of the world is really important, right? But I mean, I think that that's why it's important to note that. That's why he ends this, you know, this entire book there rather

than, you know, calling for us to expropriate the expropriators. Yeah. And it's also why Lennon is so essential. He really is taking the Marxist analysis and critiques and applying it in a new age, the age of rampant imperialism and in extending the understanding. So very, very crucial. Okay. So let's move on. We have a couple more questions here. We're coming up on the hour mark. But one important element, and I know this is something that you put a lot of emphasis on in just general is applying this stuff in our own organizing effort. So how can or should we apply and develop capital in our own age of organizing? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of ways for sure. I think that one of the things that it stands out to me the most is the way that Marx theorizes the state and the relationship between reform and revolution.

So, you know, at the end of chapter 10 on the working day where Marx's details, right, based on the factory inspector reports, like the absolute horrors of the industrial system, you know, the murder that it's responsible for, right? The degradation it's responsible for. And he calls that, you know, he ends that chapter with a call for the workers to put their heads together and pass an all-powerful social barrier that would limit the working day to 10 hours. And obviously that would be a reform that would take place through the state, you know. So also in that chapter, he talks about the state really is as responsible for two things, right? One, it's managing the contradictions, obviously, between the different classes. The other is that it's managing the contradictions within the capitalist class. So, you know, because of each capitalist were left on their own,

they would basically, like, kill everything that makes them profitable. And so the state needs to step in to manage those contradictions. And so, you know, workers need to utilize the state to win reforms, right, to advance the class struggle so that they can, you know, so that we can, you know, organize more effectively, have time for more organizing, right? and also show that we can change things. I mean, that's really, really important. But then he talks about revolution, you know, expropriating the expropriators.

And so these aren't, you know, diametrically opposed, but they're dialectically related, right? They're both part of the overall strategy for, you know, in the struggle for socialism and then communism. I think another is, you know, the value of labor power versus the wages of labor power. So, and, you know, really the difference between value and price. But, you know, the value of labor power is like, you know, it's basically determined by class struggle. You know, what does it take to reproduce something, the working class, right? Well, that changes over time. And we can fight to increase the value of labor power, which we've done historically.

The working in the capitalist class will fight to reduce the value of labor power to its bare minimum, even below its bare minimum. But if we can show that, like, well, the value of labor power includes my or our schooling, right, going to college. Right. If a job requires you to go to college, then that's your labor. That's included in the value of your labor power. And so they should pay for your college, right? Not you. You're basically subsidizing the boss by paying for the, you know, part of the value of your labor power. So I think that's like a great agitational point to make that can also help us connect the struggle to abolish student debt and for free education to the very capitalist system. Right. And, you know, really I think that, you know, Marx's law. of value is, you know, it's a law that operates above our heads and behind our backs in ways that no individual can control. But it expands, right? And it creates contradictions that are sort of delayed in various ways. So, right, like we talked about imperialism and colonialism, but that, you know, we're powerless as individuals to really change things. And that capitalism, it shows us, you know, creates a collective working class at the same time as it tries to

constantly de-collectivize us and individualize us. And that's obviously, you know, one of the primary struggles we have today in the U.S. is to think of ourselves as members of a class and not as individuals. So I think those are a couple of examples in terms of how we can apply the text today. Yeah, well said. And, you know, Marx famously did not get into the game of predicting what's going to come in the future or saying a whole bunch about exactly what socialism and communism will look like. And that's, I think, to credit his epistemic humility, but it also can lead to a bunch of different factions of people taking Marx's words and trying to say, well, this is actually the sort of socialism he meant, or this is what he actually meant, et cetera. That's something

we all still live with. And this book itself, Capital, is a book mostly about capitalism and how it functions. So with both of those things in mind, how does Marx think about socialism and communism in and through this book? Yeah. So, I mean, I think one thing is that really Marx is talking about capitalism and communism, right? Socialism is sort of, you know, a social formation that includes both modes of production, right? It's the period in which, you know, the communist mode of production is battling to defeat the capitalist mode of production.

And the way that he figures communism is very different, you know, I mean, at the, he talks about at one point early on, right, it's a, you know, it's a free association of laborers, right? operating according to a plan. So there's an element of freedom in there, but it's also a planned freedom, right? Because you can't have real free, you can't really allow the productive capacities of society to develop unless there's a sort of plan, right? And so I think there's a dialectic then between, you know, the sort of notion of freedom and this notion of planning and sort of centralized planning, which he emphasizes throughout.

And at different moments in the text, he, you know, he talks about this, these two different sort of definitions, right? these two components of the communist future. And they're present in volume one. I mean, and then volume two, because it focuses on the reproduction of capital, it talks a lot more about, you know, the planning that's needed in communism and how, you know, as much as bookkeepers are needed in capitalism, they'll be needed even more under communism.

And then in volume three, you know, he kind of returns to this, to what he does in volume one, where it's kind of both these elements of it. And but he also talks about throughout all three volumes, You know, that just because, just as there's no, you know, pure capitalist mode of production without elements of other modes of production that we can sort of see elements of, you know, the communist mode of production, even in capitalist societies, right? So he talks about joint stock companies at one point, you know, free education, those kinds of things, which doesn't mean that they're, that that's communism, but it means that these are elements for communism in the same way that there were elements of capitalism in non, non-capitalist societies, that capital was able to sort of. seize on and then you know um enforce right and so we have to be attentive to that as well without thinking that these themselves are the path to communism or these are communist right so like you know i don't know the fact that knowledge uh like can be shared online right without cost

and that challenges private property you know because private property is based on like scarcity and like non-reproducibility and rivalry so if i have i have access to something, you can't have access to something. Well, knowledge is very different because if you, you know, I mean, that's why my books are available for free online, right? It doesn't take away anything for me, right? And in fact, it increases our productive capacity because the more people who have access to that knowledge, the more we can do with it. But that doesn't mean that, you know, it's communism, right? Or that's necessarily, because it's still under the capitalist mode of production. But with that, with that, we can see the ways in which we're already sort of, we already

kind of parts of our society and our relations are already already contain elements of the communist future within them right and we can you know highlight those and say show how much better they are than the ones that are capitalist elements yeah exactly by identifying and we can also consciously cultivate and extend them and that's an important aspect too and and i think that's that's one of the insights of dialectics more broadly is you know it's not like feudalism ends and then capitalism starts. It's like the seeds of capitalism start appearing in the middle and late feudal era and then these developments occur. And the same is true for our time, right? Elements of socialism and communism or communism because socialism is this transition towards

communism exist. And it's our job to identify and extend to those and to show, as you said, how they are superior to the capitalist alternative. And that's going to become more and more important as the climate crisis particularly ramps up because people are going to start seeing they're not going to be able to turn away from the fact that the way that we do things economically politically socially is just not sustainable they don't work anymore and people are going to be looking for alternatives one of the alternatives or at least a false alternative presented as a real one is the fascist one the fascist appeal very simplistic racialized, tribalistic,

scapegoating narratives of it's these brown people or it's the Jews that are in charge that are doing this, etc. They have the advantage of having a very base, simple explanation for everything. It's wrong in every single way, but they do have that advantage. We have to take on the obligation and the responsibility to understand these things ourselves and then be able to go out and teach people these things and to connect up their personal struggles,

what they're going through in their lives that they care about, with this broader movement to building a better world. I think Capital is absolutely crucial for that. And teachers like you, Derek, that can take a complex work like Capital and make it understandable to everyday working class people are also essential in that process. So I thank you for that. Now, reading Capital with Comrades goes over Volume 1 of Capital in 12 episodes,

as we said earlier, under an hour each. Do you have any plans on continuing this with Volume 2 and 3, or are you just kind of seeing how the reception of this first volume one turns out first? Yeah, so I mean, yeah, so we want to do volume two next. And so I've kind of started that a little bit, but it's going to be sort of a different beast altogether. But I think that I think it would be really useful, really helpful because it's often presented as like, I don't know, like are super boring. And there are some parts that are like a little more dry, but there's actually a lot in there about the class struggle, a lot of really inspirational, you know, like mobilizing, energizing theories and concepts, and also a lot of concepts that help us

understand, for example, the environmental crisis, right, and how capitalism produces nature and space in certain ways. So, yeah, we are working on that. I can't tell you when it'll be out, but, uh, because this was a big project and it took up a lot of time. So we also kind of needed to breathe her from it and wanted to, wanted to get it out there and let us sort of, you know, get feedback from it too before we started the next one. But yeah, that's definitely in the works. I don't know about volume three. We'll have to sort of, you know, take that later as it comes. But in the meantime, you know, I do think that there are, there's a lot, you know, for people who listen to it and want to read more. I mean, obviously, you know, read Marx, read Marxist School. I do get asked so, like, okay, I've listened to this. I've read Capital, what's next. And I mean, I think there's a couple books. The first one I always recommend is Harry Harritunians, Marx After Marks. Is it, I think it's Turkish. But it's a book from, I think like 2014. maybe, that talks about really, I don't know, shows not only how Marxism was taken up throughout the third world, the global South, and developed, but also how Marxist theories

themselves allowed for that and took that into account. And another one is David Harvey's Limits the Capitol, which is old. I think it's from 1983. But for those who are interested in a lot but like that, you know, academic debates, but also, you know, some political debates with real implications. You know, Harvey's got a really good grasp in a really good way of presenting those. And then there's also somebody named Radica Desai, who's in, I think, at the University of Alberta, but she's really does amazing work about Marxism and understanding the contemporary configuration of imperialism. so those are some of the things that I you know that I definitely recommend which speaks to another way you know another reason that it's important to emphasize that not only are there communist elements present under capitalism but that you know Marxist ideas actually have transformed the globe right I mean they have eliminated exploitation right they haven't created a communist world because that can happen as long as capitalism exists but that you know like we need to take inspiration not only from what Marx is Marx wrote but from the you know the you know the the more than a century of the actual worker's struggle that we have that's actually created

successful socialist experiments that continues to do so. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Derek, for coming on the show again, talking about this. And for you and all the comrades behind reading Capital with Comrades, all the work that went into it, the collective effort that went into it. I cannot recommend it enough. I will say, again, it's my personal favorite walkthrough of Capital that I've ever come across. And you can listen to this individually, as you say in the intro episode you can do it along with reading capital and then going to this to these episodes or just sort of going to the episodes without having red capital themselves you're going to get something out of it regardless but the best way to do this and i really want to encourage this aspect to do

it collectively and specifically if you're in organizations right if you are in any sort of socialist left communist organization anti-capitalist formation taking reading capital with comrades and giving it out to your members and and doing a little study group with that resource, I cannot tell you how beneficial and advantageous that would be. So definitely consider that if you're operating in that context. Derek, before I let you go, can you just reiterate where listeners can find that podcast and Liberation School online? Yeah, sure. So liberation school.org, and we have a tab educational resources and courses. And so you can see the reading capital with comrades there. You can listen to all the episodes. They're sort of embedded

from SoundCloud. It's on SoundCloud. It's on, you know, iTunes. iTunes, Spotify, I think all the major platforms you can find it on. And you'll see that the episodes, descriptions, or somewhere in there, also has an email you can send that you can send questions to. Or, like, for example, if you're studying it in a group, if you want somebody to come on and sort of talk with their group about it after you've listened and study the book, have a conversation. You know, we'd be more than happy to do that.

Nice. Yeah. Wonderful. And I will link to that in the show notes so people can find it as easy as possible. And Derek, you always have an open invite here on Rev Left. You want to come and talk about anything at all. Specifically, that new book, when it's out, hit me up. And we'll have you back on to talk about that because it's a really important and fascinating topic.

And you do great work on pedagogy in particular. So thank you again for coming on. Thank you for everything you do. And let's keep in touch and do this again soon. That sounds great. Thank you so much, Karen Head. Oh, hello, how are you? My favorite son.

In an hour, I will go where I've never gone. In the span of the space between your mother's eyes are the secrets that I've saved. Ooh, the averages and hearts. You lose every man for himself, every child alone. Oh, why do they shine so bright in my dreams? So bright in my dreams Golden blades forged from love They sell my feet

But you know where I'm going When all is sad and I I don't need them More my secrets Just the grace of one Here they come Here they come Here they come

Oh here they come Is everything signed It's everything done I'm sorry about the blood The devil has done It was every man for yourself Every child belongs Please tell your mother, I'm sorry for the strife.

Tell your brother I loved him the same to his wife. And if you have a heart to take my life away, give me some some. Give me anger to remember you today Give me anger To remember you today Because here they go About where they come Because everything

I can not think me under I'm sorry about the blood The devil and his stone It was every man for yourself Each heart alone Thank you.