Capital

I have spent more time with this book than with probably any other, and I still learn new things from it all the time.

Parts of it are very hard, but that’s because Marx is trying to show how the whole world is put into motion by economic power, money, and competition. But he also knows how to liven up even very technical parts of the argument with dark humor, arresting images, and biting sarcasm. 

It may seem odd for me to include this work, focusing on the economics and politics of the capitalist system, under the category “psychoanalysis and politics.” But one easily forgets that it is in this groundbreaking book that Marx makes his crucial argument on “commodity fetishism,” the (psychoanalytic) process by which we so fetishize—which is to say, love—a car or an iPhone, for example, that we disavow the labor and environmental conditions (i.e. the exploitation and domination of people and nature) under which they were produced.

No wonder that Jacques Lacan, the noted psychoanalytic thinker, saw Marx as the first… show more.

Capital is still the most thorough analysis of the workings of capitalism.

It inaugurated a major theoretical rupture in the social sciences. It defines a new theoretical system of concepts on the basis of which we can decipher the social and economic reality that surrounds us: capitalism.

That goes for every capitalism, and not just that of England in the nineteenth century, where and during which time Marx lived.

The object of Capital is, as its author explains, the “ideal average” of the capitalist system, the causal relationships that operate below the surface of each and every capitalism. 

This is the most important book about capitalism ever written and also the most important book about how machines function under capitalism. While Capital was written before automation, the analysis of mechanization on display here draws together value, labour, and machines in a groundbreaking way that remains relevant today.