Two Ways of Approaching Marx's Capital

Today's Marx's birthday! And next Sunday, I'm starting a new weekly Zoom class on Capital. So this seemed like a good week for an essay on how to (and how not to!) read that book.

In his 1886 preface to the English edition of Capital, Marx’s longtime collaborator Friedrich Engels says that the book was already becoming known as “the Bible of the working class.” Sadly, he may have been more right about that than he realized.

In the thirteen decades since he wrote that line, a great many socialists and communists have treated Capital