things i like

“All that is solid melts into air.”
— karl marx and friedrich engels, the communist manifesto

“pictured reading karl marx beside his parents' pool / facing ridicule he pleaded / ‘that doesn't make me rich, no way / it's only outdoor and it isn't heated’”
— los campesinos!, renato dall'ara

marx is easier to read when he is treated as someone attempting an explanation of nineteenth-century capitalism rather than as the author of a ready-made answer to every subsequent political question. his work combines philosophy with economic analysis, and the vocabulary changes considerably between the early manuscripts and capital. the word marxism introduces still another difficulty, since it names a tradition whose participants frequently disagree about what marx meant.

in the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, marx describes alienated labor as a relationship between workers and the activity through which they reproduce their lives. the product of labor belongs to someone else, and the worker generally has little authority over the conditions under which it is made. this goes beyond the familiar observation that work can be exhausting or badly paid. a person may be well compensated and still have very little control over the activity to which most of the day is devoted.

marx's later account of capitalism becomes more technical. in capital, labor-power is treated as a commodity sold for a wage. the worker receives the value of that labor-power, while the work performed can produce more value than the wage represents. the difference is central to marx's account of surplus value and exploitation. this is a specific economic argument, not simply a synonym for employers behaving badly; it depends on assumptions about value that have been extensively debated.

commodity fetishism is another term that has acquired an unfortunate second life outside its original context. it does not mean enjoying shopping too much. marx is describing a social situation in which relationships between producers appear as relationships between commodities and their prices. the institutions governing production can begin to look like impersonal properties of things rather than arrangements maintained through human activity. in a market, the price appears on the label, while the conditions under which the object was made are usually elsewhere.

historical materialism develops from the proposition that people must produce the material conditions of their existence and that the organization of this production shapes political and intellectual life. marx and engels argued against explaining historical change exclusively through the evolution of ideas. the economic and social relations of a period matter to which ideas become influential and how institutions survive. this does not mean that a change in technology automatically produces one predetermined political outcome. there are much stronger deterministic versions of the theory, and they remain disputed.

the account of ideology is more complicated than the popular caricature in which everyone who disagrees with marx has simply been deceived. an institution can become so familiar that its historical origins are easy to overlook. the relevant question is how certain descriptions of social life become common sense, particularly when those descriptions help reproduce the arrangements they describe. later writers such as antonio gramsci developed this problem through the concept of hegemony, giving education and cultural institutions a more explicit role.

marxism also changed enormously after marx. gramsci's writing on political power differs substantially from g. a. cohen's analytical reconstruction of historical materialism. leszek kołakowski's history documents just how extensive these disagreements became, particularly over how historical explanation works and what can legitimately be inferred from marx's critique of capitalism.

it is possible to find parts of the analysis illuminating without treating every prediction as vindicated. marx expected capitalist development to produce certain patterns of class conflict, but capitalism has changed through political institutions and economic arrangements that his nineteenth-century texts could not fully anticipate. the interesting work begins when a theory is precise enough to be tested against that history. i have been trying to make my way through capital, which is a substantially bigger undertaking than recognizing the phrase about everything solid melting into air.

to read

karl marx, economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844
especially the writing on alienated labor. early marx, and probably the marx i am most immediately attracted to: productive activity as something that should belong meaningfully to human life rather than merely sustain it.

karl marx, capital, volume i
commodities, value, exploitation, accumulation, and the organization of capitalist production. i particularly want to understand commodity fetishism beyond the considerably less interesting internet meaning of “people really like buying things.” (eventually i will actually have to read the enormous book.)

antonio gramsci, selections from the prison notebooks
hegemony and the problem of how a social order maintains itself without depending entirely upon coercion. probably especially relevant to what interests me about the reproduction of institutions and common sense.

g. a. cohen, karl marx's theory of history: a defence
an unusually systematic reconstruction of historical materialism and one of the foundational texts of analytical marxism. i suspect the parts i disagree with will be at least as useful as the parts i don't.

leszek kołakowski, main currents of marxism
a very large intellectual history of marxism. particularly interested in this because it treats marxism as a tradition with a history rather than beginning from the assumption that the purpose of reading its history is to discover the correct marxism.

c. wright mills, the marxists
marxism approached by a sociologist already concerned with class and power. i am interested in the attempt to separate what remains intellectually useful in the tradition from what became doctrine. (also: mills!!!!)

last edited: 31 october 2026