Marx

By Fred Skolnik

Given the exigencies of the time, Fomite offers a series of bound pamphlets on urgent political, social, cultural, and organizing issues from a radical, anti-capitalist viewpoint.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Jan 31, 2017

Book preview

Marx

I grew up in a Communist household. My father arrived in the United States from Poland in 1920, at the age of 16. He became a union activist, ran for the New York State Senate in 1934 on the Communist ticket, and fought in Spain. In 1948 he campaigned for Henry Wallace and in 1949 for Vito Marcantonio. In our hallway closet we kept a bust of Lenin and bound copies of an English-language Soviet magazine called USSR. Scattered around the house were copies of the Daily Worker. And on the narrow set of shelves in the hall, alongside my Tarzan books and Uncle Remus stories, was a three-volume edition of Capital, published by Charles H. Kerr & Company (Subversive literature for the whole family since 1886).

I had never read it, but after my father died in 1988 I took it back to Israel with me. By then I had become a patron of a Russian-language bookstore in Jerusalem that also sold English translations of Russian literature turned out by Moscow’s foreign- language publishing houses, all dirt cheap. Here, in the 1960s, I had bought Bunin’s Shadowed Paths, Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, Chekhov’s Short Novels and Stories, and Dostoevski’s My Uncle’s Dream and Notes from a Dead House. I had also picked up, out of curiosity and even a sense of intellectual duty, a two-volume edition of Marx and Engels’ Selected Works and also Marxist Philosophy by a certain V. Afanasyev. Now I had Das Kapital itself and even read a few sections, though certainly not the whole of it.

Since that time the Communist system has collapsed. No one, of course, would think to go back to it. Nonetheless, this strikes me as a good time to go back to its origins and read the great work once and for all, perhaps even naively, as though this dream of a workers’ paradise could actually come to pass. So I take down the three volumes and bring them into the living room and lay them down within reading distance and prepare to get to work.

The first volume is called Capitalist Production. Marx published it in Hamburg in 1867 after years of research in the British Museum Library (the second and third volumes were published after his death, completed and edited by his friend and colleague Friedrich Engels). Marx had been born a Jew in the town of Trier in the Rhineland. His father had converted a year before his birth and then converted all eight of his children in 1824, when Marx was six years old. His mother converted a year later. As a university student Marx fell under the sway of Hegel’s dialectic philosophy and subsequently got involved with radicals and socialists. After his marriage in 1843 he went to Paris to