It's so hard to work on grant applications when it's sunny and 22 degrees out. My well-planned trip to the library turned into a meandering bicycle trip through downtown, where I ended up in my favourite park, iced coffee in hand, listening to live blues and, in an attempt to be productive, reading about how money works. I thought Marx and sunny afternoons would be a perfect combination, but somehow his words don't leap off the page like normal when there's music to be heard, coffee to be drank and punks to look at.

Capital getting blurry

I feel badly for Marx; he keeps going over and over points. I can sense his frustration: he's got it all clear in his head, and he wants to get on with the argument, but he's got to wait until we're all with him. He throws in page-long footnotes, full of detail you know he finds interesting (e.g. how some Inuit lick the money piece to show an exchange has been completed.) Since he grasps the main concepts, maybe he's keeping himself motivated to write. But he has to leave that out of the main text because he might lose us, the simpler folk, struggling to keep up.

He genuinely cares that people understand him, which places him well above a lot of academic writing (and Marx wasn't an academic.) He took years to clarify his ideas writing different drafts of Capital, some of which ended up being different books entirely. But he's got so much to do - his original plan was 6 volumes - and he can't wait to get to it. He only pauses to disparage bourgeois economists, who are too dim to see how capitalism works.

OK, I'll explain it again

So I feel badly admitting that I don't get a lot of it. Part of the problem of reading Capital is that I've got a capitalist education. I've learnt how to focus my disciplinary boundaries, not break them down. Yet those boundaries are a symptom of alienation: each of us, finding our little niche in politics, history, sociology, whatever is just replicating the social division of labour. We treat capitalism as if it was a series of discrete bits, rather than a system to be understood in its totality. Which means I've never had to think about exchange or value: that was economics, and that meant math, numbers, glazed-over eyes, etc. Here's Marx saying, "This stuff is just as important as revolutionary history! Please hurry up and figure it out, because I've got so much more to say!" And I'm running after, panting, "Wait up! I don't get it!"

I'm still a Marxist. But, as I'm discovering, that means way more than I thought it did.

Being patient, damn it

There's a lesson in this. I thought I knew a reasonable amount about many subjects. As I crack the spines on books I've never read (and then read the introduction and put them down), I'm discovering that I don't know very much. It's humbling, and perhaps it's a necessary part of going back to school. I thought I had a basis of knowledge in my favourite topics: alienation, capitalist economics, imperialism. But I'm just at the beginning.

This isn't unusual: many radicals, once they get a taste of the big picture, feel frustration with others who don't see it. Like I said, I can even sense it in Marx, and he's doing his best to be patient. For all of us who think we have our politics well-figured out, it's sobering to learn how far we've got to go.

What do you mean, you don't understand how surplus labour gets appropriated directly by the feudal lord?! - 12th century Chinese peasants get fed up

I don't mean empirically: I think it's fine to profess a certain doctrine by accepting its key premises, even if you don't know all the details. A doctrine is an abstraction, but one that's based on facts at a more concrete level (hopefully!) So, the facts can come later (and anyhow, it's impossible to know everything about a doctrine: the real world keeps changing.)

What I mean is that learning never stops. We can immerse ourselves in the theory & practice of that doctrine and learn more about the ever-expanding whole. And, while we're doing so, be humble and patient with other people who are still trying to get the basics. After all, we were there once, too - and still are, depending how you look at it.

Grudgingly, art

I'm slightly delirious with booksale mania: I've been to two in the past two weeks, and there's at least 2-3 more coming up soon. In a bid to be less reductionist, I got two books on art: one is a brief history of socially conscious art, the other is a survey of Dada and surrealism.

I think my problem with art is not art per se; it's treating art as separate from society. In other words, art as idealist practice, springing from the heads of genuises. And how some well-intentioned artists try to be activists by just applying that model: the art that's sprung from my head will emancipate the masses. Art is not separate from social struggles.

It's interesting that the Dada movement reached similar conclusions. Setting out to destroy bourgeois, individualist art, they soon realized a) they were going to be be commodified and b) they weren't helping the revolutionary struggle. So they took the sober, mature step of shutting themselves down. They even say, 'Look, we know our work's going to end up in some capitalist's private collection some day; meanwhile there are people fighting and dying to destroy capitalism. So let's quit while we're ahead and join the struggle.' I respect artists who can be that self-critical of their own work. And in my own self-critical fashion, I'm going to learn more about them.