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February 12, 2006
Kapital for Beginners
Kapital for Beginners, a comic book by David Smith and Phil Evans published in the early 1980s, makes clear some salient points of Marx's theory concerning how capital and labor interact, and how the capitalist to prosper must extract surplus value, value that can be created only through labor. Since I have not managed to read even the abridged version of the real thing, I borrowed this one from Antonia.
This book and the book it dumbs down have at one level an hilarious ironic cast that reminds me of Kafka's parable of the gate or the Philip K. Dick's story, A Scanner Darkly, in which narcotics officer S.A. Powers investigates his own increasing addiction, eventually getting himself incarcerated and blowing his mind in the process.
In the US and probably much of the developed world, the line between labor and capital is blurry in the top quintile, where we'd expect to rely on equities for retirement. In other words, we aspire to finish our lives as capitalists, and indeed are so intent on getting there that we invest to ride big capital's coat tails as it exploits us while we work and aims to play us off against cheaper labor elsewhere. Our fathers and mothers working in the private sector eventually lose their jobs, but seem to make it to financial security, provided we keep the scheme going.
Most of my compatriots from the top quintile would likely remind me that Marxism has been proven to be bunk, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc being the ultimate demonstration. Interesting that this comic book points out (years before the implosion) that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Castro, and dictators like them missed the point. Or maybe they got a different set of points, those made by Machiavelli. Quoted in this book Rosa Luxemburg wrote instead, "Only the working class, by its self-activity, can bring about socialism. That means workers control. Nobody can bring about socialism 'On your behalf.'" Guess the French "Socialists" didn't read Rosa Luxemburg either.
Posted by Mark at February 12, 2006 04:23 PM
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