Using Marxs Capital as an Organizing Tool

Details: Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1673 ... September 24, 2018
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Using Marx’s Capital as an Organizing Tool

Ingo Schmidt

Marx’s Capital: three volumes, 2,500 pages. A tome as an organizing tool? For leftists who really can’t do without Marx, there are a lot of his texts that are shorter and address questions of organizing directly. The Communist Manifesto (1848) comes to mind, but also the materials he wrote for the International Working Men’s Association. Whether these texts are still relevant today is debatable but there’s no doubt that generations of socialists read them as guides to working class struggles.

Capital (1867), on the other hand, points at recurrent crises that surely are a nuisance for capitalists but also offer them ways to reinvent and actually expand the rule of capital. Workers gaining higher wages... and shorter hours through their struggles? The next crises will surely roll back those gains, the following boom will be driven by the introduction of labour-saving machines that leave workers in a rat-race for any kind of job. All the while, the power of increasingly concentrated capital over society grows. How workers could stand a chance to win the final battle, to which Marx calls them at the end of volume one of Capital, remains totally unclear. Not surprisingly, Capital has found more readers among intellectuals who need an excuse for their absence from protests and picket-lines than among front-line activists. How could it possibly serve as an organizing tool?

The short answer is that Capital isn’t a book of theoretical solutions waiting to be applied in practice but a starting point to make connections between different aspects of capitalist realities, the discontents they produce and the resistance movements rallying around them.