Part One People often ask me what current books I recommend to help them understand Marx’s Capital. My answer to this is almost always the same. There is to my understanding no book out there…
I’ll admit after perusing the blog a bit more, that I agree with you on the general character of this blogger as ultra pedantic and shit-stirry. I can’t agree that the blogger did any malicious editing of quotes. It’s clearly a paraphrase of both Marx and Harvey despite the quote formatting:
More important to me is the general complaint about Harvey, which imo is not pedantic. It is actually a rather large debate in modern Marxism; you’re free to argue the importance of the debate, but it is relevant, and I am certain that Harvey is aware of it and the special significance of terms like a priori in relation to chapter one. There is continuity between this misinterpretation by Harvey and his rejection of major pieces of Capital, like the tendency of the falling rate of profit. It’s not a separate matter that Harvey is one of the least revolutionary Marxists in popular discussion.
Wrt misrepresentation, i’ll repost what I already wrote earlier both demonstrating the malicious editing, and explaining how these edits are more than mere formatting, and change the meaning of what harvey said to create a strawman punching bag:
author writes (my emphasis):
While Harvey is saying:
“Marx abstracts from all the useful qualities of commodities because we cannot perform experiments.
But the author has actually cut out massive portions of this quote, without indicating it, to massively change the meaning. What harvey actually wrote is (my emphasis):
[Marx] abstracts from the incredible diversity of human wants, needs and desires, as well as from the immense variety of commodities and their weights and measures, in order to focus on the unitary concept of a use-value. This is illustrative of an argument he makes in one of the prefaces, where he says that the problem for social science is that we cannot isolate and conduct controlled experiments in a laboratory, so we have to use the power of abstraction instead in order to arrive at similar scientific forms of understanding.
I.e. harvey is not saying that marx abstracts from the diversity of needs, wants, etc, because we cannot preform experiments, but rather that marx’s need to abstract from the diversity of needs, wants, etc is illustrative of an argument marx makes in the prefaces about his method.
I agree with you on the front of harvey not being particularly revolutionary and displaying this bias in his work
I’ll admit after perusing the blog a bit more, that I agree with you on the general character of this blogger as ultra pedantic and shit-stirry. I can’t agree that the blogger did any malicious editing of quotes. It’s clearly a paraphrase of both Marx and Harvey despite the quote formatting:
More important to me is the general complaint about Harvey, which imo is not pedantic. It is actually a rather large debate in modern Marxism; you’re free to argue the importance of the debate, but it is relevant, and I am certain that Harvey is aware of it and the special significance of terms like a priori in relation to chapter one. There is continuity between this misinterpretation by Harvey and his rejection of major pieces of Capital, like the tendency of the falling rate of profit. It’s not a separate matter that Harvey is one of the least revolutionary Marxists in popular discussion.
Wrt misrepresentation, i’ll repost what I already wrote earlier both demonstrating the malicious editing, and explaining how these edits are more than mere formatting, and change the meaning of what harvey said to create a strawman punching bag:
author writes (my emphasis):
But the author has actually cut out massive portions of this quote, without indicating it, to massively change the meaning. What harvey actually wrote is (my emphasis):
I.e. harvey is not saying that marx abstracts from the diversity of needs, wants, etc, because we cannot preform experiments, but rather that marx’s need to abstract from the diversity of needs, wants, etc is illustrative of an argument marx makes in the prefaces about his method.
I agree with you on the front of harvey not being particularly revolutionary and displaying this bias in his work