There’s a book by Kemple called Reading Marx Writing which… I need to read more carefully (I’ve just flipped through it). From a super-quick glance, it seems, strangely, not to take its own attention to Marx’s text seriously enough, in a way? To act as though elements that I take to be plot points, are sort of… inadvertant intrusions? So it seems to tease out interesting things, but still to operate from more assumptions than I carried in – originally – about what Marx “ought” to be arguing, so that those assumptions end up serving as a sort of external normative standpoint from which it become possible to adjudicate what was accidental and nonaccidental in Marx’s text? It protects itself by saying it’s not attempting to work out what Marx “meant” – but, in a way, there seems to be a very strong sense operating in the background of what Marx could possibly “mean”, so that it then ends up sort of not being possible for him to “mean” what his text does?

But I’m almost certainly being enormously unfair to Kemple – I shouldn’t write on anyone I’ve read so superficially… Sorry… I have a cold at the moment, and most of my better sense has drained away as it’s clouded my thoughts :-)

What I meant to say, before I decided I needed to cast aspersions on something I’ve barely read, was that I would really welcome references on this…

Take care…

Whihc is why I managed not allude to the opening of the post, bedtime reading, I’m plugging Marx’ journalism, and letters for that matter, as bedtime reading. They’re short!

Apologies for the slightly tangential blurt… Long day… :-)

I don’t mean to suggest a systematic investigation correlating theory and journalism. I just like to keep the corresponding volumes of the blue books and the red books on hand because it keeps the practical Marx in mind.

It’s just that there is a vast debate over concepts like “real subsumption” – over whether this is meant to describe some sort of one-off historical shift, or to mark out a logical distinction – and related debates over whether the developments traced out in the opening chapter of Capital are intended to mark out some sort of early historical moment that has been surpassed, or some sort of ideal type of commodity production, or else some sort of logical distinction, etc.

And there’s something about these debates, to me, that is… (and I’m not expressing this well, apologies) just somehow… at a skew to the concerns that I think are driving the distinctions and dramatic pivots of the text. This is what I was trying to capture by saying that I felt the distinction Marx was after was a “political” one – not so much trying to suggest that other readings aren’t engaging with the text as a political text – more suggesting that there is a much more direct way that I see Marx to be commenting on forms of political organisation and ideals in these particular moments in the text? Although even this language probably isn’t hitting what I’m after – the “real subsumption” discussion generally does pivot around arguments over forms of organisation and political ideals… So I’ll need a better way to express what I’m after… eventually… :-) I tend to blurt things first – sometimes it’s only once I’ve tossed it out that I can work out what’s worrying me, and then how to say it…

I haven’t done work to line up the theoretical and the journalistic – I’ve been engaged in a sort of insane textual wrestle with Capital, such that I read other things by Marx almost for relaxation – for the moment, at least, I’m trying to avoid turning his other writings into work as well :-)

Speaking of the blunt, bald Marx, do you every line up the more theoretical with the journalistic?