By the end of the lecture David Harvey tells Marx once said: "I am not a Marxist." It appears that even in his own time, many things were ascribed to Marx which Marx did not intend. Furthermore, Harvey claims at the beginning, few people integrally read Marx's central work - Capital (Das Kapital). Mostly it is quoted in part, which is prone to misquote or taken into the wrong context. In this podcast David Harvey takes us with him in his 2008 version of the course he has been teaching over 40 years: about Das Kapital, volume one, as a whole (Reading Marx's Capital).
The course is available in an audio feed as well as a video feed. I have embedded the video of the first lecture below and with me, you will find that there is hardly anything you miss out on if you take only the audio.
After the (nice) addition of the little conversation at the beginning, it kicks off with the first lecture about the first chapter and generally how this book is to be read. It had me excited right from the start. Not only is it worth to engage into the question how one should address any author's major work with Marx as an example, for it is not just him who is victim of endless quoting in snippets and stereotypical interpretation. I was also thinking of Mills, Darwin, Keynes and Freud to name but a few. In addition Marx kicks off with taking us to pondering the value of a commodity - to analyze the value transitions of any simple product we purchase any time any day without much thought.
Class 01 Reading Marx's Capital from David Harvey on Vimeo.
I want to thank my reader Naveh for pointing me to this series.
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