Das Kapital, by Karl Marx

Preconceptions: Ooh! Marx has two on the list. He must be really evil.

Reaction: I tried. I really tried.

I am a professional reader. I've plodded and outlined my way through countless books the rest of you would use to prop up dressers or test bullet loads. I've picked through countless arcane references, charted influences, and mulled implications. I've read Joyce, Kristeva, and Derrida--I'm no stranger to wordy crackpots.

This book was my undoing.

I'm certainly no economist, and I've spent much of my life trying to escape from economy. To talk of money seems beneath me, and I'm annoyed that I live in a society where finances so dominate my decision-making.

This is a book written by and for people just like that.

Though some sources claim otherwise, I believe it is impossible to actually read this book. Even the sources I used instead, Engels's own summary and a book called Capital for Beginners with cartoons(!) couldn't make this dull and dense discussion of economic factors any more interesting or rational.

I picked out a few points with which I agree with Marx, though in a more limited fashion:

• Some (not, as Marx says, all) historical events and artifacts are influenced by economic factors, particularly the oppression of one class by another.
• Capitalism sometimes (not always) enables those who own the means of production to exploit those who do not.
• To earn a profit, a capitalist must (usually) pay a laborer less for a product than he could sell the product for himself.

The key to this book--like many on this list--is that the things each author asserts as true are not always true. That's what makes them appealing: for one or two particular cases, they seem to apply. This intermittent reinforcement encourages people to apply the theories to other circumstances hoping they will fit.

Do capitalists ever exploit the workers? Of course they do. But not always--and that's the main weakness of Marx's premise. His attachment to absolutes is what makes his work so dated and useless: even assuming what he said was ever true, it certainly isn't in all times and all places.

Specifically, Marx fails to account for:

• The ability to change class.
• The possible gradations of value for a similar item: the chair you make may not be as good as the chair I make.
• Alternate ways to stabilize capitalism than total revolutionary destruction.
• The bell curve, specifically as applied to human motivation and talent.
• His own susceptibility to his theory: Marxism is as much a result of economics as the forces it describes.

It is possible that for about ten minutes in the mid 19th century, as industrialization destabilized the marketplace and people adjusted to new social conditions, the criticisms asserted in this book were true. They may even apply in limited areas and circumstances in other times and places.

This book just doesn't account for my experiences in the marketplace, not all of which have been positive. I've seen plenty of mediocrity and idiocy, but little deliberate exploitation. Some, but not much. I've seen much more exploitation of corporations and government agencies by individual proles, frankly.

Before you call me an apologist for the free market, let me assure you that plenty of things annoy me about capitalism.

• It's too easy to work the system: to get the rewards for value without delivering the value.
• Other people always decide the value of an object or a service by how they're willing to pay for it.
• Value is essentially determined by majority rule, and the majority may or may not be qualified to judge something's true value.
• We've confused the tokens of value with the value, and too many of our decisions are based not on producing or delivering something of value but in doing what someone else thinks is valuable just to get a paycheck. In other words, I resent the fact that so many of my decisions must take money into account, and that the inflow of money depends largely on what someone else is willing to pay me to do.
• The determination of value is often too focused on the present without much interest in a future payoff.
• The accumulation of the tokens of value is not the same as value, and investors are disproportionally rewarded for their true contributions.
• There seems to be an inverse relationship between the intelligence and talent of a person and the money they earn.

Still, capitalism seems to be the best we've got so far.

Though capitalism only intermittently rewards excellence and passion, it seems to be the only system we have that does so as often as it does. A state-planned system would certainly be prone to corruption (as we've seen), and one run by a committee of citizens would collapse sooner than most of those communes did in the sixties.

Verdict: I suspect the main reason this book is considered so harmful is that it fomented many of the violent revolutions of the twentieth century, filling a population with idealistic notions of a total equality that can never exist except by force. Its adherents certainly caused a lot of trouble, though I'm not sure this book was the complete cause.

Communism is a philosophy by which a large mass of unhappy people can name their gripe and feel justified in correcting it. Capitalists prefer to emulate or replace the happy people.

If you think of a better system, I'll be glad to hear it. I'd like it to account for the only classes I truly believe in, the perceptive and the non-perceptive. It'd also be great if it rewarded the former more consistently.

Let me know when you've got that finished, and I'll help your revolution along.

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