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…
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
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