No matter how many decades pass since Karl Marx’s Capital was first published, and no matter how often it is dismissed as outdated, it time and again returns to the center of debate. At a venerable 157 years of age (it was first published on September 14, 1867), the “critique of political economy” has all the virtues of the great classics: it stimulates new thoughts with each rereading and is capable of illustrating crucial aspects of our present as well as the past.
One great merit of Capital is that it helps us put the developments of the current moment in proper historical perspective. The famous Italian writer Italo Calvino said that one reason why a classic is a classic is that it helps us “relegate the current events to the rank of background noise.” Such works point to essential questions that cannot be skirted around, in order to properly understand them and find a path through them. This is why classics always earn the interest of new generations of readers. They remain indispensable, despite the passage of time.
This is just what we can say of Capital, 157 years since it was first published. It has, in fact, become all the more powerful as capitalism spreads to every corner of the planet — and expands into all spheres of our existence.
After the economic crisis broke out in 2007–8, the rediscovery of Marx’s magnum opus was a real necessity — almost a kind of emergency response to what was happening. If Marx’s great work had been forgotten after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it provided still-valid keys for understanding the true causes of capitalism’s destructive madness. So while the world’s stock market indexes burned hundreds of billions of dollars and numerous financial institutions declared bankruptcy,…
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Auteur: Marcello Musto
