How to Read Marx’s ‘Capital’: Commentary and Explanations on the Beginning Chapters

Most of our perennial debates would be obviated by a shared understanding of the first chapters of Capital—and after the publication of How to Read Marx’s ‘Capital’, you have no excuse. With his characteristic combination of a mathematician’s precision and a philologist’s erudition, Heinrich disassembles the intricate clockwork of Marx’s Capital into its component pieces, and gives the reader just as much as she needs to put them back together again. It is at once so embedded in the text Heinrich quite rightly deems it a ‘workbook’, and a work of magisterial historical-critical scholarship rendering Marx’s debt to Aristotle as lucidly as Ricardo. Heinrich does not offer an interpretation of Marx so much as astrally project the reader into the mind of Karl in his self-critical process of deliberately constructing the delicate argumentation of Capital. The genius of Heinrich’s commentary, like that of Capital itself, is that it makes the reader herself a scholar.

-Cordelia Belton, author of forthcoming book on communism

In this explosive new commentary written by the world’s leading scholar on Marx, Michael Heinrich brings a rejuvenating fire to the important task of reading Capital, dispensing with obsolete interpretations while highlighting underrecognized problems. By clarifying the stakes of Marx’s critique of political economy and arguing for its contemporary relevance, Heinrich leaves us with a project which is open-ended and politically serious. Both new students and long-time teachers of Marx will benefit immensely from this text, as nothing of this depth has ever been available in English until now.

—Edward “Edwad” Henry, co-host of Reel Abstractions podcast

Commentators have hitherto mostly interpreted Capital in various ways; the point is to understand it. This immaculate translation provides anglophone readers with Michael Heinrich’s forensically accurate exposition of the most vital yet difficult parts of Capital: Volume 1.

—Dr Matthew Cole, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

This fine book by one of the foremost living Marx scholars equips readers to better draw on Marx’s writing in the way Marx would have wanted – as a body of ideas to help us think for ourselves. With accessible prose and conceptual rigor, How to Read Marx’s ‘Capital’ clarifies Marx’s masterwork, without sacrificing either nuance or complexity. Heinrich’s book will help readers new and old to better understand Capital and thus capitalism’s ongoing generation of human misery. The book makes a major contribution to today’s exciting renewal of Marxist inquiry.

—Nate Holdren, author of Injury Impoverished and associate professor in Drake University’s Program in Law, Politics, and Society