Lena

Harvey highlights some important points in Capital Vol. 1, such as time, temporality and control, which he ties to Foucault, who expanded on these ideas. He also attempts to dispel some myths or misunderstandings about Marx's work, such as his stance on technology and heavy industry, in which he is often portrayed as someone heavily in favor of industry, but Harvey manages to point out Marx's (subtle, but still present) scepticism, based on which Harvey posses a question for the reader if industry is inherently capitalist and how future socialist revolutions should approach it. Despite these brilliant remarx, most of the book is “Here's what Marx said here and here” without much elaboration, which needlessly prolongs the book. A better companion to Vol. 1 is, in my opinion, Michael Heinrich's An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, though they both have something to them, Heinrich's work is more in line with Marxology, while Harvey tries to pinpoint and critique Marx's shortcomings at times.

A very important application of Marx's materialist conception of history. Despite highlighting economic, polilitical, etc. struggles going on in France, Marx is careful to never be overtly deterministic. It also offers a (still relevant, but short) critique of the state and its tight knit relationship with capitalism, which Marx never got to elaborate upon in detail and which many ‘socialists' countries completely ignored.
“All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it.”

Probably my favourite book that I've read so far this year, though the edition (which isn't available on goodreads) is in Czech and also contains Korsch's On Marxist Dialectic and On Materialist Dialectic. The main premise of the main text is a “call to action” for Marxists to return back to and emphasise the dialectic more, as to not fall into the trap of Marxism becoming a stagnant ideology, an “inverse thinking” as Korsch puts it. Even though the text might be more difficult to read at points, it displays the shortcomings of Marxism and Marxists that haven't properly understood Marx's dialectic in a very striking manner. It also clears up some of the fog that surrounds Marxism with it's relation to science and philosophy and tries to “put it back on the right course”, so to speak. Korsch, along with Lukács, who is also mentioned several times in the book, form an important baseline for the positive and negative critique of Marxists from a left position. These striking remarks and pitfalls of which Korsch warns of can be seen developed later in the Soviet Union, especially Marxism becoming something of a sacred text, an ideology, not a critique (of political economy) as Marx understood it.

Also “a Marxist critique of Marx” just sounds cool.

The main problem I have with this text is Lenin's seeming inability to consider the positions of his (and Bolsheviks') opponets from their point of view; he completely disregards the Dutch and German critiques and their anti-parliamentism and acts like the (very uniqe, at least in Europe) conditions which Russia found itself in can be “transplanted” onto much more developed countries like Germany. Parliamentary politics played a radically different role in Germany than they did in Russia because they arose out of different circumstances. Also, history has proven that his position on Britain “support the Labour party so that people might become more favourable towards Communists” has been proven false throughout history, which isn't Lenin's fault, but it is alarming how many people treat this text as sacred scripture in the 21st century.

Marx had some brilliant ideas