Below are three books that kick-started my intellectual journey. I have read my whole life, but I consider this journey in its mature form to have began in college, after a break with personal reading that happened in high school. I figured this would be useful to anyone trying to understand what have been the influences of my positions academically, as well as a reference list of sorts for anyone looking to read some themselves. I’ve included descriptions that exist somewhere between synopses and anecdotes about my experience with the work and its place within my intellectual travels. I plan on adding to this in the future, but wanted to get something out now rather than privately edit this for days on end.
The Big Three
Table of Contents:
1 – The Big Short
3 – The Communist Manifesto and Capital
1
Fascinated by the movie (I watched/listened to it at least 10 times over a two week period when it was on Netflix) this book was one I read eagerly freshman year of college as part of my “getting back to reading” after a high school hiatus. Think of it as the Pre-Socratic phase of my intellectual journey; what is important is not so much the content but the phenomenon itself. This alluring telling of the economic disaster of my youth, the 2008 housing crash, planted in me suspicions about the system that would flower quite nicely in a few months time.
2
Read in the long hours at a slow summer job, Wealth of Nations marks the true beginning of my intellectual journey. I was inspired to read it because, hot off two economics courses I took my freshman year, I was fascinated by the seemingly paramount importance of economics to understanding the workings of the world. My professor, a staunch libertarian free-marketeer in the legacy of Milton Friedman, like all professed lovers of laissez-faire, recommended Smith to me.
Reading it however (and here I should mention that I only read the first of five “books,” or parts as we would call them, around 200 of the text’s 500 pages) turned my world upside down forever. It begins innocently enough, with mention of the butcher and the baker, the power of the division of labor, etc. But as one moves on from these introductory chapters, Smith also sheds light on the negatives of capitalism in his discussion on price, wages, commodities, and so on. Despite the density of the text, due to both lofty ideas and old English, the effect this book had on me is comparable to being hit directly by a freight train. Not only was my economics professor wrong and one-sided about many of the things he taught, it caused a crisis of authority as I realized this man, respected in his position as researcher and teacher, was not only extremely biased, but was apparently not well read! It occurred to me quite rapidly that I could no longer blindly trust what any academic figure had to say, especially when it came to fundamental texts, of which I then (and through to today) set myself to reading on my own in order to parse through the lies and omissions. This radical leap lead directly to another, the likes of which nothing quite as radical has happened in my learning since….
Fun Fact:
Did you know that the term “invisible hand” is only used once in Wealth of Nations? I expected to find it while reading but ended up using Project Gutenberg to CTRL+F the phrase, finding it buried deep in writing about how capitalists, in employing their capital to further their own position, further the position of the country they reside in, regardless of their intentions, because they are inherently furthering industry in the process. Moving from this, Smith argues that capitalists always prefer working within their own country because their capital is close by and can be better controlled, they know better the rules and customs, etc. This makes sense, as technology at the period was limited compared to today, and when things were separated by distance, they were also separated by time, significantly so (recall that Wealth of Nations was published the same year of America’s independence, at the time it took something like 3 months to cross the Atlantic). In today’s globalized world we know that this preference for the domestic holds no water amid instant communication, private travel to anywhere in the world in a matter of hours, and a homogenized world system in which, if one has the money, any number of legal systems and social customs can be understood and incorporated into decision making. We see this in the rise of outsourcing, the army of lawyers capitalists hire for their benefit, etc. Noam Chomsky, another massive influence of mine, makes similar points on the popularity of the “invisible hand” phrase and how unread Smith is despite professed popularity.
What this points to is not inaccuracy on Smith’s part, but rather evidence that capitalism itself has changed from then to now, which in turn is useful for understanding both the limits of Smith but also the general limits of thinkers at the time when it comes to capitalism – Chomsky makes the point well that many concerned with liberty during the Enlightenment wrote mostly about the state, not because capital didn’t have the capacity to infringe on it, but because at the time it was peanuts compared to the concerns of competing political systems (monarchy vs democracy and so on; I cannot find the specific part of a lecture where he discusses this but if I do I will link it). Nowadays we can see the full inversion of this reality, with states becoming puppets in the hands of the ultra-wealthy, whom are entirely undaunted in moving operations, factories, resources, you name it, to any part of the globe, the relentless march of globalization having cracked open the whole world to the global market. So much so, that not only do those who claim to be concerned with freedom first and foremost not critique capitalism, they are its strongest intellectual proponents, using phrases like “the invisible hand,” of which they have likely never read from Wealth of Nations but are simply parroting like their teachers before them. It is said that Margaret Thatcher used to carry a copy of Smith’s book in her purse. If so, she clearly never read it (another excellent jab from Chomsky, unfortunately I cannot take credit).
3
That radical leap was, of course, reading Karl Marx, first the pamphlet, then the brick. After reading Smith, I spent a lot of time researching (jumping from Wikipedia page to Wikipedia page) different takes on the ideas he presented. Because of my indoctrination freshman year, I was still liberal (pro-capitalist) but had increasing concerns about the capacity of capitalism to regulate itself. The idea that pushed things over the edge for me (that is, into being more suspicious of capitalism than a fan of it) was the concept of “economic rent” or “rent-seeking,” in other words, trying to get wealth without doing anything of value. This likely struck such a strong chord within me because, as someone who has moved many times, some of those times at the hands of landlords, I have developed a natural and right resentment of them and their behavior. Something about understanding this fact, that capitalism not only allows but encourages such action, clicked into place all of the other critiques that I had been reading (I was also very drawn to the socialist notion of “to each according to their contribution,” which is paradoxically the supposed outcome of capitalism according to its proponents, and even more so to the communist evolution of it: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”). From there I went on to online socialist groups to find more information, probably something like r/socialism101, and I found a link to Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism”. A short but well thought out piece, I likely took great stock in it in part because of my childhood fascination with STEM, and I mean, because its freakin’ Albert Einstein. After that, the ship officially sailed, and I have been a leftist of some kind or another ever since. The next step was to cement myself into the foundation of my new belief, the writings of Marx.
Perhaps surprisingly, I don’t have much to say about the content of either of the texts shown in the image above. They of course provided the concrete ideas of the critique of capital that have guided me since: surplus value, the commodity, alienation, the role of the proletariat, money, the sphere of commodity circulation, etc. (which, I must mention, I would have had no chance of understanding if not for Ernest Mandel’s 100 page introduction to Capital, shoutout Penguin Classics. I read these first pages of the book eagerly on a Saturday morning, and kept at it all day, about 8 hours in all to finish his part, the 1970’s English serving as a much more graspable summation of the biggest parts of Marx’s theory. I have read nothing as eagerly since). But I also encountered much more in the 200 or so of the 1,000 pages of Capital I read, including references to classical economists like Smith and Ricardo, and an awful lot about linen. Basically, my interest fell short similarly as it did while reading Smith: amid an intense amount of detail that was near impossible to skim because of the density of the text itself, and because I felt I had “gotten what I came for” and it was now time to reflect and/or move on. (I have something of an interest in my own “reading rate” as it were, a wonderfully inaccurate measure that I do quite imprecisely by keeping track of my pages-read-per-hour of a given book, and figuring the average across reading sessions. Capital holds the title of my all time lowest, 10 pages an hour, largely due to the fact that I quite literally read every paragraph 3 times before turning the page, desperate to understand every word of Marx’s 150 year old translated German. Also because some of it was so fascinating as to elect a miniature celebration of the idea itself and my own understanding of it. Don’t laugh.)
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Anyhow, these books represent the beginning of my ever occurring intellectual journey. I will add more to this list in due time, but figured I should go ahead and create the section itself earlier rather than later.
Nihilist Communism 