Diary: Capital Vol 2 and other stories

Up bright and early this morning. A ten past eight appointment with the dentist to have my new crown fitted. Except that it didn't fit. Apparently this happens one time out of five or six.

The tooth-stub was re-impressed (uncomfortable-to-the-cheek process with a mould) and I have to return in a couple of weeks for the next attempt to fit it.

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I am working through Capital Vol 2 (£2.99 on Kindle .. slightly easier to read than the free PDF) and what a trial the first four chapters are.

Things they don't tell you. Volume 2 was never written as a book by Marx, instead it was assembled from his voluminous notes by Engels. It's dry, insanely-repetitive .. and a less reverential editor would have cut it down to one tenth the size.

There are occasional nuggests buried under pages of Marx pecking away at the same material, over and over again. Marx was clearly just writing this stuff for himself, trying various thoughts out in an obsessive manner.

I'll grit my teeth and persevere, and then let someone else take over the heavy burden of distilling its real content. David Harvey is meant to be the go-to guy and I have his Limits to Capital.

Unfortunately I have to say I side with Michael Roberts against Harvey in the fundamentals of Marx's dynamical thinking, summed up in the reproduction schemes and Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (LTRPF).

Update: Vol 2 chapters 5 and 6, where Marx reverts to coherent narrative, are considerably more interesting. I'm learning quite a bit and hoping for a continuing trend here.

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BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg has an insightful piece on the BBC website today about the inner decay of the present Tory government.

"The fuss around Boris Johnson is the symptom not the cause. The problem that is increasingly on people's minds at this grisly conference is that the Tories might be only at the start of a decline, which becomes impossible to escape.

"One former minister says, "there is a smell of decay", another, that it is "hopeless, but we are resigned to the nightmare". Cabinet ministers fret that Theresa May simply doesn't have the ideas or imagination to reboot either her leadership or their party. ...

"One of her colleagues says "how did she blow the party up in 12 months?", lamenting how her premiership has paralleled Gordon Brown, who after years of hoping to get to Downing Street arrived there with little to say, bewildered by the sudden challenge of the top job. Another says she looks "bent and broken". ...

"The fear here is not really that Boris Johnson is grabbing all the attention, it's that this party could be dying inside, and it finds itself with a leader who might struggle to stop the downward spiral."

Time to finish up here and go listen to Boris.

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Comment 

Performance-wise, it was a pretty decent speech and the conference standing ovation looked genuine. The message - economically-globalist, politically-liberal, strategically British-Empire-lite - was tailored to appeal to smaller capitalists operating within the national market, those companies aligned with US and other non-EU markets and the culturally-nationalist fraction of the more traditional working class.

Its tragedy: the Boris vision is not aligned with the interests of the dominant financial and industrial wings of the British ruling class, which heavily value economic integration within the European Union. It also fails for the idealistic middle-class young, those who buy into euro-ideology and fill the ranks of Momentum.

So yet again we've seen the deep fissure within the British elite and in the mass of the population, as refracted through the Tory party. Boris, despite his charisma, does not bridge the divide. No-one can.

Tory party dynamics, going forward, should be fascinating.