Mark's Pages

September 16, 2008:

Reading Capital.

I returned so many times to the opening passages. Five, six, eight times over two or three years. Always ending with failure and discouragement, as if my brain were not capable of thinking those thoughts.

Deep frustration, and discouragement. I believed that I understood For Marx. Yet the density of the later work defeated me.

One summer on the patio of my childhood apartment I forced myself to interact with it differently. To read and re-read each paragraph, if necessary each sentence, over and over, following its purpose and superbly taut logic at the most granular level, a clause at a time, until confident that moving forward would not find me lost. I found that if I were disciplined in this way, I could manage perhaps ten pages a day. And that, at the end of that day, I understood those ten pages.

I remember well the day that my girlfriend's sister came to visit, finding me happy, maybe for the first time since childhood, truly happy, because success in understanding this book fueled a growing sense of confidence in my own abilities and worth. I remember very exactly my feelings as she arrived, finding me in a folding beach chair on the patio, sipping Coke, studying Althusser.

Through much of the summer I took the book to the bowling alley down the street. I loved sitting in the café, eating french fries or hot dogs, studying, with the great steady background wash of continual noise drowning all distraction.

Learning to read this book changed and matured my mental processes, leaving me with an ability to focus which I'd never known before, driven since childhood by hyperactivity and sugar and the multiple inner voices of ADHD.

It left me believing for the first time that I was able to participate fully in something which was more important than merely myself, something with the potential to change and improve the world by combating its injustice.

It permanently changed the way I read other works, providing protocols for objectively discriminating one set of ideas from another.

I see this work now as the crest of the wave of popular mobilizations which some people summarize with the tag, The Sixties. As that wave receded, the work of Althusser's circle became less and less accessible, more and more obscure, more and more distant. Maybe "faint" is a better word.

How will future generations view this work?

Inevitably, as with all things, that will be determined by the outcomes of many struggles.

Maybe I haven't fully turned my back on that outcome.