1/ After struggling to figure out where to go next, I have started on Prof David Harvey’s “Seventeen Contradictions and The End of Capitalism”. I picked him mostly because his public lecture series on reading of Das Kapital seems to indicate a level of thoroughness I am missing: http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/marxs-capital-class-01/
6/ Finally!!! After Piketty completely ignored it, Harvey in his introduction: “And there is no question that the history of capitalism is an intensely racialized and gendered history”
3/ Oh, this is funny. Here he is actually practicing the methodology described in The Shock Doctrine: prepare a plan beforehand in case a crisis appears that might require (or at least open for) a radically different approach.
5/ In that post Harvey also discusses how Piketty and Marx define “Capital” differently, now I don’t know Marx (yet), but for Piketty Capital is Stuff You Can Own (ref the whole slavery thing), but it seems Marx and Harvey share a different view of Capital. It seems to me that they view it as a process rather than possessions. Currently, my understanding is that the “value” of a machine is a function of it producing things and not the cost of buying it. But I might be totally off base.
Tbh maybe Piketty should’ve read Das Kapital before writing a book with the same name. Then he could’ve discussed this difference in definition. (But, as we saw, he doesn’t really discuss or analyze much at all) And tbh, it seems weird not to have read (which Piketty apparently hasn’t) what is considered to be one of the most influential works in your field… (yeah, I clearly don’t like Piketty, but jeez that should be clear from my thread on Capital 🔪)