MARX’S CAPITAL ILLUSTRATED – David Smith & Phil Evans

Karl Marx’s three-volume, never-finished beast of a book, Capital is intimidating. It’s the subject of the same jokes folks make when they suggest you curl up against your windowsill and pour through War and Peace. The implication here is often that it’s a monster of a book, a Goliath that you, meager David, can’t conquer.

I don’t know first-hand how true that is, exactly. I’ve read four or five works directly from Marx at this point, and I’m sure there are more to come, but I haven’t tackled Capital itself. Part of that is because the first couple months of starting a book review blog is a poor time to block off a month or more fighting through that book. Part of it is because I knew, from other sources I trust, that it was much easier and more beneficial to start with some of Marx’s smaller works. I read some introductory texts on Marxist economics in general before diving into Marx at all. Still, I wanted to get a solid sense of Marx’s major argument and be able to recommend an approachable way for others to get the same. After reading works like The Communist Manifesto, Critique of the Gotha Program, and Wage Labor and Capital, I found a condensed, graphic novel version of Goliath in Marx’s Capital Illustrated. This is an insightful, friendly and amusing way to get the essence of the core Marxist economic arguments.

Author David Smith begins with a biographical sketch of Marx himself that I found terribly useful. We explore his education and early work, the thinkers that influenced him, the governments that exiled him and the movements that inspired him. Events like the Paris Commune of 1871 loomed large in Marx’s imagination. They are laid out both in this beginning section and throughout the book. We even get some history of Marx’s struggle to publish Capital itself over decades, and some of his own suggestions on how to tackle the beast. For instance, he suggests starting with Chapter 10 first and coming back to the rest later.

The main body of the book outlines just about every major element of classical, Marxist economic thinking. The author guides us through Marx’s discussion of commodities, use value and exchange value. We learn about how Marx believed capitalism fetishized the products we make as a society and and how it uses money and capital to accumulate wealth. Illustrator Phil Evans provides a fantastic series of illustrations, in many different styles from comic to photographic, in order to make the author (and Marx’s) points clearer. Instead of just reading Marx talk about how the working class is exploited for its labor and how capitalism causes destructive crises of overproduction, we get to see Phil Evan’s characters experience, suffer and struggle against these forces and their consequences. It’s a deeply human and expansive work, both in terms of the written word and what’s drawn to illustrate the point. My emotions while reading it ranged from sympathetic to amused, from fury to solidarity. Sometimes I felt like there was quite a mish-mash of styles presented in terms of the visuals in the book. Most of it worked quite well, even if I had my favorites as well as jokes that didn’t quite land. But in a work about something as complicated as capitalism, a variety of approaches is welcome. A lot of it was funny and almost all of it was helpful, while none of it really detracted from the larger argument.

A complicated discussion of economics becomes comprehensible in Marx’s Capital Illustrated. The vocabulary you need to understand Marxist theory is used, but not in a way that puts up walls. This is a book that invites you into a struggle. It helps you see that as a worker, it was your struggle all along. As a result, this understanding of your struggle should belong to you, too. It should be something in which all on the political left can find value, too.

There are a few areas where Smith reveals his judgment of later revolutionaries post-Marx. I can see his characterizations as being divisive. For instance, he doesn’t spare the likes of Stalin from criticism. Even Castro gets some ribbing. Meanwhile, Rosa Luxemburg is praised. Lenin and Trotsky and their divergence from Marx regarding vanguard parties is highlighted on one page. I’m making an effort to understand my own biases while keeping an open mind as I read more about these figures. However you feel about any of this, staking out such divisive opinions appears to be par for the course on the left.

Whether you agree with the author’s assessments or not, I can’t see how it would affect your overall estimation of the work accomplished here. Marx’s Capital Illustrated is a brilliant attempt at bringing Capital to life in a new format. Its new section on the post-2008 struggles of late capitalism keeps it even more up-to-date. If this is the only book you read on the subject, you would have a solid grasp of the basics on how Marxists view capitalism at work in our world.