Structure of the book

This textbook is written with Rheo, a typesetting tool for producing multiple different formats from the same source document. As a result, you can work through the same text (with the same footnotes, citations, and links) either as a website or as a PDF.

Each section addresses a core concept in Marx’s Capital. We work through each concept in three systematic parts:

An explanation of what the term means for Marx and in Capital.
A case study in how Marx’s use of the term might help us to understand similar terms today.
A conclusion with discussion questions for thinking further about the relationship between Marx’s analysis and the tech world.

Here are a few questions that motivate this book as a whole. We hope reading Marx’s Capital will help you to answer these and questions like this, and will also open up new ways of thinking about technology, value, and your economic life more generally.

Why has Nvidia become worth so much in recent years?

Is there a basis for this value? What philosophical sense is there to ‘valuation’ in the tech world in general (i.e. seed rounds, Series A, mergers, and so on)?

Is it politically productive to consider software engineers as ‘workers’?

Many political struggles in the 20th century used this term to hew together disparate persons– in working class unions, for example– in order to cohere their actions as class struggle. Is class struggle of this kind still possible today? If so, what are the contours through which we should understand class in tech?

Will AI change the structure of class society?

Why is the prediction that transformative AI will create a ‘permanent underclass’ striking such a chord online? Are these ‘new’ fears simply a convenient refactoring of capitalism by tech labs who stand to profit from them?

Why do we go through boom-bust cycles?

Are boom-bust cycles (from dot-com to crypto to generative AI) accidental market failures, or recurring expressions of capitalist accumulation logic?

Under construction

This book is a living document and work-in-progress that is still under construction. There are entire sections that are yet to be published to the live site, and additional sections will likely be added in the future. We will also fix errata and edit existing sections (which is important if you want to use this text academically: be sure to cite the website with a date).

Where we haven’t yet filled in a section, you will see the following modal:

This section is still under construction! See Structure of the book for more information.

We are very open to suggestions, comments, criticisms, and tirades of praise. Please write to us, or join our Discord and participate in the discussion there.

Forward, Soviets!

We open with what is arguably Marx’s most important (and perhaps also most misunderstood) concept: the commodity.