Jože Barši​

1955, Ljubljana

Reading Capital. Proletarians of the World, Unite!, 2007–2008

object on a stand and wall text

In the fall of 2007 I joined a group of political science students who got together once a week to read Marx’s Capital (Vol. 1) at the Workers-Punks University in Ljubljana. After the political changes in Slovenia and across ex-Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Marxist theory all but vanished from the universities; similarly the Slovene translation of his Capital is almost impossible to find anywhere, including second-hand bookstores. Although reading Capital is becoming more popular as a result of the global financial crisis, I do not romantically believe in trying to solve this crisis through a work written in the 19th century. But its rereading, I think, is to be recommended; with it we must redefine or reinvent Capital. To read Marx not so much as a thinker, but rather as one who demands that his theory becomes socially effective.