ANOTHER DAMN'D THICK, SQUARE BOOK! SCRIBBLE, SCRIBBLE, SCRIBBLE, EH! MR. GIBBON?

[Attributed to the Duke of Gloucester, on the occasion of his receiving a presentation copy of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.]

I thank Jerry Fresia and S. Wallerstein for their kind encouragement to me to write a short popular book on Marx, but I think I must continue with my perhaps ill-advised magnum opus.  Leaving to one side the books I edited back in the day to make enough money to pay my psychoanalyst bills, almost all of my books have sprung from some source deep within me to which I have only limited access.  In each of those books I seek to tell a story, the story of an argument or the story of an idea, and I am unable to write until the story unfolds in my mind before me.  Somewhat factiously, I have compared the stories I tell in my books to Jack and the Beanstalk, the serious point being that only when the story of the book is clear to me can I tell where it begins, how it proceeds, and where it ends.

   Because I write this way, my books tend to be short and to have few if any footnotes [a fact that used to irk my old friend, Bob Ackerman, who would spend frantic hours, when writing, searching for the scraps of paper on which he had jotted down the information for a footnote.]  Only once have I written a book on demand, as it were, and that was my textbook, About Philosophy, which I agreed to write in order to enable my then wife to take a semester off from teaching so that she could finish her important book on Edith Wharton.  It was a labor of love, one might say, but it was not fun.  I cranked it out in eight weeks to forestall the threat of having to return the advance.  [It is now in its eleventh edition and has earned me well over a million in 2016 dollars, but that is another story.]

My son, Patrick, who is a brilliant chess Grandmaster, once wrote a book on chess in the series called The Idiot’s Guide to …,” but I am afraid I would be an utter failure if I were to attempt The Idiot’s Guide to Marx.  I think such a book would be valuable and I do not doubt that it would do more to advance the cause than the book on which I have just embarked, but it is just not my thing.  Of one thing I am quite certain:  Capital itself is not such a book.  I have no idea at all whom Marx thought would be his readers.  Can he have imagined that this astonishing book, in German [!!], would be snatched up and read avidly by English workingmen?  Lord alone knows.  It is, when you think about it, a miracle that two world-historical revolutions were carried out in his name.

Perhaps if I could find a venue with a good camera and a handful of volunteers to serve as an audience, I might attempt a series of lectures on “Marx in the Twenty-first Century.”  I could imagine myself doing that.