Marx's Capital: Intro

My advisor Dr. Christopher Paskewich and I have decided to use this, my last undergraduate semester, to read Karl Marx's Capital and use Dr. David Harvey's online course to analyze the work and relate it to our modern world. As daunting as it, we want to try and get at the heart of Marx's understanding of the nature of the market system and see how his model fares up today. We have started on the Ernest Mandel introduction, and all I can say is that it does a decent job packing Marx's argument into an entire intro. It's dense, but he manages to get across the key divisions of the text and defend the historical materialist argument. What makes this intro interesting to me was that it was referred to me specifically early-on when I started looking into leftist politics as a teenager, when I was talking to a small orthodox Trotskyist sect called the International Bolshevik Tendency around 2006. In my conversations with the group, they mentioned the Mandel intro because of Mandel's Trotskyist background and thus viewed his intro as an appropiate starting point for the understanding of Capital. But to look at Capital simply from an orthodox Marxist viewpoint would be to miss many of the cultural and literary qualities of the text that Mandel does not always eloquently depict. Thus, the Mandel intro seems to me to be useful only insofar as it shows the orthodox view of Capital, beyond that it isn't very insightful. But next, I shall get into the meat of the text.