A first edition of Karl Marx’s anti-capitalist book “Das Kapital” sold for a whopping $40,000, a tidy sum for a book that demonizes free markets.
The Communist intellectual’s book, funnily enough, also sold on a day when the Dow Jones reached an all time high of 17,068 points. One has to wonder what Marx might have thought of the speculation in the future value of his tome?
The Guardian, who first reported the story, brought up the interesting fact that Marx was actually a modest investor himself.
Marx himself was not immune to the seduction of speculation: Francis Wheen’s terrific biography of the great communist recounts that, in 1864, he claimed to have made more than £400 from the English stocks “springing up like mushrooms this year”.
Marx might perhaps consider that the rare book is a special case of surplus value, not that he saw much return on his own labours – relying instead on handouts from Friedrich Engels’ earnings at his family’s Victoria Mill in Salford.
At the post-Marxist Frankfurt School and in his journalism and life, Walter Benjamin certainly saw book-collecting as more than a simple market fetish. In his essay Unpacking My Library, he sets out his own attachment to rare books and describes “a very mysterious relationship to ownership … a relationship to objects which does not emphasise their functional utilitarian value – that is, their usefulness – but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate … The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership – for a true collector, the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.”
So after all this, not only was Marx totally wrong about his redistributionist philosophy, but a hypocrite as well. It reminds one of all the Che Guevera t-shirts that are for sale and the useful idiots who lionize him by engaging in that one activity he hated: free trade.
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