You're listening to the partially examined life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.

Our questions for episode 359 are something like, what is it to explain the economic world or what is economic value?

We're starting another two-episode run here on Karl Marx, centering around the first chapter,

preface and the afterword of Marxist magnum opus Das Capital, whose first volume was published in

1867. To help orient us to this project, we also read the introduction to his Grungurse, i.e.

foundations of a critique of political economy, written in 1857, and a few other little bits

that we'll get into.

More information about the text and the podcast, please see Partially Examined Life.com.

This is Mark Linsonmeyer in Madison, Wisconsin, producing this podcast, and by then

consuming it, returning to myself as a productive individual reproducing himself.

This is Seth Paskin, 20 yards of linen in Austin, Texas.

This is Wes All One, quietly treating bourgeois relations as if they were irrefutable natural laws of society in abstracto in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This is Dylan Casey sensuously contemplating the use value of my labor after building my Lego tranquil garden in Madison, Wisconsin.

It must say something about the reading of the length of our intros in a given week,

aside from Seth's punchy one, which left us asking questions.

There are some tortured formulations of things in here, which I guess is what Marx is known for.

Right?

We again gave ourselves, like with this Feuerbach one one two full episodes to basically take on one

kind of ponderous set of readings and i think in this one we're going to besides for sure we'll go

through the introductory material the gruneric introduction is sort of even though it was written years

before serves as an introduction to the whole project, some comments on

his method. I think the thing that we maybe wanted to start on was this thesis on Feuerbach,

...