I had that thought recently. Around the same time I remarked to my wife after glancing over a bunch of really good music we own, “why does anyone bother to listen to bands from outside Chicago?” She answered, “Jawbreaker’s not from Chicago.” Touche. Similarly I don’t really want to only read Marx. Not all the time, anyway. I do feel that way on occasion, though. Most of what I’m really compelled by is in there already. I need to read other stuff to help me find it, sometimes, and I need to read stuff to correct Marx’s occasional error.
For instance, I re-read chapters 26, 27, and 28 of v1 of Capital recently, the heart of the “so-called primitive accumulation” section, “ursprüngliche Akkumulation.” (Which reminds me - note to self: read over Cleaver’s notes on these sections soon, and Hardt’s shorter notes.)
There’s so much in these sections. (Which, if anyone’s interested, are online in German here. And I believe the Grundrisse is downloadable in its entirety in German via a link on this page.) Althusser identifies them as among the most important sections of v1, exemplary of the good aleatory Marx that he likes. Jason Read makes a lot of these sections as part of Marxist account of subjectification in his excellent book. Any biopolitics stuff is of course going to find resonances here as well, and there’s a lot on discipline, surveillance, policing, law and the state.
As part of this, one could also read these chapters alonsgide Agamben, Schmitt, and Ranciere in order to pose questions on inclusion-as-excluded and different meanings of the term “the people”. For instance, Marx writes of “the identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people.” (886 Penguin ed.) Enclosure of commons and a drop in wages from 1765 and 1780 lead to wages “not more than enough for the absolute necessaries of life” (p888, Marx quotes a Dr Price). ” Land clearances, conversion of smallholding farmers into proletarians, says Price, “is an advantage which the nation should wish for.” Marx adds that “the people who have been ‘converted’ do not belong” to the nation - proletarian as included-as-excluded.
In the Fowkes translation, Fowkes makes a note on a term which he translates as “free and rightless proletariat.” The note reads: “Marx uses the word ‘vogelfrei’, literally ‘as free as a bird’, i.e. free but outside the human community and therefore entirely unprotected and without legal rights.” (896.) The ‘vogelfreie Proletariat’ is a good term, which preserves the resonances of some of Agamben’s term bare life - outside the bounds of the human community, bounds which are always political, while being simultaneously and by virtue of this exclusion also included in a subordinate position within the material organization of the polis - but with an added nuance. Not only is Marx better on the historical specificity of the condition(s) of being outside-yet-inside in this way, but his term preserves another resonance. The vogelfreiheit of the proletariat implies the negative component - free qua not owning anything but themselves and birdlike qua inhuman - but also a positive compontent: freedom as a power to determine, and as being underdetermined qua capable of aleatory and productive encounters beyond those that produce surplus value, and birdlike qua possessed of a power of flight. Fowkes leaves this resonance out of his translation, of course, emphasizing solely the negative components (a la Agamben with bare life). Inquiring after Fowkes would be worth doing to see if that links with a political and theoretical position or if it’s simply part of the tendency in Marxism to produce images of the working class and to treat those images as adequate to the class itself.