Re: [PEN-L:14124] Bad writing

["Miller" <jmilleriii@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doug Henwood Wrote:

I will present a Marxist perspective on "bad
>>writing".
>
>Is this "good" or "bad" writing?
>
>"[Industrial capital is] the capital that, in the course of its total
>circuit, assumes and again throws off these forms [of money capital,
>productive capital, and commodity capital], and fulfils in each of
>them the corresponding function... [N]ot only does every particular
>circuit (implicitly) presuppose the others but also...the repetition
>of the circuit in one form include[s] the specifications of the
>circuit in the other forms. Thus the entire distinction represents
>itself as purely formal.... The circuit of capital is a constant
>process of interruption...ecah of these stages not only conditions
>the other, but at the same time excludes it."
>  - Marx, Capital vol. 2, quoted in Gayatri Spivak, The Critique of
>Postcolonial Reason


This seems an unfair passage to quote, since it is a posthumous fragment
from an unfinished work.  Karl Marx, when he wrote for himself, felt
perfectly free to resort to a variety of shorthands, using the terminologies
of Hegel and Smith and Richardo, etc.  But in works aimed at the reading
public, like the Manifesto, and the Eighteenth Brumaire, and the Civil War
in France, and even in Capital, Vol. 1, Marx writes with great clarity and
eloquence.   Engels even more knew how to compose in demotic periods, meant
to inspire a broad audience of common readers.

So I cannot see putting Marx in either the camp of Orwell or Adorno.

That, of course, is the trouble with stark contrasts.   They may clairfy the
stakes in a debate (they may artificially "sharpen the contradictions," so
to speak); but stark contrasts always run the risk of omitting the sensible
middle ground, one in this case more or less sensibly occupied by Karl Marx,
regarded only as a literary stylist.