| Author/Contributor(s): | Mayo, Michael |
| Publisher: | Penguin Press |
| Date: | 6/1/2027 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
Why does it seem like everything is getting worse? Most of the students Mike Mayo encounters at Oxford, the university where he teaches, arrive with strong critiques of the world. They are outraged at injustice they see all around them and are searching for change. They know they don’t like capitalism, and that they probably like socialism. But they will also admit that they don’t have a great sense of what either of them actually are. Meanwhile, Mayo’s working-class family in Boston are equally dismayed at the world, but they come at things differently. They know they don’t like socialism, and the people they listen to tend to praise capitalism. But they, too, will tell him they don’t have a firm grasp on what those famous “isms” truly mean.
Most of us aren’t that different from either Mike’s students or his family and probably sit somewhere in between them: We’re trying to figure out what’s happening in the world, what is happening to us, beyond the partial answers that the media so often conjures up. It might feel good to decry capitalism or socialism, but what is going on behind those terms? The Art of Capital is a reader’s guide to Capital with a focus on the reading. What does this famously (infamously!) difficult book do for, and to, its readers? Mayo explains how the book itself thinks, and how it does something more radical and moving than simply trying to convince.
The Art of Capital argues that society suffers from a relatively new kind of confusion, a mismatch between what we see, what we feel, and what we understand. Understanding our world shouldn’t be this hard. The solution proposed is an act of reading that world in a new way. Capital is doesn't offer a set of readymade ideas. It isn’t a bingeable collection of hot takes. To read it is to struggle, and the struggle itself is where the meaning and the power lie. This is a book about finding new powers of reading—reading Capital, reading capitalism, and reading our own lives as we live them, day by day.