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At last we are alone.” My father told me he heard these words from an elderly gentleman sitting beside him on the London Underground in June 1940, just after the fall of France. The same insularity animates Brexit. It was an illusion then — it was not the UK alone, but an alliance with greater powers that won the second world war. It is an illusion now. The UK will not be alone, but it will be lonelier. We cannot know what would have happened if the 2016 referendum had the opposite outcome. That is the road not taken. But we know some results and may at least guess at others. Brexit is a decision to separate the UK from the institutions governing the continent of which it is necessarily a part. One result is certain: British people will lose the right to move and work across the EU, as will citizens of EU members to live and work in the UK. That is a reduction in freedom. It is the result of insisting that one should not have both a British and a European political identity. This is...

My aim, as with the Companion to Volume I of Capital, is “to get you to read this book.” I wish I could add “in Marx’s own terms” but, as I shall shortly show, it is particularly difficult in this case to understand what those terms might be. But, first, I need to persuade you of the importance of undertaking a careful study of Volume II and treating it on a par with Volume I. The case for so doing is, in my view, unassailable. In the Grundrisse (e.g. 407), Marx unequivocally asserts that capital can be understood only as a “unity of production and realization” of value and surplus-value. By this, he means that if you cannot sell in the market what has been produced in the labor process then the labor embodied through production has no value. Volume I of Capital concentrates its attention on the processes and dynamics of the production of value and surplus-value, laying to one side any difficulties that might arise out of the conditions of their realization. Marx assumes, in effect, t...

Once you get to the end of Capital, Volume I, it is a good idea to go back to the beginning and read the first chapter again. You will almost certainly find yourself reading it in a different light. You should, by now, find it a lot easier to follow. When I went back the first time, I also found it much more interesting and even downright fun to read. With the tension out of the way as to whether I would ever manage to get to the end of this huge tome, I relaxed and really began to enjoy what Bertell Ollman calls “the dance of the dialectic” and all the nuances (including the footnotes, the asides and the literary references) that I had missed first time through. Skimming back over the whole text schematically is also useful. It helps consolidate some thematic understandings. When I used to set examination papers, I would sometimes take a basic concept and ask students to comment on how it would weave into and out of the fabric of the book. How many times, I would ask, do you encounter...