Fiction
Early Marx
I have all my clothes on, even my sneakers, and I'm lying flat on my back in my bed. Clearly, not only have I have fallen asleep in this position, I also haven't moved all night. I turn my head. It's 7am. The air in the room is already hot. I must've slept four, five hours. And there's a jackhammer going on on the street, just outside my window. They're actually tearing up a sidewalk before people are even up for work. It's unbelievable. But the strange thing is, the truly strange thing is, that, after waking up on a hot Brooklyn morning - hung over, sleep deprived, cottonmouthed, head full of static and being driven positively-fucking-insane by a jackhammer whose spatial coordinates are far, far, far too close to my own for my liking - the strange thing is, is that my first thought is, 'I want to read early Marx.'
So I get up - conveniently there is no need to put any clothes on, of course - stand up on a chair to reach the high shelf, slide the book out from the middle of the stack that it's been in since I moved into my new room months ago, lie back down, skip over Fromm's fairly extensive introductory comments, and start right in on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 - what is usually meant when people speak of "early Marx." And you know, as an anarchist, I've always had a massive grudge against Marx, but after reading a bit, I have to agree that, really, he's quite good.