First off, I want to say I’ve really enjoyed reading your posts.  Keep up the good work on that.  And don’t forget to look at the study questions available via the homepage as you read.

Second, although Marx is the oldest writer we’ll be reading this term and might be thought to be irrelevant after the post-89 collapse of the Soviet Union and many supposedly “Marxist” governments around the globe, one finds Marx everywhere these days, and not only among left-leaning humanities scholars in the academy.

One notable such place is the wonderful publication Jacobin, a relatively new magazine/site that is infused with Marxist modes of thought/practice, a global perspective, and a youthful vibe that shows the deep relevance of Marxist ideas in our moment of looming ecological catastrophe and ever-increasing inequality.

Another is the awesomely comprehensive collection of Marx’s and Marxists’ work at marxists.org, which collates a deep, deep trove of e-texts and distributes them for free.

For those interested in taking a deeper draught from Capital than the Norton gives you, CUNY’s own David Harvey has made available his classic lectures/discussions that walk through all three volumes of Capital.  For when you have a few hundred hours of free time.  And that’s not counting doing the actual reading.

Ferdinand De Saussure’s analysis of language alludes to Nietzsche’s theory on lying and human’s false cognitive truths, though Saussure’s theory took the analysis one step further than Nietzsche’s, they are relatively one in the same. Saussure’s theory, like Nietzsche’s, explains how humans attempt to use an arbitrary system based on sound or language to capture the tangible and make it intangible for learning and speech purposes. The words that Saussure uses while theorizing is Signified and Signifier. Where the Signifier is the sound or written word and the signified is the concept that is lent to the sound. The actual object or “ding un sich” is referred to as the referent. A signifier may not exist without a signified or rather lacks meaning without a signified. And while a signified may exist the meaning of a signified may change between persons and context. The relationship that exists between the two are considered arbitrary relationships and are only as real as they are made. Nietzsche elaborates on his theory by explaining how value is equated with signification. Nietzsche says, “(1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined” (858). In this case, the signified is being exchanged for a signifier or a word is being exchanged for a meaning. The value is determined by the sender and receiver or group of persons in discussion. The idea that is lent to a word is not fixed, it is capable of being exchanged so long as it is stated that it is being exchanged. In this way language is very much like money.

Saussure explains that money and language are similar in the ways that they can be exchanged for similar or dissimilar things. Money may be exchanged for something of a fixed quantity. Something such as a bag of apples may be purchased for $3.00. While you may also go to another country and exchange a U.S. dollar for the equivalent $16.90 Pesos (in Mexico). If one wanted to delve deeper into the comparison of money and words one could also argue that language and money are alike in that they are both the Signified. Like words, money means nothing without the signifier behind it. In this case each country has an amount of gold that signifies how much their dollar, peso, pound, rupee, etc. is worth. The referent is gold, the dollar is the signified and the signifier is the value we put with a dollar. Money and language are alike in many ways. In both cases we have signifiers and a signified and we also have exchanges and arbitrary equivalents.