I’d not heard of Frederic

I’d not heard of Frederic Jameson before but perhaps I should have since, apparently, he invented “postmodernism”. Since this is a load of old rubbish this suggests you should hold off buying the book until you get a further opinion from someone who knows more about him. If you want a literary approach to Capital there’s always Francis Wheen’s Das Kapital: A Biography (reviewed in the Socialist Standard, on this site at  http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2007/no-1239-november-2007/book-reviews ).Judging by the interview (and of course it’s a good thing that Marx’s ideas should be being discussed), Jameson seems to be a bit of an “underconsumptionist” (see the thread on Andrew Kliman, who criticises this approach). Capital is not really “a book about unemployment” in the sense that it argues that capitalism’s tendency to replace living labour in the production process will eventually lead to its collapse because if fewer and fewer workers are being paid wages there’ll be fewer and fewer consumers to buy the products. This, incidentally, is an analysis of capitalism that is shared by Peter Joseph and the Zeitgeist movement.What it overlooks is that what drives capitalism is not consumer demand, but investment demand, ie investment with a view to profit and the re-investment of profit as more capital. If the “underconsumptionist” theory was right — and people were putting it forward in Marx’s day — capitalism should have collapsed a long time ago. The fact that it hasn’t shows there must be something wrong with the theory.