Marxists, particularly those of an academic or scholastic persuasion, often claim that people misread Marx, especially Capital. Spend fifteen minutes on the internet talking about Marx, and you’ll soon enough get a Marx bro telling you you’ve got it all wrong. He’ll cite chapter and verse to you. Actually, he’ll seldom cite chapter and verse. Usually, he’ll just cite name upon name. “You need to Hegel.” “You need to Althusser.” He won’t show you precisely you’ve got it wrong or where particularly you’re misreading. But he’ll tell you, you’ve got it wrong.

Lately I’ve begun to wonder about a political project—no, not just a political project, but a world-building project—that’s tied to a text that almost everybody thinks everybody else is getting wrong. The only historical parallel that I can think of, of course, is the Bible.

The two successful political projects coming out of Marx were the Bolshevik Revolution (and the international revolutions it set off and self-identified communist parties and self-identified communist states it launched) and social democracy, often conceived as more or less anti-Soviet but pro-Marx.

From the point of view of it critics on the left, social democracy is a betrayal of Marx or a misreading of Marx. It’s workerist, laborist, nationalist, imperialist, masculinist, statist, and fetishist. It misreads the theory of value in Marx as a labor theory of value rather than, as Diane Elson puts it, a value theory of labor. It is reformist and evolutionary rather than radical and revolutionary.

From the point of view of its critics on the left, Bolshevism is also a betrayal or misreading of Marx. Most fundamentally, on the question of domination, which critics of the Bolsheviks see as rooted in some of the same failures as social democracy—workerism, laborism, nationalism/imperialism, statism—but also, for other critics, in the failure to appreciate the constraints of history and the need for economic development and economic conditions to ripen. The failure to see that need, say the more Menshevik-inclined, is a revolt against the teachings of Marx. Which can only result in terroristic disasters of the sort that Stalin was responsible for.

Even friends of the Bolshevik Revolution saw it as a break, a healthy break, with, or disregard of, Marx’s Capital. Gramsci famously called the Bolshevik Revolution “the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital.” Though he went on to qualify that judgment, Gramsci did identify a kind of structural conservatism in Capital, not unlike the “jeopardy thesis” that Albert Hirschman identifies as the one of the three strands of reactionary thought in his “The Rhetoric of Reaction.”

That was certainly how many of Marx’s more impatient comrades in the movement saw many of his developmentalist strictures after 1848—that, disappointed by the failures of 1848, Marx had abandoned a politics of the will for the patience of historical materialism, which required the development of economic forces before any genuine revolution could be made. As Heinzen put it, Marx believes workers “must patiently go hungry and starve, until an England has been made out of Germany.” That was the spirit the Bolsheviks were revolting against, in part, and for Gramsci, it required a certain healthy disregard or distance from certain teachings of Marx.

So those are the two most successful projects to come out of Marx: Bolshevism and social democracy. Both, in the eyes of their critics, and even their friends, based on a misreading or inattentiveness to Marx.

Which makes you wonder about the politicalness of the text itself: Could it be a failure of Marx’s Capital that no successful politics has emerged based on the proper reading of the text? Is the text itself a little too open to misreading, a little too vague, a little too exacting for the ways of the world?

I say this from personal experience: Having spent the last two years, reading and re-reading and re-reading again, those opening chapters on the commodity, value, money, and capital, having taught parts of them countless times, and banging my head against the wall, trying to figure out what any of it means, grumbling in frustration at the miasma of it all, and then imagining an actual political movement, with practical tasks to be done, and people to be mobilized to act, and with any luck, policies to enact and institutions to be built, sitting around and trying to read these chapters, and desperately trying to extract the kernels of practical wisdom and truth about the political economy that follows from it, well, I become a lot more empathetic to those political people who’ve tried to make a movement from this material, and a lot more empathetic to whatever mistakes or misreadings they’ve succumbed to, along the way.

Political theory has always been a species of practical wisdom. The great texts are tied to concrete political projects. Think of the advice literature to which Machiavelli’s The Prince is responding, though that, too, has spawned a thousand political projects based on misreading the text.

Which makes me think the opposite point: Maybe misreading is baked into the success or viability of any political project; maybe misreading is simply what politics is. In the spirit of Harold Bloom, maybe any political project must be a misreading of the text it claims to honor. Maybe any and every political project is, by its nature, a strong reading, in the Bloomian sense, of the original text, which is always a misreading, and has to be, for it to come into being in the world?