One of the worst things you can do as an amateur philosophy student - or maybe one of the best things you can do as a philosophy student; I'm not sure - is bring later texts to bear on a given philosophical work. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble has ensured I will never be able to take seriously anything Freud has to say about gender ("Really, Mr. Freud? Psychology follows from gender, which itself follows from biology?"), and 1970s/1980s philosophy, with its emphasis on symbols and social codes as capable of producing the world in their own right, has me highlighting and interrogating a given passage of Marx's Capital every other page.
To provide an example, here's a passage I highlighted earlier tonight:
Otherwise with capital. The historical conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring into life, only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And this one historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production.
And the comment I appended to it:
The crux of this thesis must rest in the development of capitalism prior to the Colombian exchange - although even then, one could argue that historical developments like the Mongolian Invasions and Indian Ocean trade point toward a growing globalization that both precedes and makes possible capitalism, even in its embryonic forms (wouldn't have paper money and gunpowder without Song Dynasty China, would you?).
"Marx won't shut the fuck up about twenty yards of linen making a coat" is something of a cliché in Marxist circles, but I'm surprised people seem to pay so little attention to him meticulously listing every profession required to make a watch in 17th century Europe.
