O Capital

by Karl Marx, Julian Borchardt (Editor)

Com a presente edição d'O Capital procurou-se tornar acessível ao leitor comum aquela que é seguramente a obra mais citada de Karl Marx, a mais importante para a compreensão profunda da sua doutrina e também a mais mal conhecida. E isto exactamente porque a sua leitura na versão original apresenta bastantes dificuldades tanto ao leitor não especializado como ao mediamente informado.
No entanto, ao tentar eliminar essas dificuldades houve a preocupação de não comprometer o sentido e o conteúdo das palavras do fundador do socialismo científico. Não estamos, pois, em presença de uma dessas obras de divulgação em que um novo autor expõe livremente o texto original, sacrificando a fidelidade das ideias à simplicidade da linguagem.
O critério seguido neste caso teve como princípio norteador conservar sempre que possível as próprias palavras de Karl Marx, limitando-se a intervenção no texto-base a suprimir tudo o que não fosse imprescindível para a compreensão das ideias expostas e a reagrupar em novas unidades o que diga respeito a um mesmo tema e surja disperso em várias partes ao longo da obra.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy

518 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1867

About the author

With the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.

German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.

Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).

The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.

Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.

Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.

Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.

Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .

People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.

Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

The bourgeoisie, the ruling class of the time, cannot remain dominant without wanting to modify the instruments of production; therefore, the relations of production and the set of social conditions. The old industrial classes had the requirement not to change the mode of production. The bourgeoisie, with not a century of existence, creates massive and colossal productive forces, much more than already done in the past. However, even with these changes, the production forces that led to the socialist regime in the future are still in the process of maturing in today's society.
At this point, Marx presents two forms of contradiction within the capitalist system. The first is the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production. As much as the bourgeoisie always creates increasingly powerful means for production, the relations of production do not follow this rhythm: the connections of property and the distribution of income. On the contrary, the regime of capitalism produces more and more exhaustively, but misery is still growing in society.
With this comes the second contradiction, which appears with the growing increase in both wealth and misery. The proletariat, which increasingly constitutes the population's majority, had become a class and the bourgeois, and in this way, wish to seize power and transform these social relations. But, unlike old revolutions, where minorities fought for minorities, the minority had fought for all in the proletarian revolution. This fact marked the end of the class struggle and the end of the antagonistic face of capitalism.
The exploited class is the most potent of the change agents. The awareness that arises in this environment forms political associations, such as unions, movements and parties, that want to achieve solidarity between all oppressed classes to fight for their rights and oppressors. Therefore, this is capitalism's essence, the exploitation of the majority, a category dominated by the minority, the dominant.

[tiago. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apesar de este ter sido um dos livros mais enfadonhos que já li em toda a minha vida, O Capital reúne todas as características de um clássico incontornável. Pode não ser uma leitura divertida ou sequer fluída, mas o que consegue sem nenhuma dúvida é alterar a forma como o seu leitor vê o mundo que o rodeia. Marx faz neste livro uma análise crítica (e altamente panfletária) do sistema capitalista, em toda a sua glória degenerada. Como tal, um amante de economia decerto se deixará seduzir por este livro. No meu caso, creio ser este o primeiro livro de economia que li na minha vida; e talvez por isso foi bastante difícil acompanhar o raciocínio de Marx, e mais difícil ainda manter um mínimo de interesse na leitura. Saí do livro com uma visão alterada do mundo, não haja dúvida, e com um interesse modesto em entrar mais em literatura de economia; mas, por enquanto, sem vontade de repetir a dose.

Destaque para os capítulos sobre as crises cíclicas no capitalismo e sobre o sistema de crédito, para mim os mais interessantes da obra.

[Virtual]

So here I am, having read a short-version, compiled version of Das Kapital. This book has less fame than the Communist Manifesto, which is a sad reality, but not surprising considering the size of the book and the topic which is a criticism of capitalistic modes of production and capitalism in general. A hard read, both mentally and emotionally, this work took Marx 30 years and you see he really worked on his logic and argumentation. Now, do I agree? No. What I do appreciate though is the effort.

What I wrote above was a calm and collected version of the review now let's get real. Imagine a world in which workers do not have to toil under the shackles of evil exploitative owners of money, let's really imagine it. So here's a bunch of people, some of them qualified some of them not, they produce things, a number of things, let's get more concrete and say they produce shirts, some shorts are good some aren't, and it takes one guy a lot of time to produce shirts and he doesn't want to buy a machine because that will lower the value of his work. Now you buy a shirt like that, and it's not as good as shirts used to be , because you murdered the capitalist "slave" owners and gave all the machines away to the people and many didn't know how to operate them so now they are rare to come by, and people do stuff manually. But at least everyone lives according to their means and gives according to possibilities, and come on a man, workers that were just freed from the terror of capitalism can't give away much. We need to be understanding of that worker and let him take the lion's share and give bit by bit, but at some point, he will surely revel in his proletariat status and give back, won't he?

Now at this point, you might sense the sarcasm in my text, and I can imagine you say
"But David, you capitalist pig who wants to exploit 9-year-old children by making them work in mines 25 hours a day, the solidarity of the working men have been proven by the movement of history to tend towards unity of ideas and goals and aspirations, so you with your Machiavellian surplus-value injected brain and kulak attitude are the problem by not seeing that millions of people can come to an agreement to live in a commune without property, look at all the past examples of that"

Okay, that's a strawman I pulled there, not cool. Huh kinda reminds me of something, ah this book, inventing the evil capitalist stereotype or revamping it, portraying a unidimensional worker and unidimensional capitalist and using tear-jerking statistics as economic proof of future trends. I have been reading through macroeconomic manuals, somehow they don't give that kind of statistics and tell everyone against future guessing when it comes to one market let alone the entirety of the world's marketplace, but I guess when capital accumulated by a colleague of yours allows you time to write long books about the dangers of capitalism you tend to invent your own modes of analysis.

I'll stop with the irony and sarcasm, and I'll be honest for a second, this book infuriated me to degrees I have not fathomed before, I thought myself to be a calm guy, this book shattered that impression. Never before have I read a book about economics, and kept wondering when economics starts. I will not bring marxism-leninism into this, that's a whole another beast of its own, horrible in its own ways.

Do I recommend this book?
Yes.
Why do I recommend it?
Reading it can either save you by showing you how little planning went into communism or let you believe in fairytale economics, and I guess both are positive.

[Nickolay Moshkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Довольно доходчиво — уж точно в сравнении с самим оригинальным «Капиталом» Маркса. При интересе к предмету я бы порекомендовал этот труд вместо оригинала.