What do you think?
Rate this book
Marx
Includes Capital and Manifesto of the Communist Party.
434 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1952
5 people are currently reading
85 people want to read
About the author
Karl Marx
3,251 books6,543 followersWith 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...
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...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 19, 2012
The two works in this volume, Capital and Manifesto of the Communist Party, represented efforts by their author to wear the hats respectively of social scientist and of revolutionary firebrand. It is this second hat that he wears most comfortably, and which he was not able to remove while writing his "scientific" treatise. The result, for this reader anyway, is that while Capital contains much powerful evidence and cogent thinking, the work as a whole is tendentious and not persuasive.
Ever since I first heard of the existence of Marx's Capital in my teens, it has been the epitome of the forbidding, difficult, and unappetizing text. Reading this book, to me, an omnivorous consumer of books on science, history, philosophy, religion, and other things, always seemed to offer only a punishment detail. For one thing, although I was raised in a working-class household that had, as far as it held any kind of political orientation, a socialist outlook, when I was 16 I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and found myself strongly drawn to her point of view (even as I had some problems with the preachiness, repetitiveness, and plain length of the book). I started to think of myself as someone who believed in capitalism, free enterprise, and free markets. Ayn Rand's view was essentially that society advances only through the creations of individual geniuses, and that if we want humanity to prosper, these geniuses must be left free to operate. When we mow down the tall poppies we lobotomize humanity and lose the benefit of the most precious part of our human nature.
As I grew up, I lived in a kind of tension between my attraction for the creativity and individualism of capitalism, and my concerns about social justice and the environment. But overall, after experiences like membership in four different trade unions and a brief visit to the USSR in 1982 to meet my grandfather, my heart declared itself for the capitalist side. In a free society, the individual should be able to choose his own destiny and reap the rewards--or punishments--of his own efforts. And with all the tens of millions of people who had died at the hands of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong-il, Capital by Karl Marx faded into irrelevance.
Then, last year, I joined Goodreads and came across a book called Why Marx Was Right, published in 2011. A chill moved through my bones. For I had long thought to myself, "What theory has been as thoroughly falsified as Marxism?" Phrenology? Phlogiston? The flat Earth, perhaps? Hadn't all the purges, the mass starvation, and finally the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, driven a stake through the heart of this ideology? But no, here it was again, springing up like a peat-bog fire that just won't be put out.
I knew that Marxism was, or anyway for a long time had been, fashionable in North American academia. But this I put down to a herd mentality that was preoccupied, above all, with securing state funds for itself, and I reckoned that the great majority of these academics didn't know any more about Marx or Marxism than I did. At least, they were like me in not having read Capital or the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Laagered in their ivy halls, they were anachronistic and absurd, but also irrelevant.
What had changed now though was that the world economy, signaled by the subprime-mortgage crisis of 2007-08, was heading into a depression. We're still heading into it. Governments around the world are printing money and then borrowing it to meet their towering and ever-growing budget deficits; people are losing their jobs, their houses, and their savings, and the number of these people will continue to swell. There will be increasing civil unrest. There will be revolution.
There will be Marxism.
A few years ago I read a book by an American political thinker and longshoreman named Eric Hoffer, published in 1951 and called The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. In it Hoffer sketches his idea of how mass movements unfold. He believes that people, when they perceive their lives to be ruined, never blame themselves but always seek an outside cause; and if some charismatic person claims to have found that cause, they are ready to follow him. They are ready to become a swarm of locusts, devouring all in their path to realize their leader's vision.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party was a call to action for such a mass movement, and Capital was intended to provide the theoretical justification for it. When I saw that there was a recent book proclaiming that Marx was right, I realized that I could not dodge his works any longer. As volume 50 of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World, Marx was on my reading list anyway; but the thought that his ideas would again be enlisted to justify social revolutions that I regarded as imminent moved this volume to the top of the pile, and, gritting my teeth, I dug in.
There's no denying that the first part of Capital is tough going. Here Marx tries to build up the elementary components from which his theory will be built. Through my other readings I came to discover that Marx relies heavily on chapters 8-10 of Book 1 of Aristotle's Politics, plus chapter 5 of John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. From Locke Marx draws the idea that it is our labor that creates our ownership of things, and that we are always entitled to possess the products of our own effort. From Aristotle Marx draws the idea that value of these products is always of two types: a use-value which is the purpose for which the product is made, such as a pair of shoes to serve as foot-coverings; and an exchange-value which is the value of the product as a thing to be traded for some other product. Aristotle contends that the use-value of a thing is its true and proper value, and a good and necessary part of civilized life, while the notion of exchange-value leads on to the invention of money and to the idea of seeking to acquire wealth for its own sake, which occupation can never be part of living a good life. Marx fervently seconds this emotion, and defines a commodity as a product made for the purpose of exchange. And when you hire wage laborers to help you make these products, you become a capitalist and a bourgeois. And whether you intend it or not, you rob your workers of the "surplus value" of their labor and thus render them ever poorer and ever more dependent on you and your kind, even as you put out an ever greater quantity of goods for sale and make yourself ever richer.
Marx's argument is convoluted and tendentious. He tries to show that the value of any product is exactly proportional to the quantity of labor that goes into it, and that this quantity of value is essentially conserved like physical quantities such as energy or angular momentum. I can't accept this. I'm prepared to accept that, as a rule of thumb, the "value" of a thing, all other things being equal, is roughly proportional to the quantity of (skilled) labor that has gone into it, but I agree with the liberal economists that value is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. If Justin Bieber cut a lock of his hair and put it up for sale on eBay, what would he get for it? Nothing from me, but he could probably get hundreds or thousands of dollars from someone. What is the "objective" value of a lock of his hair? The answer, I'm afraid, is "whatever someone is willing to give for it." It has no objective value.
The "scientificness" of Marx's theory depends on his account of value, which eventually he even treats as a variable in equations. I'm afraid this is all nonsense. To me, having now read the work pretty carefully, Marx's economic theory is bunk.
This is not to say that Capital is itself without value. As I see it, the book is a braid made from three main strands: a deep reading of economic history, especially that of England since feudal times; a wide survey of working conditions and the lives of workers in industrial England; and abstract theorizing to explain these. The abstract theory comes first, then the survey of working conditions, and finally a precis of economic history. Marx was filled with anger and outrage over the plight of factory workers, and he produces plenty of evidence to support his view, which makes fascinating and troubling reading. Government factory inspectors were themselves traumatized by what they found: the relentless, around-the-clock exploitation of men, women, and children, who lived in filth, poverty, misery, and degradation. The owners of the factories resisted all efforts to improve the conditions of these helots.
In his economic history too Marx is pretty convincing. He shows how the proletariat, the army of dispossessed would-be workers, was progressively formed by the dissolution of ancient and feudal notions of property and by the enclosure of the commons and by the seizure of ecclesiastical properties by Henry VIII and others. People who had been farmers or agricultural workers were thrown off the land and wound up broke and desperate in the towns. They became cannon fodder for the mechanized factories of the Industrial Revolution.
Whether "Marxism" is the answer to these kinds of problems has already, I believe, been answered in the negative by history. But that doesn't mean it won't be tried again--and again and again. Indeed, when I finally came to the much shorter Manifesto of the Communist Party, and waded through the sarcastic and patronizing attacks on the more timid brands of socialism to arrive at Marx's 10-point survey of traits that the post-revolution world would possess, I saw that some points have already been implemented:
Point 2: "A heavy progressive or graduated income tax."
Point 5: "Centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly."
And, in light of the proposed U.S. Ex-PATRIOT Act, Point 4: "Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels."
Marx would have to give us some credit, I think, for having taken these steps toward realizing his utopia. But, as his Manifesto makes clear, his program is necessarily violent, for it is not possible to break the grip of the bourgeoisie on the means of production except through force. And his call for "justice" though violence will find many receptive ears in the years ahead, I have no doubt. But now, having read him, I can provide not just resistance, but principled resistance, to that program.
Thinkers of the world, unite.
Ever since I first heard of the existence of Marx's Capital in my teens, it has been the epitome of the forbidding, difficult, and unappetizing text. Reading this book, to me, an omnivorous consumer of books on science, history, philosophy, religion, and other things, always seemed to offer only a punishment detail. For one thing, although I was raised in a working-class household that had, as far as it held any kind of political orientation, a socialist outlook, when I was 16 I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and found myself strongly drawn to her point of view (even as I had some problems with the preachiness, repetitiveness, and plain length of the book). I started to think of myself as someone who believed in capitalism, free enterprise, and free markets. Ayn Rand's view was essentially that society advances only through the creations of individual geniuses, and that if we want humanity to prosper, these geniuses must be left free to operate. When we mow down the tall poppies we lobotomize humanity and lose the benefit of the most precious part of our human nature.
As I grew up, I lived in a kind of tension between my attraction for the creativity and individualism of capitalism, and my concerns about social justice and the environment. But overall, after experiences like membership in four different trade unions and a brief visit to the USSR in 1982 to meet my grandfather, my heart declared itself for the capitalist side. In a free society, the individual should be able to choose his own destiny and reap the rewards--or punishments--of his own efforts. And with all the tens of millions of people who had died at the hands of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong-il, Capital by Karl Marx faded into irrelevance.
Then, last year, I joined Goodreads and came across a book called Why Marx Was Right, published in 2011. A chill moved through my bones. For I had long thought to myself, "What theory has been as thoroughly falsified as Marxism?" Phrenology? Phlogiston? The flat Earth, perhaps? Hadn't all the purges, the mass starvation, and finally the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, driven a stake through the heart of this ideology? But no, here it was again, springing up like a peat-bog fire that just won't be put out.
I knew that Marxism was, or anyway for a long time had been, fashionable in North American academia. But this I put down to a herd mentality that was preoccupied, above all, with securing state funds for itself, and I reckoned that the great majority of these academics didn't know any more about Marx or Marxism than I did. At least, they were like me in not having read Capital or the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Laagered in their ivy halls, they were anachronistic and absurd, but also irrelevant.
What had changed now though was that the world economy, signaled by the subprime-mortgage crisis of 2007-08, was heading into a depression. We're still heading into it. Governments around the world are printing money and then borrowing it to meet their towering and ever-growing budget deficits; people are losing their jobs, their houses, and their savings, and the number of these people will continue to swell. There will be increasing civil unrest. There will be revolution.
There will be Marxism.
A few years ago I read a book by an American political thinker and longshoreman named Eric Hoffer, published in 1951 and called The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. In it Hoffer sketches his idea of how mass movements unfold. He believes that people, when they perceive their lives to be ruined, never blame themselves but always seek an outside cause; and if some charismatic person claims to have found that cause, they are ready to follow him. They are ready to become a swarm of locusts, devouring all in their path to realize their leader's vision.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party was a call to action for such a mass movement, and Capital was intended to provide the theoretical justification for it. When I saw that there was a recent book proclaiming that Marx was right, I realized that I could not dodge his works any longer. As volume 50 of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World, Marx was on my reading list anyway; but the thought that his ideas would again be enlisted to justify social revolutions that I regarded as imminent moved this volume to the top of the pile, and, gritting my teeth, I dug in.
There's no denying that the first part of Capital is tough going. Here Marx tries to build up the elementary components from which his theory will be built. Through my other readings I came to discover that Marx relies heavily on chapters 8-10 of Book 1 of Aristotle's Politics, plus chapter 5 of John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. From Locke Marx draws the idea that it is our labor that creates our ownership of things, and that we are always entitled to possess the products of our own effort. From Aristotle Marx draws the idea that value of these products is always of two types: a use-value which is the purpose for which the product is made, such as a pair of shoes to serve as foot-coverings; and an exchange-value which is the value of the product as a thing to be traded for some other product. Aristotle contends that the use-value of a thing is its true and proper value, and a good and necessary part of civilized life, while the notion of exchange-value leads on to the invention of money and to the idea of seeking to acquire wealth for its own sake, which occupation can never be part of living a good life. Marx fervently seconds this emotion, and defines a commodity as a product made for the purpose of exchange. And when you hire wage laborers to help you make these products, you become a capitalist and a bourgeois. And whether you intend it or not, you rob your workers of the "surplus value" of their labor and thus render them ever poorer and ever more dependent on you and your kind, even as you put out an ever greater quantity of goods for sale and make yourself ever richer.
Marx's argument is convoluted and tendentious. He tries to show that the value of any product is exactly proportional to the quantity of labor that goes into it, and that this quantity of value is essentially conserved like physical quantities such as energy or angular momentum. I can't accept this. I'm prepared to accept that, as a rule of thumb, the "value" of a thing, all other things being equal, is roughly proportional to the quantity of (skilled) labor that has gone into it, but I agree with the liberal economists that value is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. If Justin Bieber cut a lock of his hair and put it up for sale on eBay, what would he get for it? Nothing from me, but he could probably get hundreds or thousands of dollars from someone. What is the "objective" value of a lock of his hair? The answer, I'm afraid, is "whatever someone is willing to give for it." It has no objective value.
The "scientificness" of Marx's theory depends on his account of value, which eventually he even treats as a variable in equations. I'm afraid this is all nonsense. To me, having now read the work pretty carefully, Marx's economic theory is bunk.
This is not to say that Capital is itself without value. As I see it, the book is a braid made from three main strands: a deep reading of economic history, especially that of England since feudal times; a wide survey of working conditions and the lives of workers in industrial England; and abstract theorizing to explain these. The abstract theory comes first, then the survey of working conditions, and finally a precis of economic history. Marx was filled with anger and outrage over the plight of factory workers, and he produces plenty of evidence to support his view, which makes fascinating and troubling reading. Government factory inspectors were themselves traumatized by what they found: the relentless, around-the-clock exploitation of men, women, and children, who lived in filth, poverty, misery, and degradation. The owners of the factories resisted all efforts to improve the conditions of these helots.
In his economic history too Marx is pretty convincing. He shows how the proletariat, the army of dispossessed would-be workers, was progressively formed by the dissolution of ancient and feudal notions of property and by the enclosure of the commons and by the seizure of ecclesiastical properties by Henry VIII and others. People who had been farmers or agricultural workers were thrown off the land and wound up broke and desperate in the towns. They became cannon fodder for the mechanized factories of the Industrial Revolution.
Whether "Marxism" is the answer to these kinds of problems has already, I believe, been answered in the negative by history. But that doesn't mean it won't be tried again--and again and again. Indeed, when I finally came to the much shorter Manifesto of the Communist Party, and waded through the sarcastic and patronizing attacks on the more timid brands of socialism to arrive at Marx's 10-point survey of traits that the post-revolution world would possess, I saw that some points have already been implemented:
Point 2: "A heavy progressive or graduated income tax."
Point 5: "Centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly."
And, in light of the proposed U.S. Ex-PATRIOT Act, Point 4: "Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels."
Marx would have to give us some credit, I think, for having taken these steps toward realizing his utopia. But, as his Manifesto makes clear, his program is necessarily violent, for it is not possible to break the grip of the bourgeoisie on the means of production except through force. And his call for "justice" though violence will find many receptive ears in the years ahead, I have no doubt. But now, having read him, I can provide not just resistance, but principled resistance, to that program.
Thinkers of the world, unite.
June 18, 2009
Like unwanted encyclopedias, sets of Britannica's "Great Book" series show up all the time at bookstores. You can buy them as sets or, as often as not, the seller will split the set for the sake of selling an individual volume. That's how I came by this Marx volume. Problem is, I bought this a long time ago when I was less picky about things, and now that I look at it, I hate the idea that each page is split into two narrow columns of type, making for four narrow columns of type per spread -- like a newspaper, or a very old book of the 1800s. I hate reading books like that, the eye has to scan the abruptly short lines too quickly and jump to each line too often; and having four columns per spread makes for laboriously slow reading - you can't turn pages fast enough like that. But it's nice to have "Capital" and "The Communist Manifesto" in one reasonably sized volume for the collection. Luckily, I've read them both in the past -- but in different editions.
December 16, 2012
Much more insightful thinker then almost anyone in this day & age understands.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews