Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics) | Karl Marx

Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics) | Karl Marx | Great Purchase

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	Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics) Karl Marx Penguin Classics, 1992 - 1152 pages average customer review:based on 42 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One of the most notorious works of modern times, as well as one of the most influential, "Capital" is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates. Living in exile in England, where this work was largely written, Marx drew on a wide-ranging knowledge of its society to support his analysis and generate fresh insights. Arguing that capitalism would create an ever-increasing division in wealth and welfare, he predicted its abolition and replacement by a system with common ownership of the means of production. "Capital" rapidly acquired readership among the leaders of social democratic parties, particularly in Russia and Germany, and ultimately throughout the world, to become a work described by Marx's friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels as 'the Bible of the Working Class'.

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Exceptional .

The sheer depth of what Marx tries to tackle, regardless if one subscribes to it or not, is nothing short of amazing...and is reason alone to (attempt) to read Capital. It is not a bible, and those who treat it as such most likely have not read it. It is a stunningly accurate critique of political economy as it was then and as it has unfolded today. To conclude, for common misconceptions, Capital identifies the many inconsistencies and problems of political economy in the realm of the Capitalist mode of production. What it does not do is outline how to organize and make work a "socialist" or centrally planned economy. To say that the decline of the 'socialist' states make Marx and his work obsolete is pure madness - he has been correct or nearly correct on many things both originated by him or built on from predecessors - Smith and Ricardo.

Perhaps the main difficulty, and perhaps even the reason for such misunderstanding and misinterpretation, is that Marx did not build foundations of knowledge in the traditional way. His world is complex, as it should be, and everything relates to everything else. Nothing is viewed in isolation or analyzed individually. Nor is the analysis confined to things and things, essentially concealing the human element behind them that is characteristic of mainstream economic analysis. Also, unfortunately, there tends to be a large number of people that have never been exposed to Marx and listen to a small segment of the population that rallies against Marx due to either cold war ideological nonsense or dogmatic nonsense - Any serious reader of Capital will clearly see that this work lacks the politicized bias that has infiltrated most writings today. Not only is it truly exceptional, but it is the most important contribution to classical economic thought. I can only write this general review - a concise overview would be, at my level, impossible.

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Great Purchase

The book arrived right on time and the person kept in contact telling me when it would arrive and such. The book came in the right condition (as stated in the description) Great!

A good solid anti-capitalist who thought he was also a scientist

I could write 10 pages on my specific agreements and disagreements with Marx's economics analysis, but this isn't the place for that. I guess more than anything else I've got two lingering reactions. First, I wanna grab Karl Marx by the shoulders, shake him, and tell him that, however much physics envy he's got ("the rate and mass of surplus value"), he cannot make economics into a science, and that even if he could he wouldn't be able to write the authoritative foundational text for that science by just theorizing abstractly without doing any experiments. Second, I want to thank and congratulate him for his automatic, human and above all honest identification with the struggle of the working against the capitalist classes, which I found indescribably refreshing after earning an econ degree from a neoliberal department where the norm was to take the opposite orientation and then clothe it in depoliticizing claims of objectivity.

I was surprised by how often the great anti-capitalist agreed completely with capitalist orthodoxy, for example on the production benefits and human costs of the division of labor or on the need for money as a medium of exchange. I thought Marx was at his best when he was most empirical: detailing the horrors of industrial wage slavery in Dickensian Britain and then tracing the contours of the debates on the Factory Acts, especially when he was righteously lacerating the apologists of the factory owners. And now, just for you, I'm gonna type out the full text of all the parts of this book that deal with Marx's vision for a post-capitalist society, all both of 'em:

p. 515fn33: "The field of application for machinery would therefore be entirely different in a communist society from what it is in a bourgeois society."

p. 739: "In this way he spurs on the development of society's productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle."

And that's it, two sentences in 1,100 pages. So anyone who wants to blame Marx for Stalin must seek their evidence elsewhere, possibly in Bakunin.

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The alienation of the worker from his work

In the first volume of this series, Marx makes probably his most famous observation, when he talks about the alienation of the worker : ".. the worker exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the worker." Therefore, capitalism needed fragmenting the production process in small tasks, that all can be performed by relatively unqualified workers. That is how capitalism differentiates itself from artisanal production, requiring highly skilled persons. Within capitalist production, the worker is not longer selling a finished product, but only his labor time. Thus he becomes a wage-slave.

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