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14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good read for his time and for ours, October 29, 2003
I would think that Marx has had both good and bad rep and that his detractors and fans have taken his legacy further than it deserved. So how should he be viewed? I submit that there are 4 ways to do so and all of them are mutually important. They are 1) Economic, 2) Intellectual, 3) Political and 4) Moral. Marx based his economic views on the premise that all value of a good produced comes from the labor that goes into it. Intuitively this seems wrong. What of the capital, management, demand (by the way Marx does not like the idea of supply and demand either) etc. Our experience shows that all of these and more play a role in determining what value a thing has. Iteratively the Marxist model of economy then suffers from its imperfect premise. His contention of lack of sustainable profits etc make sense if you agree with his premise but that is not how it shapes out in the modern World. All in all it seems that Marx misses the point about how economy works, and given his incredible intelligence, you wonder why. I think the reason is in the intellectual workings of his mind. Now it appears that most of human experience happens in shades of gray or on a spectrum. Very few things actually are definite "this or that". This is particularly true of psychology, sociology and also economics. Perhaps the very fact that so many variables come to bear on any given situation that it would be impossible to reproduce that situation again reliably. Hence much of these fields are understood along a spectrum and minor variation in observation is to be expected from event to event and from time to time. Unfortunately many people tend to think of the World as an absolute. For this, against that, regardless of the circumstances (abortion, death penalty, taxes etc come to mind). Marx takes the notion of value of labor from Adam Smith and particularly David Ricardo and fixates upon it as the only determinant of value of a good. Intellectually it boxes him in an inflexible position where he has to stick to his position. Eventually this inflexibility dooms him. Marx built upon his economic position to develop a political scenario that just did not happen - not sustainably. I think here the folly is not that the position was wrong but rather that when he makes his predictions: "....exploiters will be expropriated ...", he never says how it would come about. This would not be so bad if more of his writings actually had some sort of road map of how you get to this utopia, but they don't. Finally, is he as bad as I have made him out to be? Well, you be the judge. This is a man writing at the tail end of the initial experience of the industrial revolution. He devotes a large part of Capital to vivid descriptions of young children being dragged out of bed at 2 and 3 in the morning to work in horrible factories, of starving mothers giving up their children to horrendous working conditions in phosphorus match factories where they would die within a few years or were horribly afflicted, of terrible lung diseases in potters or resistance to reducing the average work day to a mere 18 hours. He sees all these and cries out. What follows may be flawed but is grounded in a deep human sympathy. And his experience resonates today with us when we think that perhaps the working poor ought to at least get a living wage, or people must not have to make a decision between rent and medicines and children ought not to die because access of healthcare was not affordable.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, December 10, 2011
This review is from: Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production: The Process of Capitalist Production (New World Paperbacks) (Paperback)
I am not exactly sure how to sum up a book like this. I put months of effort into it and got back a huge cache of historical, economic information that I am still synthesizing. What is Capitalism? Why did it arise and how? What was the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism like and what is the nature of the workers struggle and alienation? I think I will need to read it again and next time I will use David Harvey's video guide to help me focus more. I might also self-abridge my copy next time because there was much in this edition that I think is no longer needed. Maybe I will pick up an abridgement and compare it. This is an incredibly important work and it is a tragedy that so few people read it. As with many works from the 19th century I start and never finish, I have to blame our education system. We are just not prepared to read works this dense. I would say that in general, this book is a lot like Algebra was for me. It starts easy and fun and then gets hard and stays that way for a long time. If, however, you stay with it, you will be able to understand how it ends and it ends beautifully. This book and its ideas are not outdated and have not been superseded by anything that has come later. It is still incredibly relevant and the reader will recognize the laws and tactics of capitalism today as being the same as the laws and strategies of capitalism at the height of the industrial revolution. Read it, but use a guide or use David Harvey's videos which I did not discover until I was half way through, sadly.
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16 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Seeing in the Fifth Dimension, June 17, 2004
I think it was the poor French philosopher Althusser who claimed that Marx had discovered a new continent of thought called "history" equivalent to the continents of thought discovered by Pythagoras (geometry) and Aristotle (science). I would use a different metaphor. It is as if Marx invented a pair of x-ray glasses that allows you the viewer to see the exploitation hidden in every commodity, no matter how beautifully it is packaged. I guess the only book it is really comparable to would be the Bible, edited and created in the year 207 by the North African Roman citizen Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus. On the narrative level the books are quite opposite. The one starts with a single savior who comes to save the world, but ends up being exploited, abused and killed, thus needing saving, the other starts with a class that is exploited, abused and killed, but ends up saving the world. Of the two, Marx is definitely the more optimistic view. But if we could resurrect Marx as we resurrected Jesus, would he still have his optimism?
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