31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Marx's true theory, July 21, 1997
By A Customer
Karl Marx. His ideas have been interpreted and reinterpreted time and time again. Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Luxembourg, Debs, and countless others have used him, some of them more faithfully than others. Most people see Marx as the older Capital Marx. Yet these manuscripts show his true spirit, his devotion to mankind, and why democracy cannot be accomplished without communism. Marx here convincingly shows why capitalism alienates man from man and why equality cannot be accomplished under it. These texts are easily ten times more important than Capital. You can see the youth in this book, the yearning for a better society, and a man with the ideas to do so. If you are opposed to communism, read this book before making any more denouncements. If you believe, this book will show you that Marx was truly for mankind, that he had very little to do with the so-called communist countries today. Also included are a work by Engels attacking the other forms of socialism, all of which are undemocratic socialism-from-above. Finally, the Communist Manifesto is included, for those who want to see a concise outline of what communism is really about
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Blueprint for Economic Democracy, October 9, 2005
Many people have sounded the Death Knell of Marx with the fall of the Eastern Bloc in the 80's and 90's. Many who have been interested in Marx read 'The Communist Manifesto' an admitedly dated work and never go beyond it. It must be remembered the Manifesto was a simplified form of practical ideas printed to drive the working class to action.
Marx was a student of Hegel, a notoriously difficult and deep philosopher to understand, but it shaped Marx to a degree that few understand. Marx was more than an economic philoshpher, he was an astute observer of psychology, sociology and anthropology. All of his philosophy shines in clarity in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
Of all of Marx's works we see most the thesis and theory devised from his understanding of the human condition through historical analysis. This work is the most accessable, easily understood work by this great thinker. If you have the desire to truly understand a major influence for the framework of many socialized democracies of modern Europe, the drives for nationhood and equality that rocked Europe in revolt in 1848 or desire to truly understand the whole theory of Marx this small book is an absolute must.
Marx was a both a materialist and process theorist in philosophical terms. His later socio-econmic works were a sort of working blueprint based upon the historical, psyhcological, sociolgoical, economic and anthropologic theories laid down in this work.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A primer for understanding today's global economic mess, May 22, 2009
Social theorists, Marxists among them, often make a sharp distinction between Marx's early work, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and everything that came after The German Ideology. In this view, the early Marx was a social philosopher who had not yet promulgated a method or constructed a coherent conceptual framework, while his later work, especially the first volume of Capital, escaped the soft amorphousness of social philosophy and gave us rigorous social and economic science through application of historical materialism. There may be merit to this distinction, but I think that, at best, it is vastly overdrawn.
Either explicitly or by unmistakable implication, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts give us nearly all the basic and most compelling ideas that provide the foundation for Marx's later work. The objectively determined antagonism between capital and labor is explained with clarity and force. The fact that capital and labor constitute classes in a macro-level sense, rather than through reference to characteristics of individuals or status groups seems undeniable. The structural determination of behavior takes the focus off ostensibly rapacious capitalists and laboring class victims, making notions like "good guys," "bad guys," and even free will seem obsolete and beside the point. Determinism is the watchword.
Perhaps the most insightful and interesting observation in the Manuscripts is Marx's conclusion that the more workers produce the stronger the hand of capital. The more productive the worker the more he undercuts his position with respect to capital. Technological innovations, for example, make workers more productive, but they also reduce the demand for labor and reduce labor costs.
When Marx wrote the Economic and Philosophical manuscripts he had not yet made the distinction between labor and labor power, and the commoditization of labor was less clear. Furthermore, he had not yet augmented use value and exchange value with his own notion of value, measurable units which could be objectively quantified in terms of labor power. The distinction between labor and labor power, however, seems obvious even if unstated in the Manuscripts, and Marx's elaborated account of value has always seemed to generate confusion, raising all sorts of measurement problems which seem unlikely to be solved. Thorstein Veblen, generally sympathetic toward Marx's work, dismissed the labor theory of value as unduly metaphysical; probably as good a characterization as any.
To his credit, toward the end of the Manuscripts, Marx engages in an hypothetical discussion of something he calls "primitive communism." This is a world fraught with envy and resentment, the product of a premature effort to produce a genuinely communist society. This illustration was used to emphasize Marx's admission that he did not know what form a genuinely communist or socialist society would take. Instead, this was something that would have to emerge historically.
At the risk of gross over-simplification, I'll offer a Marxist explanation of the economic mess we share today: too many laboring people make too little money and are forced to rely on credit offered by the capitalist class. When borrowers are completely tapped out, unable to pay what they've borrowed, the system collapses. Fundamentally, this is not because loans were unduly risky, but because most people had so little that risky loans were essential to maintaining the bare rudiments of a lower-middle class life style.
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