Capital: An Abridged Edition (World's Classics) [ABRIDGED] (Paperback)

~ (Author), (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This is the only unabridged edition to take into account the whole of Capital. It offers virtually all of Volume 1, which Marx himself published in 1867, excerpts from a new translation of "The Result of the Immediate Process Production," and a selection of key chapters from Volume 3, which Engels published in 1895.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Product Details

• Paperback: 454 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Abridged edition (April 27, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192831224
• ISBN-13: 978-0192831224
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #911,195 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #77 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Criticism & Theory > Marxist

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stuck reviewing an abridged edition, May 8, 2002

By	Christopher D. Wright "redtwister" (Baltimore) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

...P>The key to grappling with Vol. 2 involves two major problems.

First, Marx took capital as irrational, and the capital-labor relation as an anatagonistic relation of domination. So part of the problem with Capital involves explaining how capitalism can even function in the first place. This helps us to grapple with Marx's discussion of circulation sans crisis.

Secondly, think of department one and department two as capital and labor respectively and it makes a lot more sense. As with Vols. 1 and 3, every aspect of Capital is steeped in a description of the antagonistic social relations (class struggle) and the forms in which they appear (form here means 'mode of existence', the way in which the antagonistic social relations make themselves apparent to us.)

The reason that Marx investigates the forms of the underlying social relations has to do with Marx's conception of science. Marx uses the term science to denote thought which critiques, which does not assume that essence and appearance (form and content) mirror each other, but are mediated and therefore distorted and not directly perceived.

As for the people who continue to insist that Marx wrote an alternate economics textbook, wake up. The book is not about economics per se, since Marx felt that the separation of the economic from the political, legal, artistic, etc. was a specific manifestation of the capital-labor relation. He critiques this separation and does so, not through a transhistorical set of 'laws' (as so many claim), but through a critique of bourgeois society's own understanding of itself (most prominently for Marx, via political economy.) For Marx, the 'laws' of capital are the forms of motion of the class struggle, not transhistorical, disembodied rules.

A complete argument can hardly be made here, but do yourself a favor if you wish to make a comment on or engage with Marx: read what Marx says. Like any other worthwhile intellectual, Marx takes a lot of effort (an acquaintance with Hegel helps a lot). Unlike most, Marx really was serious, even (especially) in relation to Das Kapital, that the point is not to understand the world, but to change it. Theory can never resolve the contradictions of the practical world, only revolutionary practice, the self-activity of the working class (most of us), can produce a society based on the 'free association of producers', in which 'the freedom of each is the precondition of the freedom of all'. Hardly the vision of a totalitarian.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a serious analisys of economic relation, September 17, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Capital (Hardcover)

very important words over the economic vision over english production mode in the last century and your generic influence in future world. many economics appointments of the industrial world, statistics and a great concepcion of many categories of the political economy

0 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great book, February 6, 1999

By A Customer

it reveals how capitalism work