Praise for the contents of The Best of Karl Marx:
“[T]he genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind.”
~ V.I. Lenin“Marx and Engels, the great teachers of the proletariat, were the first to explain that, contrary to the opinion of the utopian Socialists, Socialism was not the invention of dreamers (utopians), but the inevitable outcome of the development of modern capitalist society. They showed that the capitalist system would fall, just as serfdom had fallen, and that capitalism was creating its own gravediggers in the person of the proletariat.”
~ Joseph Stalin“I must admit that Marx was right when he sketched out the idea that only when a truly rational, just and equitable social regime exists on this earth, will humankind have left prehistory behind.”
~ Fidel Castro“The theory of Marx…is universally applicable. We should regard it not as a dogma, but as a guide to action.”
~ Mao Zedong“The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought.”
~ Che Guevara“I cannot ask of others what I cannot do myself, but this is not just about me, this is a collective effort. Karl Marx said that history is made by leaders but within the framework of the conditions that history imposes on them.”
~ Hugo Chavez“The economically-minded reader today will likely recognize the obsolescence of Marx’s theoretical progression from the Labor Theory of Value to revolutionary socialism. The resulting doctrines require an alternative economic universe in which marginalist solutions to a theory of value are never discovered, and where attempts to deploy a political reordering of society around the doctrine of surplus value proceed as if Marx had actually succeeded in delivering his promised and declaimed proofs of its viability. They nonetheless offer a textual glimpse into the chasm that emerged between Marxist doctrine and the mainline of economic thinking over the last 150 years.”
~ Phillip W. MagnessKarl Marx (1818-1883) was a German socialist philosopher and economist. A frequent political exile for his revolutionary activism, Marx eventually settled in London and established himself as a pamphleteer and organizer for the International Workingmen’s Association. He composed his main economic treatise, Capital, there under the patronage of his friend and frequent collaborator Friedrich Engels. Marx’s other major works include the Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and the posthumously published Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie.
His reputation and influence expanded rapidly in the twentieth century, primarily due to V.I. Lenin’s adoption of Marxism as the foundational doctrine of the Soviet Union. Today, Marx is considered the preeminent theorist of the socialist-communist tradition in economics and political philosophy.
Phillip W. Magness is an economic historian specializing in the 19th century United States. He is the author of numerous works on the political and economic dimensions of slavery, the history of taxation, and the history of economic thought.
The American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was founded in 1933 as the first independent voice for sound economics in the United States. Today it publishes ongoing research, hosts educational programs, publishes books, sponsors interns and scholars, and is home to the world-renowned Bastiat Society and the highly respected Sound Money Project. The American Institute for Economic Research is a 501c3 public charity.
