Das Kapital, Gateway Edition (Skeptical Reader)
by Karl Marx
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Book Summary Information
Author: Karl MarxEditor: Friedrich Engels
Introduction: Serge L. Levitsky
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Abridged
Published: 1996-07-01
ISBN: 089526711X
Number of pages: 356
Publisher: Gateway Editions
Book Reviews of Das Kapital, Gateway Edition (Skeptical Reader)
Book Review: YES! THE ULTIMATE BOOK ON TODAYS' CAPITALIST WOES
Summary: 5 Stars
Make no doubt about it, folks. The class struggle is every bit as relevant today as in the late 19th/early 20th century, and definitely much more valid than in the middle 20th century.
I was born in 1982 in a small Oregon town, with a poor mother and middle-class grandparents. As such I have seen the lives of both the "low" and the "medium." Also, during my young life I have witnessed jobs disappearing, other jobs spring up with lower wages, the diminishing of unions, cutting of education, social services, and public transportation. My grandparents recently sold their moderately affluent estate and moved into a retirement apartment. All of these forces, the basic impoverishment of the working and middle classes, has driven my recent political thinking.
Karl Marx, years ago, gave a description of why this might be happening. He followed the most moral and meritocratic theory for wealth and value: an object is worth as much as the effort it takes to make.
Wealth, through the capitalist system of employment and profit, accumulates more and more wealth in the hands of bourgeois company owners. "Petty-bourgeois" owners, i.e. the mom-and-pop stores and small business in general, of which my grandpa, a dentist, was a part of, are being driven under by corporate chain competition in retail. As fewer and fewer people actually control and govern the "means of production" through ever more disconnected social relations, something is going to have to give soon.
Modern corporate capitalism is more concerned with profit than human rights, and will support war, McCarthyism, religious fundamentalism and racism to maintain its power. Not to mention the influence they have on the government both through campaign contributions and bullying ("give us tax credits and support our anti-union activity or we're leaving your state!"). Marx's critique of capitalism is more relevant today than any time recently.
As protection for workers is destroyed, and social support systems go with them, the rich still have hoardes of wealth and power. This wealth needs to be challenged. Those who actually do the work must revolt and seize control of their business and workplace, which is exactly what Marx said in "Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation", Chapter 32 I believe.
This work is totally better than the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Marx wrote the Manifesto at the tender age of 30; later on he began to doubt the authoritarian and statist elements of the Communist program, especially after seeing the Paris Commune. More recently we have discovered that people need some form of incentive to work, even if that incentive does not involve increased rights to ownership, power, or domination over other workers. Socialism is a philosophy that has had its fair share of flaws, not to mention the Lenins and Maos of the world who abused the theory in the same way the Medieval Church abused the teachings of Jesus Christ. But no theory is ever flawless, and socialists should be able to correct their past flaws to account for human nature and "reality." There is no reason to believe that heavy social hierarchy and class division is a necessary evil; workers CAN manage their lives just fine through cooperatives.
Read this book to understand Marx's attack on capitalism's oppressive and exploitative faults, then look around you. If you look carefully you should see evidence of Marxism in the economy all around you. Rather obey the orders of the capitalist tycoons, military-style, or would you rather fight back and overthrow this system in the same manner as if it were a fascist or communist state?
Summary of Das Kapital, Gateway Edition (Skeptical Reader)
"Das Kapital", Karl Marx's masterwork, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth century. From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that in our time dominated half the earth and for half a century kept the world on the brink of war. Even today, one billion Chinese remain in the power of the Marxist system. Yet this important and powerful work has been passed over by many readers frustrated by Marx's difficult style and his preoccupation with nineteenth-century events of little relevance to today's reader. Serge Levitsky presents a new revised version of this masterpiece, carefully translated for the modern reader and abridged to emphasize the political and philosophical core of Marx's work, while trimming away much that is now unimportant. Here then is a fresh and highly readable version of a work whose ideas have influenced the lives of nearly every person alive today.Philosophy Books
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