Das Kapital, Gateway Edition (Skeptical Reader) Paperback – Abridged, July 1, 1996

As a history teacher, it is always nice to get back into the text and re-discover what history is all about. Economic theory is somehting that has eluded me for a long time. This book is outstanding.

A+

I once read that the happiest people on earth about the fall of the Evil Empire in 1991 were Eastern European graduate students who no longer had to pretend to have read this and to have 'worked it in' to their Doctoral Thesis as inspiration.I tried, I really tried. Thick as a brick. Even 'Atlas Shrugged' was a better read. (That doesn't say much good about 'Atlas Shrugged'.) Read 'The Communist Manifesto'; you will get the gist of it.Marx was so lucky to have had Engels as his best friend. Engels, with his endless submissions of anonymous positive and negative reviews, hoodwinked the world for 150 years.Physically this is well made and attractive edition. It looks 'real good' on my bookshelf as long as no one asks too many questions.

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?

Marx got it all wrong. He derives his understanding of economicsnot from the real world, but seemingly out of thin air. His firstreal mistake come on page 3, when he asserts, without any goodreason, that use value can be completely omitted from hisderivation of exchange value. The Austrian school of economics,exemplified by Ludwig vonMises and George Reisman, has shown thatuse value can in fact be quantified, using a principle calledmarginal utility. Not only can use value be quantified, but itis the primary force in determining the market value of goods.The second biggest problem seems to be his treatment of laboras if it were some kind of substance. It may be simply a metaphoron his part, but I get the feeling it isn't. Labor is an action,not a substance intrinsically contained in commodities.Some of his other mistakes, like his treatment of the sourceof property rights, may be excusable considering the time period,when most land could be traced to ownership by right of conquest,but on the whole this book reads like sophistry for a hateredand envy of producers, rather than a scholarly work of economics.

Classical book

very good

Still not an easy read, although immeasurably easier than the original. Highly recommended if you are unwilling, (or unable) to decipher the actual book, and seems to cover everything, in a more understandable prose.

👌

good