Capital : A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics) (Volume 2) | 
| Author: Karl Marx
Creators: Ernest Mandel, David Fernbach
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 421704
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 624
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0140445692
Dewey Decimal Number: 335.41
EAN: 9780140445695
ASIN: 0140445692
Publication Date: March 1, 1993
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Product Description
Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the only volume to be completed and edited by Marx himself, avoids some of the mistakes that have marred earlier versions and seeks to do justice to the literary qualities of the work. The introduction is by Ernest Mandel, author of Late Capitalism, one of the only comprehensive attempts to develop the theoretical legacy of Capital.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 Must read July 24, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Although Marx's Capital remains a difficult read, it is essential for understanding the current economic mess, in particular the growth of unproductive speculative capital. With speculative debt reaching nearly ten times the level of the world's productive economy (GDP), it appears that the barons of capitalism have sealed their own fate. Find out why.
A good solid anti-capitalist who thought he was also a scientist May 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I could write 10 pages on my specific agreements and disagreements with Marx's economics analysis, but this isn't the place for that. I guess more than anything else I've got two lingering reactions. First, I wanna grab Karl Marx by the shoulders, shake him, and tell him that, however much physics envy he's got ("the rate and mass of surplus value"), he cannot make economics into a science, and that even if he could he wouldn't be able to write the authoritative foundational text for that science by just theorizing abstractly without doing any experiments. Second, I want to thank and congratulate him for his automatic, human and above all honest identification with the struggle of the working against the capitalist classes, which I found indescribably refreshing after earning an econ degree from a neoliberal department where the norm was to take the opposite orientation and then clothe it in depoliticizing claims of objectivity.
I was surprised by how often the great anti-capitalist agreed completely with capitalist orthodoxy, for example on the production benefits and human costs of the division of labor or on the need for money as a medium of exchange. I thought Marx was at his best when he was most empirical: detailing the horrors of industrial wage slavery in Dickensian Britain and then tracing the contours of the debates on the Factory Acts, especially when he was righteously lacerating the apologists of the factory owners. And now, just for you, I'm gonna type out the full text of all the parts of this book that deal with Marx's vision for a post-capitalist society, all both of 'em:
p. 515fn33: "The field of application for machinery would therefore be entirely different in a communist society from what it is in a bourgeois society."
p. 739: "In this way he spurs on the development of society's productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle."
And that's it, two sentences in 1,100 pages. So anyone who wants to blame Marx for Stalin must seek their evidence elsewhere, possibly in Bakunin.
Essential January 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I think one of the great misconceptions about Capital is that it is dry and difficult. Many people seem to think that reading it would be a chore. Not true. If you were to read it on your own or in a study group, you'd find it funny, engaging and not all that hard. It assumes perhaps a small amount of understanding of classical political economy (Malthus, Smith, Ricardo, etc) but not much. I'd say if you're going to read it, read it in a group, because some of the ideas need to be worked out, but four friends of average intelligence can understand this book with a minimal level of effort.
That said, is it worth it for you to take the time? I'd say so. While I may think a number of Marx's ideas are just plain wrong and the ideas of many of those who followed in his footsteps to be even more misguided and destructive, I still think this is worth the time. Besides being a book by the man who has influenced world events more than anyone else in the last two hundred years, it is also just very well written and a goddamn good, and important, read.
A friend of mine once described Capital by saying ,"this is literature". It definitely is, with all the complications that come with that classification. This book does not explain the workings of a capitalist economy. It is not a science textbook. It is a brilliant work that is part flawed history, part political theory and part a discussion of classical political economy. Everyone should read it, but no one should take it all at face value.
Doors of Perception January 23, 2007
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
If :
- Your mum has taught you lots of valuable things (eat your vegetables, be nice to old people and little dogs, don't be late to school, keep a clean nose) but she was never really able to explain why you had to WORK for a living - instead of, you know, just living;
- Your teachers packed your head full with all kinds of useful knowledge (about prepositions and adverbs, mineralogy and astrophysics, the reproductive organs of plants, x+2-y=0) but they never told you how exactly PROFITS are made - and why anybody would want to make them anyway;
- Your friends and lovers can spend hours yakking about various interesting topics (the latest music machine, videogames, designer shoes, imitation leather sofas, blockbuster movies, pink underwear and cherry flavoured bubble-gum) but they call you a bore and a nitpick whenever you wonder why you're all surrounded by so many COMMODITIES and publicity ads promising you bigger, better and faster useless things.
- You often have the impression that some greater truth is lacking in your life (and you've tried all the legal/illegal drugs, exciting TV shows, gurus and psychoanalysts, help-yourself books and bestsellers about kid sorcerers)...
...Then the time may have come to have a long talk with good old Uncle Karl - the black sheep of the social sciences, the guy nobody likes to mention at social occasions (except in the form of a joke: "have you heard the one about Karl Marx in Las Vegas?"), the most misquoted and misinterpreted modern thinker.
In "Capital", he kindly invites you to break on through to the other side (that's how countercultural he was) and check out what's really happening behind the glitzy appearances of everyday life. You don't even have to be a genius to understand him (it will be enough if you can count to ten without choking). And you might be surprised about how obvious some things will seem after he explains to you about the cage you're sitting in.
Of course, mum will probably be broken-hearted and fear that you'll join the next anarcho-pinko-terrorist organization down the block. Your teachers might refer to a vast list of successful anti-Marx books and charity organizations. And your friends and lovers will find you an even greater bore than before.
Fascinating, Intelligent, and Obsolete. November 22, 2005
12 out of 19 found this review helpful
"When Volume 1 of Capital was first published, capitalist industry, though predominant in a few Western European countries, still appeared as an isolated island circled by a sea of independent farmers and handicraftsmen which covered the whole world, including the greater part even of Europe," writes Ernest Mandel in his introduction to 'Capital'.
How did we advance to the present day?
An *economic* text, this book is considerably distinct from much of Marx's preceding output. Capital stands a work of theoretical economics similar to the output of David Ricardo in many ways -- calls for action, the nature of the state, and philosophical concepts are given little treatment throughout the 2,500 pages. Marx *did* write about ideas like commodity production, use-values and exchange-values, theories of surplus-value, crisis theory, organic and technical compositions of capital, the transformation problem, changes in the rates of profit, and much more. It is an analysis of *capital*, and hence, *capitalism.* There is little information about the mechanics of a post-capitalist society. After investing the time to read it, readers will be baffled when critics argue "50 bujillion people DIED as a result of 'Capital!!!'" (Marx died in 1883) -- "therefore Marx is wrong!" To be objective, a thinker can imagine the absurdity of blaming World War One, slavery in America, and imperialism on 'The Wealth of Nations'.
The volumes of this massive economic text were published successively in 1867, 1885, and 1894. Most economists feel marginalism has rendered it obsolete. At the end of the 19th century, Bohm-Bawerk argued since production occurs in a roundabout way, part of the product Marx attributed to workers needs to be employed to finance the roundaboutness. Workers would obtain the whole of what the produced only if production was instantaneous; as a result, interest must be paid no matter who owned the capital.
This is a brilliant work. The tough part is understanding the meaning of Marx's terms, which was especially difficult for me, learning the neo-classical viewpoint first. The first chapters took a few days to understand with confidence. After that, the sheer length of the text is formidable, though rewarding and absolutely fascinating.
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