<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Among my favorities
Review: Hillarious, I found only Roger Rabbit, and Attack of the Green Tomato's more intellectual.While I once enjoyed this book,(after all I am V.I Lenin) I have alas out grown it. Unfortunately I most appologize to all those who had to live under communism or who once supported it it sounded so good on paper back in 1917. However it has been and will more likely than not continue to remain a idelogy plague by a lack of practicality(most of the formerly stalinist regimes are now capitalist or semi capitalist(Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam...etc) (North Vietnam being the remaining exception) based on the inherant impracticality of the communist/socialist economic model. Unfortunately, as a system it is prone to abuse by those claiming to represnt the people,(Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung and His Son, Che Guevara etc.)to impose totalitarian controls much like those imposed by Adolf Hitler. Therefore I must conclude that systems which are republican(United States) and parlimentarian (England, Italy, Germany, Japan) create greater access to opportunity and freedom from repression.
Rating:
Summary: Seeing in the Fifth Dimension
Review: I think it was the poor French philosopher Althusser who claimed that Marx had discovered a new continent of thought called "history" equivalent to the continents of thought discovered by Pythagoras (geometry) and Aristotle (science). I would use a different metaphor. It is as if Marx invented a pair of x-ray glasses that allows you the viewer to see the exploitation hidden in every commodity, no matter how beautifully it is packaged. I guess the only book it is really comparable to would be the Bible, edited and created in the year 207 by the North African Roman citizen Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus. On the narrative level the books are quite opposite. The one starts with a single savior who comes to save the world, but ends up being exploited, abused and killed, thus needing saving, the other starts with a class that is exploited, abused and killed, but ends up saving the world. Of the two, Marx is definitely the more optimistic view. But if we could resurrect Marx as we resurrected Jesus, would he still have his optimism?
Rating:
Summary: Seeing in the Fifth Dimension
Review: I think it was the poor French philosopher Althusser who claimed that Marx had discovered a new continent of thought called "history" equivalent to the continents of thought discovered by Pythagoras (geometry) and Aristotle (science). I would use a different metaphor. It is as if Marx invented a pair of x-ray glasses that allows you the viewer to see the exploitation hidden in every commodity, no matter how beautifully it is packaged. I guess the only book it is really comparable to would be the Bible, edited and created in the year 207 by the North African Roman citizen Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus. On the narrative level the books are quite opposite. The one starts with a single savior who comes to save the world, but ends up being exploited, abused and killed, thus needing saving, the other starts with a class that is exploited, abused and killed, but ends up saving the world. Of the two, Marx is definitely the more optimistic view. But if we could resurrect Marx as we resurrected Jesus, would he still have his optimism?
Rating:
Summary: Surprising
Review: I was greatly surprised to find that Communism and Socialism are not discussed in Capital, volume 1. This leads me to believe that the most vehement criticisms of this book are by people who haven't read it. I am not by any means a communist, but I found this book to be an excellent description of capitalism. Since we are still living in a capitalist system, much of what Marx says is still relavent today, for example, his analysis on how capitalism exerts continious pressure to lengthen the work day. I regularly read the Economist and found Marx's criticism of the magazine entertaining. It is worth knowing, for example, that the Economist opposed shortening the work day of CHILDREN to 10 hours. In another fascinating section, Marx uses the depopolation of Ireland based on the Potato Famine and the resulting land grab by the rich to disprove Malthus' theory on population. He proves how, despite losing half of its population to famine and emigration, poverty continued to rise, and the rich continued to get richer. He ends the chapter on this prophetic note: "The accumulation with the Irish in America keeps pace with the accumulation of rents in Ireland. The Irishman, banished by the sheep and the ox, reappears on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian. And there a young but gigantic republic rises, more and more threateningly, to face the old queen of the waves."
Rating: 
Summary: How Many Stars Do You Give to a Discredited Classic?
Review: I was greatly surprised to find that the words "Communism" and "Socialism" are not even mentioned in Capital, volume 1. This leads me to believe that the most vehement criticisms of this book are by people who haven't read it. I am not by any means a communist, but I found this book to be an excellent description of capitalism. Since we are still living in a capitalist system, much of what Marx says is still relevant today, for example, his analysis on how capitalism exerts continuous pressure to lengthen the work day. I regularly read the Economist and found Marx's criticism of the magazine entertaining. It is worth knowing, for example, that the Economist opposed shortening the work day of children to 10 hours. In another fascinating section, Marx uses the depopulation of Ireland based on the Potato Famine and the resulting land grab by the rich to disprove Malthus' theory on population. He proved how, contrary to what Malthus predicted, despite losing half of its population to famine and emigration, poverty continued to rise, and the rich continued to get richer. He ends the chapter on this prophetic note: "The accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace with the accumulation of rents in Ireland. The Irishman, banished by the sheep and the ox, reappears on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian. And there a young but gigantic republic rises, more and more threateningly, to face the old queen of the waves."
Rating:
Summary: A good read for his time and for ours
Review: I would think that Marx has had both good and bad rep and that his detractors and fans have taken his legacy further than it deserved. So how should he be viewed? I submit that there are 4 ways to do so and all of them are mutually important. They are 1) Economic, 2) Intellectual, 3) Political and 4) Moral. Marx based his economic views on the premise that all value of a good produced comes from the labor that goes into it. Intuitively this seems wrong. What of the capital, management, demand (by the way Marx does not like the idea of supply and demand either) etc. Our experience shows that all of these and more play a role in determining what value a thing has. Iteratively the Marxist model of economy then suffers from its imperfect premise. His contention of lack of sustainable profits etc make sense if you agree with his premise but that is not how it shapes out in the modern World. All in all it seems that Marx misses the point about how economy works, and given his incredible intelligence, you wonder why. I think the reason is in the intellectual workings of his mind. Now it appears that most of human experience happens in shades of gray or on a spectrum. Very few things actually are definite "this or that". This is particularly true of psychology, sociology and also economics. Perhaps the very fact that so many variables come to bear on any given situation that it would be impossible to reproduce that situation again reliably. Hence much of these fields are understood along a spectrum and minor variation in observation is to be expected from event to event and from time to time. Unfortunately many people tend to think of the World as an absolute. For this, against that, regardless of the circumstances (abortion, death penalty, taxes etc come to mind). Marx takes the notion of value of labor from Adam Smith and particularly David Ricardo and fixates upon it as the only determinant of value of a good. Intellectually it boxes him in an inflexible position where he has to stick to his position. Eventually this inflexibility dooms him. Marx built upon his economic position to develop a political scenario that just did not happen - not sustainably. I think here the folly is not that the position was wrong but rather that when he makes his predictions: "....exploiters will be expropriated ...", he never says how it would come about. This would not be so bad if more of his writings actually had some sort of road map of how you get to this utopia, but they don't. Finally, is he as bad as I have made him out to be? Well, you be the judge. This is a man writing at the tail end of the initial experience of the industrial revolution. He devotes a large part of Capital to vivid descriptions of young children being dragged out of bed at 2 and 3 in the morning to work in horrible factories, of starving mothers giving up their children to horrendous working conditions in phosphorus match factories where they would die within a few years or were horribly afflicted, of terrible lung diseases in potters or resistance to reducing the average work day to a mere 18 hours. He sees all these and cries out. What follows may be flawed but is grounded in a deep human sympathy. And his experience resonates today with us when we think that perhaps the working poor ought to at least get a living wage, or people must not have to make a decision between rent and medicines and children ought not to die because access of healthcare was not affordable.
Rating:
Summary: Tough but worthwhile
Review: Marx's CAPITAL is frequently condemned by people who've never read it, and lauded by other people who don't fully understand it. I've read it and I don't think I fully understand it, but the main points of the text are pretty clear; Marx drills them into the reader as he unfolds his theory of the basis of capitalism. First, a note on what CAPITAL is not. It is not a "communist" tract, though it is a foundation for communist thought. Marx follows two main trains of thought -- the first is observational, the second diagnostic. He explains how capitalism works, and why it works that way. Disagreeable as some of his ideas may be, they cannot be brushed away by citing the examples of Stalin and Pol Pot to discredit them. Unlike the typical Communist dictator, Marx was a hard-working scholar, a clear thinker, a fundamentally honest writer. His familiarity with the whole spectrum of economic and philosophical writings that preceded him is unquestionable, and CAPITAL is probably more impressive to a reader who's read THE WEALTH OF NATIONS (Adam Smith), if nothing else. The capitalism of Marx's time (mid-19th century) had dismal effects on the "proletariat" or working-class, and CAPITAL cannot be fully appreciated without some knowledge of how England, the most industrialized nation in the world, looked at that period of history. Charles Dickens is one writer who "exposed" the condition of the poor, in a more acceptable (though no less wordy) fashion it seems. CAPITAL is certainly an important book and it is not the unreadable monstrosity it's reputed to be. It is repetitious, but usually the repetition includes some new twist as Marx proceeds from one aspect of his theory to the next. The purpose of the book was to establish a scientific basis for his understanding of capitalism, so Marx employs numerous algebraic equations that might scare readers away at first. They are not complicated, however, nor are they really "mathematical" so much as illustrative of abstract economic processes. One quickly grows accustomed to them; I personally find them amusing. Marx's book is also a polemical text, and he injects some bitter wit and just plain nastiness into his analysis. Either he couldn't restrain himself, or it's a rhetorical device, but whatever the case, CAPITAL contains some very interesting screeds and some very memorable caricatures of capitalists. Overall a powerful book and one that promotes greater understanding of the forces that shape our world even today.
Rating: 
Summary: My "real" review + response
Review: One can see that this book is worthless when, in the first few pages, Marx says something along the lines of "If an amount of corn changes for a quantity of eggs, then the value of that quantity of corn equals the value of the eggs". There is actually a double inequality of value, as the marginalist revolution proved Marx's theory of surplus value is wrong on a number of counts. Neo Marxist John Roemer has pointed out that this was a mathematical trick. Purchase of goods generally happens prior to the time when they are employed in production. Hence, when value is expressed in terms of units of labor, the fact that an economy is expanding (as it was when Marx wrote this text) will show that one recieved more units in the present than they paid in the past of whatever commodity value is expressed it. The main flaw of this text is the fact that interest may be justified on account of time preference. This can be found in Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk's Capital and Interest, the classic critique (absolute destrcution) of Marx. Now, on to the response to the reader from Dulles. Can the reader from Dulles read? I never implied that Marx lived in the 18th century. My point was that he relied on the objectivist view of value propagated by the classical school, originating in the 18th century. I think my statement "Back then, dead white males such as Smith and Ricardo" should have tipped you off to that (Okay, okay, Ricardo wrote in the 19th century). Equally confusing is your notion that I claimed the Spanish Dominicans wrote about the growth of large corporations. I actually said "spanish economists of Centuries earlier who disproved the so called 'value paradox'?" Being so ignorant of economics, I always thought the value paradox referred to why a useful good like bread cost less than a frivolous one such as diamonds, not the growth of large corporations. But, I must confess, in my haste to be clever, I overstated the contributions of the Spanish Scholastics. While they introduced subjectivist value theory, they didn't actually solve the value paradox. But don't be so quick to call Marx a genius.While his views certainly represent the logical culmination of the classical school, there was other, more advanced economics that he could have learned from at the time. Hermann Heinrich Gossen, a Prussian economist writing around the same time as Marx elucidated the law of diminishing marginal utility in his 1854 book "The Development of the Laws of Exchange among Men and of the Consequent Rules of Human Action". I would also like to point out another foible of yours I find funny. My user name is clearly "Walt Byars" , however, you consistently spell my last name "Bryars". Does it make sense for you to make fun of me for saying Marx lived in the wrong century (which I didn't) when it could easily be a single letter typo? The reason wrote such a sarcastic review is because I such took pride in a witty comment I had made immediately before. A leftist I knew mentioned that capitalism was "reactionary", so I made the brilliant counter - "Which is more reactionary, The Laor theory of Value of the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility?" and "The productivity Theory of interest or the Positive Theory of Capital"?
Rating:
Summary: One of the most influential books ever
Review: The Capital, written in three volumes by Karl Marx himself and, after his death, by his friend Friedrich Engels, and totalling some 3.000 pages, is the work of a man who surpassed all established standards of his time in what regards the multifaceted knowledge he acquired in many fields and, more important, trough the influence it had over millions of peoples troughout the world, whatever their position in the social spectrum. Of the monumental book and of its author it could be said that not a single human being in the years to come, wherever he/she lived, would escape (for better or for worse) unscathed from what is written in the book. For it inaugurated a new era in the relationship between men of all social conditions in the whole world and in years to come. It is the book where all the reasons for the downfall of capitalism in the end of the XIX century are pinpointed with a precise and polemical style, trademarks of the German author, and where, for the very first time in the story of History, historical movements are treated coherently as the necessary (deterministic) events of the social movements of humankind since the beginning of civilization, something called historical or dialectical determinism by the author, who borrowed and inverted many concepts from the German philosopher Hegel. Notwhitdstanding the importance of the book to West and East culture, this is not an easy book to read, given the intricacy of the subjects treated and also its lenght. For me the most attractive feature of the book is the disdain Marx had for anyone who did not agree with him, unabashedly fighting against Political Economists and Historians of all ideological collors. Despite all the rabid polemic, what remains after almost 150 years of the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital is the collapse of the communist world and the strenght of Capitalism, who learned the lessons of survival better than its ideological counterpart.
Rating:
Summary: Reactionary Nonsense!!!
Review: These reactionary socialists want us to continue living in the 18th century!!! Back then, dead white males such as Smith and Ricardo brainwashed the enslaved human race into believing that they exchanged a good for another good whose usefulness was exactly equal to the good you gave up!!! And why would these dead Anglo Saxon males have you believe that the price of a good had nothing to do with its usefulness? why would they ignore the slightly less-white spanish economists of Centuries earlier who disproved the so called "value paradox"? Maybe it was because they were RACIST ANGLOPHILES of a less enlightened time!! Bring your mind into the 21st century, and don't read reactionary white males like Marx who would like to keep in in the 18th!! Luckily, the Anglo-American patriarchy has been unable to completely supress the views of Bohm-Bawerk, Fetter and Von mises! Although they tried, they tried. These parasites will try as hard as possible to hang on to their reactionary status quo! Too bad there are inherent contradictions in these irrational ideologues' systems! These ridiculous views gave rise to the Nazis of Germany, which forced the Austrian Subjectivists to evacuate to America!! Now, they will not keep the eyes of the common man blind to ideas such as "time preference" that challenge their traditionalist patriarchal hegemony!! edit: This is in reply to Keith Restrepo from NY's positive review. He states: "BUT PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OVERLOOKED BY MARX'S CRITICS: When the Russian radical party led by Trotsky sent delegates to Marx's front door with ideas for a Communist Revolution, he slammed his fists down on the table and totally rejected the idea. He knew it would not work especially if they skipped over Capitalism in the process, and he told them that one day they will have to become capitalist anyway, and start all over again. Was he wrong? " I bet the reason that Marx (Died in 1883) rejected Trotsky (born in 1879) was because he could have been no more than a little toddler when he visited him....either that or the story isn't true.
<< 1 >>
| 
