<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Stuck reviewing an abridged edition
Review: ...P>The key to grappling with Vol. 2 involves two major problems. First, Marx took capital as irrational, and the capital-labor relation as an anatagonistic relation of domination. So part of the problem with Capital involves explaining how capitalism can even function in the first place. This helps us to grapple with Marx's discussion of circulation sans crisis. Secondly, think of department one and department two as capital and labor respectively and it makes a lot more sense. As with Vols. 1 and 3, every aspect of Capital is steeped in a description of the antagonistic social relations (class struggle) and the forms in which they appear (form here means 'mode of existence', the way in which the antagonistic social relations make themselves apparent to us.) The reason that Marx investigates the forms of the underlying social relations has to do with Marx's conception of science. Marx uses the term science to denote thought which critiques, which does not assume that essence and appearance (form and content) mirror each other, but are mediated and therefore distorted and not directly perceived. As for the people who continue to insist that Marx wrote an alternate economics textbook, wake up. The book is not about economics per se, since Marx felt that the separation of the economic from the political, legal, artistic, etc. was a specific manifestation of the capital-labor relation. He critiques this separation and does so, not through a transhistorical set of 'laws' (as so many claim), but through a critique of bourgeois society's own understanding of itself (most prominently for Marx, via political economy.) For Marx, the 'laws' of capital are the forms of motion of the class struggle, not transhistorical, disembodied rules. A complete argument can hardly be made here, but do yourself a favor if you wish to make a comment on or engage with Marx: read what Marx says. Like any other worthwhile intellectual, Marx takes a lot of effort (an acquaintance with Hegel helps a lot). Unlike most, Marx really was serious, even (especially) in relation to Das Kapital, that the point is not to understand the world, but to change it. Theory can never resolve the contradictions of the practical world, only revolutionary practice, the self-activity of the working class (most of us), can produce a society based on the 'free association of producers', in which 'the freedom of each is the precondition of the freedom of all'. Hardly the vision of a totalitarian.
Rating:
Summary: Stuck reviewing an abridged edition
Review: ...P>The key to grappling with Vol. 2 involves two major problems. First, Marx took capital as irrational, and the capital-labor relation as an anatagonistic relation of domination. So part of the problem with Capital involves explaining how capitalism can even function in the first place. This helps us to grapple with Marx's discussion of circulation sans crisis. Secondly, think of department one and department two as capital and labor respectively and it makes a lot more sense. As with Vols. 1 and 3, every aspect of Capital is steeped in a description of the antagonistic social relations (class struggle) and the forms in which they appear (form here means 'mode of existence', the way in which the antagonistic social relations make themselves apparent to us.) The reason that Marx investigates the forms of the underlying social relations has to do with Marx's conception of science. Marx uses the term science to denote thought which critiques, which does not assume that essence and appearance (form and content) mirror each other, but are mediated and therefore distorted and not directly perceived. As for the people who continue to insist that Marx wrote an alternate economics textbook, wake up. The book is not about economics per se, since Marx felt that the separation of the economic from the political, legal, artistic, etc. was a specific manifestation of the capital-labor relation. He critiques this separation and does so, not through a transhistorical set of 'laws' (as so many claim), but through a critique of bourgeois society's own understanding of itself (most prominently for Marx, via political economy.) For Marx, the 'laws' of capital are the forms of motion of the class struggle, not transhistorical, disembodied rules. A complete argument can hardly be made here, but do yourself a favor if you wish to make a comment on or engage with Marx: read what Marx says. Like any other worthwhile intellectual, Marx takes a lot of effort (an acquaintance with Hegel helps a lot). Unlike most, Marx really was serious, even (especially) in relation to Das Kapital, that the point is not to understand the world, but to change it. Theory can never resolve the contradictions of the practical world, only revolutionary practice, the self-activity of the working class (most of us), can produce a society based on the 'free association of producers', in which 'the freedom of each is the precondition of the freedom of all'. Hardly the vision of a totalitarian.
Rating: 
Summary: A tottally refuted work on economics
Review: Capital, from Karl Marx,has to be respected as a book that moved all the intellectual scenario of the late past century and early twientieth century. But, altough Adam Smith's Wealth of the Nations still is a scientifically and theoretically valid work, the Capital was completelly refuted book (in that Karl Popper's sense). The Capital was based in a deterministic view of world, which was comprensible in that period of history, when the Newton's Science was the gratest scientific achievement. But that determinism was crushed with the advent of Enstein's theory of Relativity, and the most important of all, the advent of Quantum Mechanics, in the early years of this century. In a indirect way, the whole point made by Marx was destroyed: His premise which says that, studying the past, we can predict the future. Appling a method used in the Exact Sciences (inferential-deductive) Marx thought was possible to known the future (the inexorable Communism, coming from the struggle of classes)from simply analising the past, as the mathematics would do with a theorem. Marx viewed Economics as a static system(not the way Smith already viewed the Economics, a century earlier), and the free will as a illusion, since all ideologies was merely a subproduct of particular economic era (again determinism). And the worst of all, the moral fundaments of his revoluttionary ideals was: since we already known that capitalism will be replaced by Communism, one way or another, let's end it ourselves, right now, no matter how much blood we'll provocate. In other words is something like this: If you, my friend, are going to die one day, one way or another, I'll kill you right now! A interesting book, but only as a curiosity (because of his influence) and nothing else. As a economic work, its tottaly refuted for a long time.
Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: it reveals how capitalism work
<< 1 >>
| 
