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Summary: HAVING TROUBLE SLEEPING?
Review: Try reading this thing! Nite, nite, don't let the bedbugs bite
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Summary: From A Young College Student
Review: Well, first off from a college student's point of view this book is a must read for people of my generation to learn from. It is one of the more important philosophical texts.
Many antagonists of social change tend to twist Marx's writings back around on himself and blame him for the deaths of thousands for a prematurely executed plan called modern communism.
The problem is that every major Economic structure in history not only develops economically, it develops socially. It started with Slavery. In Slavery, slaves were the product and Kings and Emperors went broke and powerless trying to buy more and more. Such examples: "Rome burned." In Feudalism, land was the sought after product, but conquerors became poor when they could no longer pay the artisans "pre-bourgeois" to make the weapons to conquer the land. So Capitalism came next in Europe. The idea is to sell a product in a macro version of a local marketplace, cutthroat competition, to sell the best product, at the lowest price. With the ideals of the money-saving, hard working protestant immigrants to the New World this was beautiful. And it worked even better in the U.S. after Europe was destroyed after WWII. Now the problem with Capitalism is that when competition begins to diminish, price-fixing and crummy product surmount to an economic collapse. Thank about it. Fifty years ago, there were over 50 different American car companies. Now there are only a handful.
LET ME EXPLAIN WHAT IS WRONG WITH WHAT HAPPENED IN RUSSIA. Every economic structure comes with it a social structure and a social responsibility. Nowadays, we no longer have slavery in this country. We may have defacto segregation but we are responsible enough not to keep people in bondage. With the "baby steps" you eventually, be it a thousand years from now, a more utopian like society. This is when the ideals of Communism or whatever it may be will take shape because humans will no longer be as self-gratifying as they were a thousand years before. It is the truth, and it is inevitable. We think now of it as something we don't want, but in the future if all goes well it will be second nature to everyone. An economic structure only works if it has a social responsibility with it. In our modern day society the dwindle of what is left of this responsibility is our DEMOCRACY. Unfortunately much of modern day capitalism has been stripped of democracy and become it's own viable entity, in which the benefits cannot be felt in underdeveloped nations, (hence Jihad vs. Mcworld). Our problem in today's society is that many of us have become too arrogant and do not have the work ethic of our forefathers, but the hedonistic ethic. And when any great civilization falls in the "age of transition," like the one we are in now, they were to arrogant and ignorant until reality swiftly kicked them in the face. All of this can be found in Arnold Toynbee's writings on the 21 greatest civilizations of man. What I am saying is that younger adults like me, and children need to get their acts together educationally and realize they can't just get out of high school and get that factory job in the auto plant that is now in Mexico. Maybe we should learn more than one language like our foreign neighbors and then we'll start to realize why the "rice growers" are the people with all of the jobs not only as laborers, but also as the doctors and lawyers of this country. We need democracy or we will fall.
A little about Marx, He was a family man, and a poor one at that. He was so into is work in his late years he had his children read the books for him out loud when his blindness began to set in. He was not the machine-totting "communist" that high school teachers bent on social paranoia, and big business ideas have to imply to try and throw young Americans into the system without providing them the knowledge to change social classes if they want to. (Hence a college education, things they wont tell you in high school). 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?
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Summary: Wonderful Analysis of Capital and Political Economy
Review: Well, many others have already explained in detail the specifics of the book, so I'll only touch on those a little. This book is a critique of the *science* of political economy and a thorough investigation of the capitalist mode of production. Marx does those two things brilliantly...offering up many ideas that still stand today and making predictions that have been eerily accurate.The first two chapters are a bit hard to digest....they force the reader to learn the terminology of neo-classical economics (Marx was shortly post-Smith and post-Ricardo). After that, however, the book flows quite well. On the down side, I believe a more straighforward presentation would have been better. I think Marx delves too deeply into personal examples from industrial England...though a few of them add to the personality of the book. I'm eagerly awaiting to read the 2nd and 3rd volumes of Capital.
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