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The Essential Marx
Shortly before he was assassinated in 1940, Leon Trotsky — one of Marx's most devoted converts and a key figure in the Russian Revolution — made this selection from Capital, to which he appended his own lengthy and insightful introduction. Compact and fascinating, this invaluable work not only presents Marx's thoughts in his own words but also places them in the swirling context of the 20th century. A critical analysis of ideas that have influenced millions of lives for well over a century, this book will be an important addition to the libraries of students and instructors of economics, history, government, and Communist thought.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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156 people want to read
About the author
Karl Marx
3,245 books6,522 followersWith the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote
The Communist Manifesto
(1848) and
Das Kapital
(1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 19, 2022
Did not finish.
This book is an abridgement of Volume I of Capital, prefaced with a long (more than 20% of the book) introduction by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's introduction is readable, if a little scattered- it reads like it was written in a rush, and he tries to cover probably too much ground in the space of time allotted to him- he's trying at once to make the case for Marx's continuing relevance, to engage in polemic against economists who have discounted Marx's ideas, and to provide quantifiable contemporary evidence to illustrate Marx's theories in the context of the times (1939).
Then Marx himself- in abridgement. All the historical examples and contemporary-to-Marx context has been omitted, leaving just bare theory and argumentation. It is frankly unreadable. Marx is thorough and methodical to a fault; he states and restates many points in slightly different ways, making the text labored and repetitious; but every sentence is also dense with meaning, and important to the ongoing edifice of theory he's building, such that reading the text is painfully demanding, but also not especially rewarding. Even when I can tell he's talking sense, I struggle to parse more than half the sentences, lost in a forest of ancillary statements about exchange-value and prices and socially necessary labor. This is text for continental philosophers or theologians; not for me.
For better or for worse, I couldn't make it through all of it. Oh well.
This book is an abridgement of Volume I of Capital, prefaced with a long (more than 20% of the book) introduction by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's introduction is readable, if a little scattered- it reads like it was written in a rush, and he tries to cover probably too much ground in the space of time allotted to him- he's trying at once to make the case for Marx's continuing relevance, to engage in polemic against economists who have discounted Marx's ideas, and to provide quantifiable contemporary evidence to illustrate Marx's theories in the context of the times (1939).
Then Marx himself- in abridgement. All the historical examples and contemporary-to-Marx context has been omitted, leaving just bare theory and argumentation. It is frankly unreadable. Marx is thorough and methodical to a fault; he states and restates many points in slightly different ways, making the text labored and repetitious; but every sentence is also dense with meaning, and important to the ongoing edifice of theory he's building, such that reading the text is painfully demanding, but also not especially rewarding. Even when I can tell he's talking sense, I struggle to parse more than half the sentences, lost in a forest of ancillary statements about exchange-value and prices and socially necessary labor. This is text for continental philosophers or theologians; not for me.
For better or for worse, I couldn't make it through all of it. Oh well.
January 23, 2019
More notes for someone else that I will share with internet. This is about the essay "critique of the Gotha programme".
What is this essay?
This essay is a polemic by Marx against the dominant “socialist” party in Germany. The party is referred to as “LaSalleans”.
Historical Contextualization
I am not sure if the copy you have includes the letters of correspondence, but this essay is written in response to an appeal by other socialists for Marx’s opinion on the “Gotha Programme(the agenda of the LaSallean party)”. Particularly the appeal for Marx’s opinion comes from Wilhelm Liebknecht who was a founder of the German socialist party and who’s son would marry Marx’s daughter. Later to be tortured and murdered by the proto-nazi Freikorps along with Rosa Luxemburg. Annihilating the working class’s leadership making the fall of the Weimar and the rise of the third reich inevitable.
I bring that up because although this(the ideas in the polemic) may seem like some fraction of a faction of a sect, but it has historical import and has even dramatically effected our past. Because we didn’t look to the international and scientific socialism of Marx and instead looked to the nationalist and/or utopian socialism of LaSalle we ended up with socialist parties becoming revisionist on the left; then socialist parties becoming national like Mussolini and Hitler then sliding hard to the right.
Why its awesome
The reason why this essay is awesome is because he essentially uses the arguments in his giant book “Das Kapital” but in a very abbreviated form: The labor theory of value which bourgeois economists will insist has been debunked, but I have yet to find such a debunking.
Epistemological/ontological grounding (why HisMat makes less presumptions)
The argument is that humans have always attempted to survive. This is true in all times and all places. This presupposition of humans’ desire and need of survival is the only metaphysical assumption that Historical Materialism has to make. Other ideas have to make vast giant brushstroke assumptions about things like “human nature”, “truth”, “god” etc. Because other theories of social, political, and/or economic organization rely on these grand ahistorical metaphysical assumptions and HisMat only has to rely on the assumption that everyone has needs: HisMat is a more epistemologically justified theory than other modernist (humanist) theories as well as post-modern(post-humanist) theories.
Extrapolation from epistemological/ontological grounding
If humans have always attempted to survive how do they do it? Well they act upon nature with labor to transform nature in to necessity. This can only ever be done through labor.
Ok that’s how history has worked, So what’s the issue?
The issue is that certain powerful people and/or institutions swoop in and take their cut out of the necessity you created from nature with labor.
During primitive communism/tribalism this extraction or expropriation could be done through something like a potlatch for example.
During feudalism this theft took the form of the tithe to the church and the manor tax paid to the estate owner.
In capitalism this theft is the extraction of surplus value. A worker creates value with labor and is paid less than the value they produced, this creates a surplus value which goes to the owner of the tools of production (the machinery rather than the real estate the machinery sits on).
Over a long period of time
This means that more and more wealth accrues to the owners of the machines. Who take that wealth and invest in better machines, better machines mean less workers are necessary so less jobs. The only way for the capitalist to keep growing their profits is improving productivity (per unit cost) by better machinery and smaller numbers of workers who are more and more technically specialized. This eventually leads to two issues.
1.Workers get shit on worse and worse as time goes on.
2.Since this is the only way for capitalits to prop up the rate of profit, it leads to a tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Because of number one, Marx argues that only the worker has revolutionary potential (because they’re the ones getting shit on). Because of number two capitalism is prone to crisis and always seeking new markets as well as more efficient means of worker exploitation.
What is this essay?
This essay is a polemic by Marx against the dominant “socialist” party in Germany. The party is referred to as “LaSalleans”.
Historical Contextualization
I am not sure if the copy you have includes the letters of correspondence, but this essay is written in response to an appeal by other socialists for Marx’s opinion on the “Gotha Programme(the agenda of the LaSallean party)”. Particularly the appeal for Marx’s opinion comes from Wilhelm Liebknecht who was a founder of the German socialist party and who’s son would marry Marx’s daughter. Later to be tortured and murdered by the proto-nazi Freikorps along with Rosa Luxemburg. Annihilating the working class’s leadership making the fall of the Weimar and the rise of the third reich inevitable.
I bring that up because although this(the ideas in the polemic) may seem like some fraction of a faction of a sect, but it has historical import and has even dramatically effected our past. Because we didn’t look to the international and scientific socialism of Marx and instead looked to the nationalist and/or utopian socialism of LaSalle we ended up with socialist parties becoming revisionist on the left; then socialist parties becoming national like Mussolini and Hitler then sliding hard to the right.
Why its awesome
The reason why this essay is awesome is because he essentially uses the arguments in his giant book “Das Kapital” but in a very abbreviated form: The labor theory of value which bourgeois economists will insist has been debunked, but I have yet to find such a debunking.
Epistemological/ontological grounding (why HisMat makes less presumptions)
The argument is that humans have always attempted to survive. This is true in all times and all places. This presupposition of humans’ desire and need of survival is the only metaphysical assumption that Historical Materialism has to make. Other ideas have to make vast giant brushstroke assumptions about things like “human nature”, “truth”, “god” etc. Because other theories of social, political, and/or economic organization rely on these grand ahistorical metaphysical assumptions and HisMat only has to rely on the assumption that everyone has needs: HisMat is a more epistemologically justified theory than other modernist (humanist) theories as well as post-modern(post-humanist) theories.
Extrapolation from epistemological/ontological grounding
If humans have always attempted to survive how do they do it? Well they act upon nature with labor to transform nature in to necessity. This can only ever be done through labor.
Ok that’s how history has worked, So what’s the issue?
The issue is that certain powerful people and/or institutions swoop in and take their cut out of the necessity you created from nature with labor.
During primitive communism/tribalism this extraction or expropriation could be done through something like a potlatch for example.
During feudalism this theft took the form of the tithe to the church and the manor tax paid to the estate owner.
In capitalism this theft is the extraction of surplus value. A worker creates value with labor and is paid less than the value they produced, this creates a surplus value which goes to the owner of the tools of production (the machinery rather than the real estate the machinery sits on).
Over a long period of time
This means that more and more wealth accrues to the owners of the machines. Who take that wealth and invest in better machines, better machines mean less workers are necessary so less jobs. The only way for the capitalist to keep growing their profits is improving productivity (per unit cost) by better machinery and smaller numbers of workers who are more and more technically specialized. This eventually leads to two issues.
1.Workers get shit on worse and worse as time goes on.
2.Since this is the only way for capitalits to prop up the rate of profit, it leads to a tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Because of number one, Marx argues that only the worker has revolutionary potential (because they’re the ones getting shit on). Because of number two capitalism is prone to crisis and always seeking new markets as well as more efficient means of worker exploitation.
November 14, 2023
Once you get past the stupid subtitle, "The Non-economic Writings", you're going to find a Marx who is far more subtle and complex than either his epigones or detractors gave him credit for. Saul Padover, biographer of Marx, who always insisted "I am not a Marxist but a Jeffersonian democrat", here collects and translates the best of Marx on religion, literature, war, the state, censorship, and education, among other hot topics. Marx's views on religion went beyond "it is the opiate of the people". He recognized religion, particularly Christianity, as a valid but flawed attempt to challenge exploitation. Unlike his twentieth-century followers, Marx strongly opposed all censorship as the last refuge of bourgeois cowards and scoundrels. His writings on the army and the state in Spain, a country he correctly identified as "completely mysterious to the rest of Europe", show that at times Marx held culture and even race as explanatory factors in politics. (Mercifully for Marx, Padover does not include his bigoted comments on Latin Americans, particularly Mexicans.) THE ESSENTIAL MARX is the place to start in uncovering the good, bad, and ugly of a thinker who will always be our contemporary.
June 15, 2025
While the new translation of Capital Volume 1 by Paul Reitter is the most readable to-date, a book of 725+ pages is something that few people will ever dig into. While Marx described capitalism and wage theft in great theoretical detail in his three volumes, and while many lessons can be derived from these texts, numerous revisions after translations after editions of his work have kept an army of academics and translators busy for the last 150 years and there aren't many working people who can actually spare the time for such a read.
This small Dover edition is essentially a Reader's Digest version of Capital Volume 1 in less than 200 pages. Otto Rühle's 1939 "digest" of Capital is quite readable, preserving most of the main points of the original, and Leon Trotsky, who was murdered the following year, contributes an excellent introduction to the relevance of Marx's ideas, especially for American readers. Trotsky points out that Americans have only 6% of the world population yet possess 40% of the world's assets. He bashes the New Deal, Keynesianism-in-progress, and American imperialism. He has plenty to say about neo-liberalism and liberalism alike.
The volume is well-priced, especially if, like me, you prefer paper books. If not, you can search for both essays online.
This small Dover edition is essentially a Reader's Digest version of Capital Volume 1 in less than 200 pages. Otto Rühle's 1939 "digest" of Capital is quite readable, preserving most of the main points of the original, and Leon Trotsky, who was murdered the following year, contributes an excellent introduction to the relevance of Marx's ideas, especially for American readers. Trotsky points out that Americans have only 6% of the world population yet possess 40% of the world's assets. He bashes the New Deal, Keynesianism-in-progress, and American imperialism. He has plenty to say about neo-liberalism and liberalism alike.
The volume is well-priced, especially if, like me, you prefer paper books. If not, you can search for both essays online.
April 19, 2020
The first forty or so pages are by Leon Trotsky, who makes a brief introduction of Marx and his analytical method and then goes on with some commentary about the world in the beginning of the XX century. There are some interesting points made.
The rest of the book is just a 1:1 quotation of the Capital, but stripped from all the historical, statistical and other commentary, so that only the pure economical theory of Marx is left. This second part is useful either as a reference or if you would like to save yourself the huge volume of the original work.
The rest of the book is just a 1:1 quotation of the Capital, but stripped from all the historical, statistical and other commentary, so that only the pure economical theory of Marx is left. This second part is useful either as a reference or if you would like to save yourself the huge volume of the original work.
August 21, 2015
Great Introduction by Leon Trotsky!!!!!!!!!!!! For those who don't have the time to read or understand Das Capital, this is a very good synopsis of Marx's thinking and arguments.
June 24, 2020
Just go ahead and read the real thing. This book leaves you feeling like you almost read Das Kapital...but you didn't. Trotsky's intro is an amusing addition.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews