A Reader's Guide to Marx's Capital

by Joseph Choonara

The first volume of Marx's Capital was published 150 years ago. It continues to entice readers eager to grapple with the author's account of the 'laws of motion' of capitalism. Yet for many, Capital can seem a forbidding work. This book, by Joseph Choonara, author of Unravelling Capitalism, is aimed at both individual readers and Capital reading groups. It takes each chapter of the first volume of Capital in turn, leading the reader through Marx's key arguments and offering insights and contemporary examples that can provide further illumination.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy

160 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 20, 2017

Reviews

[James Fahey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be a good guide containing a nice summary of Marx's ideas and philosophies. The book's opening chapters were most challenging but included, what I found to be, some good analysis of Marx's central ideas around the commodity; namely the use and exchange values, money, circulation valorisation and surplus-value, labour law in seventeenth-century Britain etc., as well as the transformation of agricultural labour due to capitalist expansion. This guide would be suitable for those with no prior knowledge/reading of Mark's Capital. Although it is stated the text is designed as a reading guide to be consumed in conjunction with reading Capital, I nonetheless found it to be useful as a shorter overview of Capital by gaining a more general understanding of the topic rather than reading the entirety of Marx's lengthier work.

[Twilight O. ☭ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic guide to Capital that manages to avoid the pitfalls that plague David Harvey's more popular companion, especially as regards abstract labor (as detailed here:https://libcom.org/article/companion-...), and manages to do so while coming in at under half the length. As other reviewers have noted, Choonara simplifies the ideas of Capital considerably, but that's only a detriment if his book is read as a standalone work, contrary to the book's stated aim of being a companion to Marx's capital. Choonara simplifies because the reader is expected to learn the details from Marx; his only aim is to present the essential features of Marx's argument so that those details might be made sense of. Far from being a detriment, then, Choonara's brevity is his work's greatest strength! Harvey's Companion is interesting insofar as it offers an interpretation of and commentary on Capital from one of living Marxism's few true luminaries, but for actual companion reading, I'd pick Choonara any day of the week.

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, this is a somewhat worthwhile companion to Capital. I like that it covers each chapter separately. I read each chapter in this in advance of reading the matching chapter in Capital, and I did find that it helped give me an understanding of what that chapter was going to be about.

But it's also not a particularly necessary book. The summary aspects of it are fine, but not particularly distinctive. I'm sure one could find lecture notes, etc. that would do just as well.

The real goal of the book seems to be for Choonara to argue against certain points in David Harvey's much more popular Companion to Marx's Capital. Some of the arguments seemed pretty esoteric to me. The disagreement that was the most clear to me was about applicability of the concept of primitive accumulation to modern neoliberalism. And on that point, I think Harvey is entirely correct.

[Jody Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a good short introduction. The earlier parts especially avoid some of the pitfalls other companions make- around the relationship between value and exchange-value for instance. However, there are some questionable parts later, and it misses a lot of complexity. And as the author is a Trotskyist there's the requisite maligning of Stalinism. All in all though, you can only expect so much from such a brief guide, and it is valuable in that.

[Beril · Rating 2 out of 5]

So tiring book! I wish i would read Marx's Capital instead of this book. Reading this book was waste of time for me. I just finished the book to finish. It is useless guideline. İ think.
I do not want to see the book. I am so nervous after finishing the book!

[Kevin Fulton · Rating 4 out of 5]

It helps make sense of Capital from a highly sympathetic perspective. Readable too.