The Marx Reader: Manifesto of the Communist Party; Wage Labour & Capital; and Value, Price & Profit

by Karl Marx, Juliette Rogers (Foreword)

Whenever a collection of Marx's works is published, a few questions inevitably arise. Is Marx still relevant today? Do we still have something to gain from reading the great man's thoughts about economic structures? To put this question another way - if Marx was wrong, in the end, about what communism would look like, then why do we still read his writings?

One way to answer this is by looking at the similarities between Marx's world and ours. The "Communist Manifesto" describes a world which is dominated by materialism. People are leaving their farms and flocking to the cities. Technology is steadily taking over the workforce. Cheap goods are flooding the market in Europe and beyond.

"Wage Labor and Capital" describes, in familiar detail, the impact of technology on social relations. Both "Wage Labor" and "Value, Price and Profit" describe a world in which capital needs to constantly expand in order to stay competitive. Wages are kept as low as possible. Skilled workers are losing their jobs to machinery and have to compete for unskilled work which pays far less. Workers live in squalid conditions and work long hours.

The world which Marx describes, in other words, has a good deal in common with the world we know today. Marx's writing shines in its ability to describe that world clearly and without sentimentality. The ideas that he develops in "Capital," his masterwork on economic theory, apply today more than ever. That's because his theories are based in steady observation of material reality. Marx's genius was in his ability to observe the material world and extrapolate the laws that underpinned that material reality.

168 pages, Paperback

Published February 17, 2021

About the author

With 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...

Reviews

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apparently I am actually the 21st century-equivalent of the type of social quack that was pointed out by Frederick Engels, in his revised preface to the social manifesto of the communist party, in that I resemble the type of phony intellectual who aims to try to rehabilitate capitalism by adapting Marx's beliefs in a ramshackle, patchwork form, with the express intention of not hurting capitalism itself or the profit motive which gives it force. But is that really the case? After some consideration of the problem, I have come to the conclusion that it is not a matter of sheer public indifference which makes my endeavor a pyrrhic struggle in the attempt for a salvationist victory. In my opinion, it is indeed possible that a single person working alone and committed to the struggle for a better, more equitable society can achieve what in Karl Marx's time was impossible: by writing with the aim of reforming capitalism, I believe it is possible that a better society can be pushed into existence, and I do not feel I, as a potential proselytizer for such a potential world, should be condemned as being merely another moral agent who has been relegated to the domain of myths and sects that Engels put the followers of Owens and Lasalle, two industrialists who incorporated socialist techniques into their business models.

Questions to be answered with the assistance of artificial intelligence are as follows: Has the mass and value of production increased year over year since Marx's time? A.I. overview answer: Yes, the value and mass of production have generally increased year over year since Marx's time. This trend is evident in the continuous increase in national production, driven by factors like capital accumulation and the growing productive power of labor. However, this increase can be influenced by changes in population and technological advancements, which can affect both the value and mass of production. Has the productive power of national labor increased year over year since World War II? A.I. overview answer: Yes, the productive power of national labor, also known as labor productivity, has generally increased year over year since World War II. This means that workers have, on average, been able to produce more output per hour worked than in the past. Has the amount of money in circulation been increasing accordingly? A.I. overview answer: No, the amount of money in circulation does not consistently increase in proportion to the productive power of national labor. The US money supply, for instance, has been shrinking recently, despite advancements in technology and overall production. While increased productivity can lead to more goods and services, the monetary system can be influenced by various factors, including government policies and global economic conditions, which may not always align with the growth in productive power. In making this analysis, I see that Marx's relation of the history of the capitalist economy is the tale of the progressive realization of the will under the aspect of the production of power-relations.

In his own time, Marx lamented that, in the economically-focused worldview dominated by capital, religious life must be discarded because there is the cash value as applied to the industry of the soul, working as according to the mysterious nature of its transcendent and metaphysical tempos, was undoubtedly lacking. Perhaps this statement of Marx can account for the whole renunciation of the kingdom of spiritual invectitude and the irreconcilability of logical positivism with humanity's higher callings? However, we should note that a similar train of logic obscures the deeper motives behind historical movements and attempts to portray reality as a drama of emotional charades; for instance, Marx proposed the alternative analysis that Russia prompted the American Civil War as a consequence of the fact that her agricultural exports were crippled by the expansion of American farm produce into the European market. This is the type of naive historical analysis that a hard-line Marxist analysis causes to appear as the recrudescence of the type of mind that overlooked the basic problems inherited from the evils of slavery and the social changes that manifested from the excoriation of this negative class-status from the world.

What is the Marxist analysis of the rise and fall in wages as related to the health of a given society? In Marxist analysis, rising and falling wages are intricately linked to the exploitative nature of capitalism and its impact on the productive power of national labor. Wages are seen as a commodity, where capitalists pay workers less than the value they produce, creating surplus value that is appropriated as profit. This exploitation inherently limits the standard of living of the working class, even if nominal wages rise. Furthermore, increased productivity due to technological advancements can lead to relative wage cuts as the cost of producing labor power (wages) falls, meaning workers can be paid less while producing more.

If the value of commodities is regulated by the level of fixed wages and the common social substance is labor, then Marx appears to beg the question of whether or not the single individual, as a member of society, is able to carry out his or her business as a crystallized product of society's incumbent relationship to the highly organized system of objects represented by relative quantities of labor within his scope of clerical-based preferences. It seems to be that the ineluctable and socially most persevering component of Marx's presentation of the social history of labor in the essay 'Value Price and Profit' is the role technology plays. According to Marx, the introduction of the power loom not only supplanted the hand-loom in the English manufacturing industry but, as a necessary consequence, this technological advance resulted in the diminishing of the worker's ability to obtain subsistence and economic viability according to his skills as established under the previous technological regime, such that a diminution of the labor-power necessary to produce the commodity in question necessarily cheapens the amount of labor exerted; according to Marx, the progressive laws of social labor demand that as the time necessary for production decreases, the social value of that labor decreases. This is a law that is realized in today's postmodern world as, for instance, in terms of virtual communication and unreal presences and surreal presentation, where the value of commodities is related inversely to the productive power of the virtual labor employed.

This makes inflation the inevitable and necessary by-product of de-realization of the relationship between the price of a commodity and its usage in terms of its value, because it no longer bears a relationship to anything that is itself a product of the labor involved in its making. Does this make sense in the world of the past, where the value of money was based according to a fixed standard, such as the value of gold? No, but that does not mean that we ought to go back to a gold-based society; on the contrary, the secret of the postmodern economy and the continued vitality of the contemporary world, in terms of continued vitality within post-metaphysical society and the social world that surrounds us, is to be found in the proliferation of immaterial labor and the commodification of culture and experience. This aspect of capital, not fully grasped by Marx, involves the rise of creative industries, knowledge-based work, and the transformation of everyday life into a spectacle of consumer culture. Essentially, the postmodern economy relies on the circulation of symbolic capital and the production of value through imagination and cultural production, rather than solely through the extraction of surplus value from wage labor.

In my opinion, it can be questioned whether this so-called secret of capitalism is itself a new permutation of the overweening psychological greed capitalists are possessed by or if it is equivalent to a revivification of the fetishization of commodity culture that Marx warned against. Personally, I can only confess my confusion over whether postmodernism represents a truly unique social development as a possibility for value-added growth or if it is merely a dead spot which falsely promises the inevitable destruction of capitalist-based society. While my A.I. overview says that postmodernism is a complex and contested concept, and its impact on society is still being debated and that, while it has been criticized for its potential drawbacks, it also offers valuable insights into the changing dynamics of late capitalism and the power of language and culture. Ultimately, whether postmodernism represents a unique social development or a blind alley depends on how we choose to engage with its ideas and how we apply them to our understanding of the world. At the moment, I can only add that I believe there will come a day when the pricelessness of human character will, instead of legitimizing the monopoly of use-values found in the system of objects itself, will be used in order to arrive at a true definition of the values of humanity.

[Krista · Rating 1 out of 5]

I like to think I'm a fairly intelligent person. This book, though, left me confused more often than not. I felt like I needed an interpretor to break things down in a manner I could more easily digest.

Then, I'd have moments where I thought he was just stating the obvious.