Capital An Abridged Edition (Oxford World's Classics) Paperback – Abridged, 17 April 2008

Its all about commodities. And its values for labours. That live in the capitalists world. Very good book its like War and Piece but just about Economy. Worth a look to see the legend at work.

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Pretty difficult to read, and a lot of content still that can go... but ultimately refreshing and rewarding, as it gives you a very different take on the world with a logic hard to defeat.

Bought for our intellectual 12-year old. Excellent abridged version but the print is small and needs concentrating. I am no expert on Karl Marx but the sections I have read are "enlightening"

Genius

A very good publication by Oxford World's Classics, Karl Marx was tops, concise explanatory and brilliant.

This edition of "Capital" contains the original English translation of Volume One - and it is an excellent translation which I prefer to the one in the Penguin edition. The introduction by David McLellan is also quite good, although I think that McLellan is unfair in claiming that Marx was not concerned enough with issues such as gender inequality and ecology.To many people Marxism is a dirty word because of its association with the bureaucratic tyranny of the Stalinist regimes of Russia, Eastern Europe, China etc. But these regimes had/have nothing to do with genuine Marxism, as anyone who reads this book will see. The so-called "communist" states were actually state capitalist systems controlled by a ruling class of bureaucrats who betrayed the aims of the 1917 Russian Revolution and turned on its head Marx's aim of a democratic workers' state and classless society.Marx's humanism and democratic instincts shine out throughout this book. There are marvellous indictments of the alienating, exploitive and undemocratic nature of the capitalist system, as well as some remarkably vivid historical sections. But Marx's main aim in this book is not to set out a blueprint for a future socialist society, it is to lay bare the "law of motion" of the capitalist society we live in.Marx shows that there are two key features of the capitalist system. Firstly, there is the fact that the capitalists make their profits by exploiting the working class. (The working class today includes ordinary white collar workers as well as manual workers.) As Marx writes, "Capital...vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour..."Secondly, there is the competition between rival capitalists which drives on the exploitation and which leads to the anarchy of the market system, with its booms, slumps and crises, as we are seeing today.I particularly like how Marx shows that people are alienated under capitalism, in the sense of their work being turned into soulless degradation, and also in the sense of having lost control of their lives to something they themselves have created - capital. "As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.""Capital" is not an easy read, and it is best tackled after reading a modern introduction to Marxism. On Marxist economics, I would recommend either Joseph Choonara's "Unravelling Capitalism" or Chris Harman's "Zombie Capitalism". On Marxism as a whole, Alex Callinicos's "The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx" is a brilliant starting point.Phil Webster.

Much has obviously been said of this work! Humanist-Marxists say it is too mechanistic whilst analytic Marxists try to ignore the Dickensian passages which describe working conditions. In truth this book, in true Marxian style is the 'dialectical' synthesis of basically all that went before. Marx forswears many of the grinding debates with other intellectuals and revolutionaries of the time in favour of a 'capitalism for dummies style'. Your hand is held as you progress from simple 'laws', each of which is taken to the limit of its logic before the next idea is broached.In fact what is striking is how pertinent this book is even today. Granted things have moved on, and it is no longer 'grim up north' but even a quick consideration makes one realise how our service-industry-fueled economy still holds to most of the same processes as Marx noted all those years ago. Beaudrillard claimed Marx was superseded because consumption has now trumped production, but a read of Capital and a bit of thought soon puts that idea to rest.It is worth ignoring the suggestions that The German Ideology is a good introduction to Marx, or that Capital is some advanced monolith. It is large, but completely readable; just as readable as Manifesto, only longer. Despite spawning abstruse French theorists, Russian and Chinese revolutions and analysis second only in quantity to the Bible there is nothing to be intimidated about.