The Weaver Reads reviewed An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy by Bade Onimode (Third World books)
Goodreads Review of An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy
1 star
This book is not an introduction to anything. Onimode throws you in there and expects you to swim; he drops terminology and equations with little explanation; and he uses the pages of the book to compete with intellectual rivals. The charts and tables, as well as equations, confound far more than they clarify.
I was able to follow along closely for around 100 pages or so, but then I just lost the whole fucking plot and was only able to skim the rest. Some of the later chapters are interesting and a bit more approachable (like money/exchange/inflation, development/crisis, and imperialism/revolution), but they still suffer from the same problems as always.
Part of it is that the book is just too abstract. There's little in the way of examples, and Onimode just expects us to make sense of everything based on words and numbers alone. It's an unrealistic expectation, as few …
This book is not an introduction to anything. Onimode throws you in there and expects you to swim; he drops terminology and equations with little explanation; and he uses the pages of the book to compete with intellectual rivals. The charts and tables, as well as equations, confound far more than they clarify.
I was able to follow along closely for around 100 pages or so, but then I just lost the whole fucking plot and was only able to skim the rest. Some of the later chapters are interesting and a bit more approachable (like money/exchange/inflation, development/crisis, and imperialism/revolution), but they still suffer from the same problems as always.
Part of it is that the book is just too abstract. There's little in the way of examples, and Onimode just expects us to make sense of everything based on words and numbers alone. It's an unrealistic expectation, as few people will be able to follow this without prior training or reading in Marxist political economy. There's a story to be told here, and examples would go a long way in clarifying what is opaque.
Honestly, there's probably no place better to start on this topic than Marx + a good companion. I heard that the new translation of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (just out this September) is much more approachable than the Progress Publishers and Penguin editions.