The Weaver Reads reviewed Marx: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer (Very short introductions ;)
Goodreads Review of Marx: A Very Short Introduction
4 stars
It’s been a while since I read any Marx or dealt rigorously with his ideas, so I chose to pick this up to refresh myself in a systematic way. The description of Marx’s ideas and life gets the point across really well. I’m most familiar with later Marx (I think like most of us), so the discussion of Marx’s intellectual formation was especially welcome.
The book veers off towards the end, and the author does not appraise Marx’s legacy particularly positively. This is a fair case to make, but I don’t quite agree with this conclusions. The author is right to argue that the Communist regimes of the twentieth century were total failures, but I don’t think this diminishes Marx’s strength as a critic of capitalism as he saw it in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, while the working class does not face total immiseration as Marx suggested, he is right …
It’s been a while since I read any Marx or dealt rigorously with his ideas, so I chose to pick this up to refresh myself in a systematic way. The description of Marx’s ideas and life gets the point across really well. I’m most familiar with later Marx (I think like most of us), so the discussion of Marx’s intellectual formation was especially welcome.
The book veers off towards the end, and the author does not appraise Marx’s legacy particularly positively. This is a fair case to make, but I don’t quite agree with this conclusions. The author is right to argue that the Communist regimes of the twentieth century were total failures, but I don’t think this diminishes Marx’s strength as a critic of capitalism as he saw it in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, while the working class does not face total immiseration as Marx suggested, he is right that neoliberalism has led to a re-monopolization of Western (and the global) economies.
Still, this is a good book to read for a better sense of what Marx is all about.
