Reviews and Comments

Quite good, accessible explanation of such mechanisms as automatization, speculation, reproduction minimum, crisis of overproduction, falling rates of profit, economic cycles, proletarianization, accumulation of capital, relative impoverishment – that the accumulation of enormous wealth on one end is accompanied by massive impoverishment on the other.

A solid choice for radicalizing people (it was literally written for the workers not as some academic discourse after all). If you're struggling with the first chapters of Das Kapital, read this and Value, Price and Profit or try the abridgement by Otto Rühle.

Especially since latey I've been developing a theory that Marx might be autistic to some notable extent, especially in the are of the theory of mind. Plus his inductive method albeit grounded in dialectical materialism did not prevent him from writing some of his works in a quite dense style. Luckily it is not the case here.

“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes at a given moment, or from the more or less accidental level of relations of production and means of communication, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.”