Karl Marx

The length of the original works of Marx are very long so can be discouraging to start out with straight away. Therefore a selection is desirable to get acquainted with the material. But the consequence of leaving out whole parts and paragraphs is that the reader is sometimes left in the dark or missing out on certain nuance. The book is meant as a survey and introduction so I understand that the editor had to make a selection that gives an overall impression, it is helpful he gives an introduction to each text and gives some context, but what I really do not understand and find highly annoying is that he made it impossible to trace back those parts that were excluded, in the original texts. If you as a reader want to follow up on these parts in full editions, you have not much to refer to (only at the end of the extract you find a reference to the edition the extract is taken from). For example the original headings are not always there and when parts are left out, "..." should suffice to notify the reader something is excluded. For me this really knocks down the quality of the book.

good copy on time- this is an excellent summary of the works of Karl Marx very helpful.

The service for receiving this book was a testament to the company and the book itself is a great companion for anyone studying Marx and his theory.

Although McLellan himself is an academic rather than a Marxist, he has put together an excellent selection of Karl Marx’s writings, including some of the shorter writings in full, as well as extracts from the longer works. The only problem with the book is that it is restricted to Marx himself and does not include the works of Marx’s lifelong friend, comrade and collaborator Friedrich Engels, except those which were written jointly with Marx. For this reason I prefer Robert C. Tucker’s “Marx-Engels Reader” to this volume.In his speech at Marx’s graveside (which is included in this collection), Engels outlines the three key elements of Marxism. Firstly, there is the materialist conception of history. Engels states that: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history…”As Marx himself puts it in “Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”:“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”Secondly, Engels points out that Marx “also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production…” and particularly emphasises the “discovery of surplus value”, which is the mechanism through which the capitalist class exploits the working class (which today includes both manual and white collar workers).As Marx wrote in “Capital”: “The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.”(Marx’s analysis of capitalism also makes good use of his dialectical approach and his theory of alienation.)Thirdly, Engels shows that Marxism is the theory of working class revolution. “For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute to… the liberation of the modern proletariat…”A revolution was necessary partly because “... the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another...” (The Civil War in France) and partly because in the process of the class struggle the ideas of the majority of the working class would change, as is shown in these two passages from “The German Ideology”:“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time the ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production...”“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”Finally, the democratic nature of the revolution that Marx envisaged (in total contrast to the bureaucratic and tyrannical Stalinist regimes which claimed to be following Marx, but which in fact were/are state capitalist societies) is shown when Marx writes (in “The Civil War in France”) about the short-lived Paris Commune as his model for a workers’ state:“(The Paris Commune) filled all posts — administrative, judicial and educational - by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers.”Extracts like these make this book very useful for anyone interested in Marxism. And don’t forget that: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” (Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”.)Phil Webster.

This is a great edition of Marx's work. The work is presented in chronological order, which is really helpful to follow the way in which Marx's ideas develop. In addition, each 'historical' section is preceded by a short contextualising comment by McLellan which is very helpful indeed. If you are studying Marx a little more in depth, you will be glad you got this book.

Excellent sampler of Marx's work. Some of his earlier writings on alienation have stood up better than his later theories. From what I have been told, the choices from "difficult" texts are well selected, giving an idea of the thinking without having to read the whole of Marx's works.