Karl Marx 'for beginners'?

[Tomhet]

Hey all..
Admittedly I don't know that much about Karl Marx or Marxism, what is a good place to start ?
Thanks :)

[Rafiq]

You may not like this response, but works of Karl Marx "The Capital" and "Manifesto of the Communist party, and other of his works are good places to find much about his personality and his beliefs.

[Unclebananahead]

'Marx for Beginners' by Rius isn't actually too bad. It's presented in a comic book like manner, with plenty of illustrations

[Unclebananahead]

"Principles of Communism" by Frederick Engels is also a great place to start. It could be considered one of the world's first FAQ's

[anticap]

Marx's Kapital for Beginners

[S.Artesian]

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.


That's where he started after completing his critique of Hegel.

[YouSSR]

Reading Capital by David Harvey is a great companion to Capital. I would recommend it to anyone, and it's free. That's really it, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Che, etc are pretty easy to read.

[Volcanicity]

The Communist Manifesto is a good place to start it's short and easily understandable and I agree with the above post about David Harvey's series on reading Capital.Also look for a biography of Marx the one by Francis Wheen is a pretty good one,I always find reading a biography of someone before or while reading their own works a good way to understand them,their writings and the times they were writing in which for me enhances the persons writing.

[Adil3tr]

The Beginners books and The principles of communism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm) would be the best place to start.

[Widerstand]

I recommend Ernest Mandel's Introduction To Marxism. It may be a bit hard to get, but it introduces the majority of Marxist though in easily understandable, short sections, along with later additions by Lenin, such as his theory of Imperialism (also has some ideas of Trotsky? not sure). It also introduces Stalinism and Maoism, as well as giving a brief overview over Historical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism. Around 200 pages all in all, rather cheap too (got mine for 12€).

[ZeroNowhere]

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.


That's where he started after completing his critique of Hegel.
I don't think it's necessarily the best of ideas to start off with a text which one probably won't understand all that much of without reading other texts; Capital, on the other hand, stands up by itself. Personally, I think that I only grasped the early manuscripts fully after having read not only Capital, The German Ideology and such, but also Engels' later works. On the other hand, Capital is fairly simple in comparison, and says essentially the same thing; the EPM are definitely worthwhile after Capital, to help form the bigger picture from what you have already found out, but I'm not sure that they're of much worth as a starting point (one's own initial formulations of an idea may well not be the most understandable formulation of them, so that's not a merit in itself in this context). Indeed, I think that reading the EPM without being in a position to understand them can actually be somewhat dangerous, and I think that it's what spawned the whole 'Oh, the EPM are Marx being philosophical, Feuerbachian, anthropologistic, moralistic, etc, and he later made a materialist, sociological, economic break with this', when in reality the early Marx essentially says mostly the exact same thing as the later Marx (some specifics are different, such as analysis of the falling rate of profit).

In addition, Capital begins from the commodity, and hence involves the proof of the labour theory of value at the beginning, which is essentially the basis of Marx's analysis either way.

However, to the OP, I wouldn't recommend reading texts by anybody who isn't either Marx or Engels to begin with. I'm something of a 'Grebanieran' here. Essentially, Grebanier had spent his first few years teaching Hamlet by generally quoting critics, and ended up having no real idea what Shakespeare was on about. Then, for the fourth year, "I explained by my classes my current dilemma and confessed frankly that I had no idea what the play actually said. I told my students that if we cooperated I thought we may discover what Shakespeare intended us to understand, provided we read Hamlet with no preconceptions." "George Bernard Shaw says that one of the troubles with mankind is that we are forever distressed to find that our pails contain dirty water, but that we never throw out the dirty water before dipping into the clear well."

As such, they read Hamlet as though they were all an audience at the first day's performance in Elizabethan London, having no idea about what would unfold, and speculated only on what had already been read, charting carefully what they had discovered thus far. As a result, the bloke found that most interpretations of Hamlet are essentially bollocks, resulting in the eventual publishing of his own book, 'The Heart of Hamlet' (for reference, I agree with Grebanier on his main points, although not on everything; for example, I think that his portrayal of Gertrude is more one-sided than that of the text itself, and indeed is directly contradicted by it, as well as a couple of other quibbles, but these are not among the major points of his analysis). Similarly, I think that practically all published interpretations of Marx are deficient, and most just plain wrong, or missing Marx's major points or the interconnections involved, which one would find in Marx, but could well pass by if one thought oneself to understand the subject already. Hell, most manage to miss out on Marx's full proof of the labour theory of value in the first chapter of Capital, vol. I, and replace it with faulty arguments where they don't just go 'Oh, well, evidently Marx's argument is wrong, but that was intentional', or just skip it over and go over to exploitation before the labour theory of value because it has more populist potential or something of the sort. In other words, it's best to read the texts themselves first, and only then expose yourself to analyses, when you are in a position in which you can read them critically.

[28350]

You may not like this response, but works of Karl Marx "The Capital" and "Manifesto of the Communist party, and other of his works are good places to find much about his personality and his beliefs.

The Manifesto is good for beginners. Capital is most certainly not.


'Marx for Beginners' by Rius isn't actually too bad. It's presented in a comic book like manner, with plenty of illustrations

I like it a lot. It was actually how I was first introduced to Marx.

[S.Artesian]

My experience is just the opposite. Read the EPM first and it was clear to me on reading every subsequent work that these categories and concepts were bound up with Marx's analysis of capital and value-- and the "binding" agent? The labor process, which is a social process, so the stage is set so to speak for the conflict between capital and labor, and between the means and relations of production.

But not a big deal. Except I would not start with Capital vol 1 since you need to have some background in Marx's dialectic, is rotation of the commodity through the facets of value...

So Value, Price and Profit is an OK place to start. Or Wage Labor and Capital or even A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

But my personal favorite is EPM; without a grasp on the labor process as simultaneous the appropriation of nature, the reproduction of human beings as social producers, and thus the social appropriation of labor itself you miss out the critical breakthrough Marx achieves.

[4 Leaf Clover]

Hey all..
Admittedly I don't know that much about Karl Marx or Marxism, what is a good place to start ?
Thanks :)

the easiest you can do is open www.marxists.org (http://www.marxists.org) , and start reading. Order is not that important , by the title of texts you will more-less understand what the text is about

[Zanthorus]

Also look for a biography of Marx the one by Francis Wheen is a pretty good one,

Initially I did quite like Wheen's book, since it was the first biography of Marx I'd ever read. However, over time it's become more and more obviously flawed. To begin with, for someone who wants to understand Marx's ideas, Wheen's book is terrible. He repeats a number of usual blunders. Off the top of my head, he asserts that Hegel's dialectic is summed up by the formula 'thesis - antithesis - synthesis'. The most mind-bogglingly stupid moment in the book is his analysis of Das Kapital, when he asserts that it is not supposed to be an attempt to understand society, but is in fact some kind of cosmic joke being played by Marx, with the whole point of the book being to whimsically contrast the abstract formulas of economics with the horrors of late victorian capitalism. This, of course, is necessary to 'save' Marx, since everyone knows that Marx's actualy economic analysis is bunkum. Except, of course, it isn't, but Wheen is an Imperialist lackey, and if he defended Marx too much Christopher Hitchens would stop talking to him. The details of Marx's actual life are a bit better, but the way it is presented in an irritating Tabloid-style 'look what Marx got up to behind closed doors' way is just plain, well, irritating. Not to mention that many of Wheen's claims are demonstrably false, such as the assertion that Marx had an illegitimate son with his housekeeper, or just plain hilarious, such as the idea that Marx was a follower of David Urquhart.

After having tried a couple of routes through to Marx, I have to say that ZeroNowhere's proposed method is the only one I can confidently get behind.

[Volcanicity]

^Yes I agree Wheen's analysis of Marx's writing is flawed,but it's good for the basic biographical part's of Marx's life and easy to read for someone unfamiliar to him as the OP obviously is.And it's the most easily available to find.I never claimed it to be a masterpiece.

[Rjevan]

My experience is just the opposite. Read the EPM first
Interesting... I'd never suggest the EPM to a newbie for reasons ZeroNowhere outlined. But well, seems like you're the exception.

"Principles of Communism" and the "Communist Manifesto" are probably the best to start with. Maybe Lenin's "Karl Marx" might interest you, too:
http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/index.htm

Before reading Kapital I'd definitely go for Artesian's recommendations "Value, Price and Profit" plus "Wage Labor and Capital"; the "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" indeed helps, too, as Marx refers to it several times (but isn't required for understanding).