THE FORMATION OF THE ECONOMIC THOUGHT OF KARL MARX

by Ernest Mandel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 1971

The letter of Marx's economic thought up through the Grundrisse. . . the letters, that is, in a thin alphabet soup served in a fundamentally un-Marxist spirit, though Mandel is a prominent Trotskyist leader and a widely respected European intellectual. Mandel's syllabus moves with Marx from a critique of private property to successive approximations of a synthetic understanding of capitalism, its historical significances, and its essential dynamics. Mandel fusses' about exactly when Marx declared himself a Communist; he makes much of the elementary point that a socialist society would seek to abolish commodity production in the Marxist sense; as usual, he identifies the crisis of capitalism with crises of ""overproduction,"" a superficial notion here given a superficial treatment; he rightly points out that Marx abandoned the ""absolute immiseration"" theory of workers' wages, but gives no clear account of Marx's later view. The core of Mandel's exegesis is the labor theory of value. He dwells on his view that Marx first rejected, then accepted it, and reiterates the theme of abstract labor versus concrete, without making the issues intelligible or compelling outside talmudic Marxist circles. There is no broad polemic to provide intellectual distinction, even by bourgeois standards: Mandel simply nits and picks at an assortment of commentators from Joan Robinson to Louis Althusser, never offering an overarching interpretation. Marxist academics and academic Marxologists will possibly find the book marginally useful; other scholars and students will find it dull. With all due credit to its virtues in going beyond the tendency to separate radically or to radically telescope the earlier and later Marx, it is dull.

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION