Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography

by Francis Wheen Narrated by Simon Vance

Overview

In this brilliant book, Francis Wheen, the author of the most successful biography of Karl Marx, tells the story of Das Kapital and Marx's twenty-year struggle to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Born in a two-room flat in London's Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy, the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867 to muted praise. But after Marx's death, the book went on to influence thinkers, writers, and revolutionaries, from George Bernard Shaw to V. I. Lenin, changing the direction of twentieth-century history. Wheen shows that, far from being a dry economic treatise, Das Kapital is like a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved by the monster they created: capitalism. Furthermore, Wheen argues, as long as capitalism endures, Das Kapital demands to be read and understood.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

The latest entry in this series lives up to its "biography" conceit. Wheen concisely recounts the birth, life, and legacy of the most challenging and formidable title in Marx's canon-incomplete at three dense volumes, the latter two posthumously published-with penetrating attention to the evolving Zeitgeists that form the subject. Marx's finest traditional biographer, Wheen gazes longer on his man's personal travails than is absolutely necessary, but his overall wit, sharp prose, and passion are altogether riveting. Wheen sees Kapital's first volume, which came out soon after the U.S. Civil War, an ironic, Dickensian masterpiece. Deftly reconciling the "scientific" Marx, whom most readers find culminating in Kapital, with the revolutionary and more recently celebrated humanistic Marx of earlier writings, Wheen argues for the relevance of Kapital's insights, even to ardent free enterprisers, and skewers the abominations of Leninism while avoiding classical anticommunism. Recommended for all academic and flagship public libraries, along with its siblings in this series, which employs a diverse group of well-lettered gadflies (P.J. O'Rourke), popularizing authorities (Karen Armstrong), and academic experts (Janet Browne) to bring renewed attention to imposing masterpieces.
—Scott H. Silverman

Kirkus Reviews

Marx's text altered the course of history; even today, it finds readers. As Wheen (The Irresistible Con: The Bizarre Life of a Fraudulent Genius, 2005, etc.) notes, quoting a Wall Street banker, "There is a Nobel Prize out there for an economist who resurrects Marx and puts it into a coherent theory."Marx thought of himself as an artist, commenting, "Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole." Perhaps, but Das Kapital was two decades in the making and unfinished at the time of Marx's death, since Marx couldn't bear to close a tangent. Thus he took time out, for instance, to learn Russian because he felt it "essential to study Russian land-owning relationships from primary sources." It has been said that Marx was right about everything except communism. Wheen takes issue with those thinkers, such as the economist Paul Samuelson, who dismisses Marx entirely because the impoverishment of the proletariat didn't work out quite as he said it would. Marx, Wheen argues, was in fact talking of the underclass, the "permanently unemployed, the sick, the ragged," who turn out to be-well, impoverished. In spite of the "dialectical dalliances" of the master, Wheen notes that Marx's notion that the wages of the worker will always decline relative to capital holds up nicely. Marx, who seems to have been rather proud of the obscurity and impenetrability of his text, was surprised to see that the first volume of Capital quickly sold through its print run in, of all places, Russia, while the French could never quite get a translation to Marx's satisfaction and the Germans ignored him. For that matter, no English edition was available in hislifetime, which he attributed to the "peculiar gift of stolid blockheadedness" that was the English national character. A welcome, brief study of the making of a not so necessarily massive tome.

From the Publisher

"[An] exhilarating read, and a healthy corrective to those brought up to think of Marx's work as rigid and doctrinaire." ---The Sunday Telegraph

APR/MAY 08 - AudioFile

The titles that make up the Books That Changed the World series might be called "librographies," since they tell the life story of history's most influential tomes. Karl Marx's DAS KAPITAL, like other books in the series, may have been read by relatively few, but many of its disciples have had wide influence. British narrator Simon Vance has an appropriately erudite tone for this material. It says something about the impenetrability of Marx's masterwork that even the brief summary is boring, but the later sections on how the book influenced revolutionaries (especially in Russia) is far more interesting and relevant for modern listeners. Vance's warm voice and steady pacing help listeners follow what can be a difficult text. D.B. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170722303
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	12/05/2007
Series:	Books That Changed the World , #8
Edition description:	Unabridged

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