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Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) Paperback – November 1, 2008

by Francis Wheen (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 35 ratings
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In vivid detail, Francis Wheen tells the story of Das Kapital and Karl 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’s captivating, accessible book 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.
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Previous page
  1. Part of series
    Books That Changed the World
  2. Print length
    144 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Grove Press
  5. Publication date
    November 1, 2008
  6. Dimensions
    5 x 0.5 x 7.75 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    9780802143945
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0802143945
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

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

"[Wheen] brilliantly evokes the atmosphere of Victorian Gothic that pervades the pages of Das Kapital."

"As gripping and as readable as a first-rate thriller."

"Wheen...presents this splendid reevaluation with great wit and verve."

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0802143946
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press; Reprint edition (November 1, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780802143945
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802143945
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.5 x 7.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 35 ratings

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Francis Wheen

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4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
35 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

John Gooch
5.0 out of 5 stars A necessary work for a library
Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2007
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Mr. Francis Wheen's narration of the genesis of Karl Marx's Das Kapital deserves an honored space on the library shelves of every man conversant in current affairs.

John Gooch
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Jeff LeVine
3.0 out of 5 stars A good, clear introduction, but 120 pages really isn't enough
Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2020
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A very brief (just 120 pages), relatively simple, clear essay on Karl Marx’s very long, complex, forever unfinished book, Capital. Broken into three sections, the first, on Marx’s twenty year struggle struggle with actually writing the book and some of his influences (Tristram Shandy!), was probably the most interesting. A middle sections that breaks down a few key ideas from Capital is probably the most dry, but not incomprehensible. The final section covers the book's initial reception and influence through the years in a seemingly balanced way. While it feels like a good introduction, ultimately I think I would have been more satisfied spending my time with a longer, more detailed work on such a big topic.
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Jacob
5.0 out of 5 stars Economics as Victorian Gothic Horror
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2015
Even discounting Marx's own views, this was surprisingly good. It reads like a Victorian economic thriller. Indeed, Wheen suggests that Das Kapital is economics disguised as Victorian Gothic horror. Wheen gives a brief account of Marx's (self-inflicted) tragic life, then shows how Das Kapital came to fruition and the aftershocks.

There is a brief overview of Marx's economic thought, which need not be belabored here. Now back to the Victorian horror. For Marx, capitalist tradition is a world of spectres and apparitions (Wheen 39). This explains why some critics couldn't understand Kapital. It isn't so much incoherent, but rather echoes the instability of capitalism itself. Or so Wheen says. I reserve judgment at the moment.

Criticisms:

Wheen really doesn't deal with the main problem of Marx's thought. The main rebuttal to Marx: the exchange value of pearls and diamonds derives solely from the labour-time spent on retrieving and transforming them, which presumably isn’t that much, why do people pay thousands of dollars for them?

Marx tries to respond to this by saying commodity fetishim represents the rule of the object over the human, of dead labor over living. In other words, this is so because we are still under the objects’ rule. This might be so and in fact (and probably unbeknownst to Marx himself), echoes St Paul's warnings to the Galatians and Colossians not to live under the stoichea.

What did Marx mean by saying that capitalism leads to the proletariat’s impoverishment? He says that capital knows how to transfer its expenses from its own shoulders to those of the proletariat. Further, and this is key, labour always lags behind capital. Even more, Marx, like Christ, not defining poverty simply in terms of material wealth, but in crushing the human spirit. Capital does not aim at a reduction of the working day but a minimizing of the labour-time necessary for producing a commodity. This doesn’t seem true. The working day today, as opposed to Victorian England, is shorter

Post-Marxist Developments

The Frankfurt school gave rise to Critical Theory, which rejected the economic determinism of Lenin. Also questioned traditional Marxist attitudes towards proletariat class consciousness. Indeed, for Marcuse economics almost falls out the picture. This explains why today's neo-conservatives, while ostensibly anti-Marxist, are in fact Frankfurtian Marxists. Marcuse doesn't demand economic determinism, so one can hold to a market economy while holding to Marxist analyses of society. Like the Republican and Democratic Parties.

Criticisms of Marx’s Analysis

Marx subsumes a lot under the term “capitalism.” Is he talking about Free Enterprise, Gangster Libertarianism, or Mercantilism? It’s not always clear. When he makes excellent points against Mercantilism (Wheen 60), he is calling it “capitalism.”
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M. A. Krul
4.0 out of 5 stars An eloquent summary of Marx
Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2008
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"Marx's Das Kapital" is noted Marx-sympathetic journalist Francis Wheen's contribution to Atlantic Magazine's series on book biographies. It's short, merely 120 pages of actual text, but it does the job well. Relying strongly on prominent secondary literature about Marx, such as David McLellan's excellent biography ( Karl Marx, Fourth Edition: A Biography ) and S.S. Prawer's equally fascinating study of Marx' use of literature and literary references ( Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford Paperbacks) ), Wheen summarizes the background of Das Kapital, how it came to be, as well as its content and its reception.

Wheen is at his best in the journalistic parts, when he can give colorful and well-done descriptions of Marx's life and activities, his relation to Engels, his trials and tribulations while working on the magnum opus, and in commentary on Marx's books and style. On the other hand, his grasp of Marx's economic theories is very weak and likely to make things more confusing, especially since he misses the point and meaning of Marx's Theory of Value entirely. Also dubious is that he appends a chapter on 'afterlife' of the book, which is mostly an attempt to summarize all of the later Marxist tradition (from an anti-Leninist viewpoint) in a few pages, a task so impossible that its attempt is fruitless and uninformative.

However, Wheen is quite good at putting Das Kapital in its historical context, in emphasizing the rhetorical and literary qualities of the book and of Marx' thought in general, and the book also contains some fascinating quotes and remarks from pro-capitalist economists and businessmen who have come to see, to their own astonishment, that ol' Marx was a better analyst of the system they wish to support than anyone else. Let us hope the reader of this booklet will be inspired by this to attempt to delve into Marx & Engels' own works, which constantly show their relevance in new and unexpected ways. As Wheen demonstrates, this is precisely as Marx had intended it.
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Top reviews from other countries

la mamand'ernest
5.0 out of 5 stars Second only to Das Krapital by Viz
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 8, 2018
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I've never read Das Kapital, and I had no idea about what it really contained until I read this revelatory book. Francis Wheen writes with great humour and I always feel when I've read one of his books that I've been educated as well as entertained.
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1.0 out of 5 stars One Star
Reviewed in India on February 24, 2015
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3.0 out of 5 stars Psychotic Marxism
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 9, 2018
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Francis Wheen attempts to do what most people avoid which is to present Das Kapital as a readable, reliable, realistic contribution to modern culture rather than just an economics textbook. Wheen claims Marx’s character was ‘a curious hybrid of ferocious self-confidence and anguished self-doubt’, that he was a tortured genius and Das Kapital being sui generis. In more direct language Marx was a psychopath who imagined a fictitious society which he sought to impose on others through bullying and, when this failed, by travelling to America to avoid debate. Marxism in action has merely confirmed this. Wheen tries provide a straight line from the early philosophical manuscripts through to Das Kapital. This is an error. Marx imbibed and regurgitated literature while growing up in a Lutheran environment led by his conforming Jewish father. He absorbed Hegel’s philosophy that’ All that is real is rational’ but recognised this as being a justification of the Prussian monarchy. Already ill at ease with anyone who did not accept his opinion without discussion he abandoned idealism in favour of materialism. As a journalist his ‘reckless belligerence’ betrayed his psychotic nature and his claim to have turned Hegel upside down (instead of having seen through its pretensions) provided the opportunity to justify political action in the name of philosophy.

Marx argued that the wealth of capitalism was based on turning people into commodities which were exchanged for other commodities. For Marx commodities had two properties use-value and exchange value.He claimed that the common element in all commodities was the fact they were the product of labour. As such his theory was similar to the labour theories of value produced by Smith and Ricardo. Marx extended this by claiming labour had the values referred to above. In Marx’s eyes value was determined by the amount of ‘socially necessary labour’ required to produce it. This could only be changed by humans, who in philosophical thought had traditionally been portrayed as objects, becoming subjects. To echo Feuerbach, ‘thought arises from being, not being from thought’. Modern economic theory has rejected Marx’s theories in favour of a theory of price determined by demand and supply. Neither theory works under imperfect competition where price is set by producers and varied according the volume of sales rather than demand influencing supply. Marx’s weakness was that he could only explain his theories by claiming that reality was a delusion.

Reality was never close to Marx’s thought. In 1848 he thought Europe was on the verge of revolution whereas populist revolts reflected political, rather than economic, demands. The idea that a great social revolution, inspired by his mythical mechanical theory history was about to take place was nonsense. Similarly the 1857 Banking crisis was imagined to be a cataclysmic event whereas it was a passing phase. Wheen imagines the Grundrisse written at the time but not published until just before the Second World War provides a link between the Paris manuscripts of 1844 and Das Kapital. He too is mistaken. Marx’s manuscripts were a restatement of German Protestant theology in secular and materialistic form. That such terms as alienation appears common to later writings is evidence of Marx’s limited mindset. Marx himself admitted ‘my sickness always originates in the mind’ but did not recognised its pathological nature. By this time he was blaming everything on the capitalist system rather than himself. The boils on his backside disappeared as soon as he completed Das Kapital.

Marx’s fundamental error was to regard his work as a science an error reinforced by Engels whose said at Marx’s burial, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history’. There is no such law and the claim that there was a special law of motion governing the present capital mode of production is similarly false. Within twenty years Marxist theory had been overthrown by other socialists and was, by 1917, dead until Lenin resurrected it and plunged Russia into seventy wasted years of human non-development. According to Wheen ‘Marx warned readers that they were entering a fantasy land where nothing is as it seems’. He lacked the intelligence to realise he was creating a fantasy land in face of the realities of everyday life. In simple terms he did not understand the mechanics of the market and dressed up his critique in ideological terms.

Das Kapital was not well received. Few shared Marx’s theoretical assumptions or appreciated his obscure presentational style. Logic and rhetoric were no substitute for clarity. Jenny Marx’s contempt for the working classes lack of interest in her husband’s theories was based on her aristocratic upbringing and ignorance of their needs. Engels tried to stir up interest in the book by sending anonymous hostile reviews to German newspapers. It was better received in Russia for whom obscurity was par for the course. In England H M Hyndman, who instigated more splits than P J Proby, produced ‘England For All’ which Marx considered had been stolen from Das Kaptial. George Bernard Shaw was an uncritical follower but failed to persuade the Fabian Society to change its ‘inevitability of progress’ approach. For them Marx had nothing to offer for a left of centre constitutional political party.

In the British Labour Party and the German SPD different factions followed constitutional and revolutionary paths. Bernstein repudiated most of Marx’s legacy, dismissing his theory of value as an abstraction which failed to explain the relationship between supply and demand. He believed capitalism could be used as a mechanism for social progress. Until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution revolutionary Marxism died outside the vanguard theories of Lenin who overturned Marx’s idea that economics determined politics and used politics to determine economics. He also rejected the idea that Marx’s theories applied to Western European countries only. The psychosis known as Marxism continues amongst the intelligentsia represented by Wheen and his ilk who lack the intelligence to reject it. Interesting read, three stars.
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john in bulgaria
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 14, 2014
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Not bad - but not what I expected..........?
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J. James
4.0 out of 5 stars mind changing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 20, 2010
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This book may not change your mind about Marxism but it certainly will about Marx. He and Engels both come out of it as the most engaging characters (!).
Wonderful introduction to Marx - bit of a page turner, in fact!
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