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Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics) Paperback – November 7, 1993

by Karl Marx (Author), Martin Nicolaus (Translator, Introduction)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 201 ratings
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Written during the winter of 1857-8, the Grundrisse was considered by Marx to be the first scientific elaboration of communist theory. A collection of seven notebooks on capital and money, it both develops the arguments outlined in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and explores the themes and theses that were to dominate his great later work Capital. Here, for the first time, Marx set out his own version of Hegel's dialectics and developed his mature views on labour, surplus value and profit, offering many fresh insights into alienation, automation and the dangers of capitalist society. Yet while the theories in Grundrisse make it a vital precursor to Capital, it also provides invaluable descriptions of Marx's wider-ranging philosophy, making it a unique insight into his beliefs and hopes for the foundation of a communist state.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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  1. Print length
    912 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Classics
  4. Publication date
    November 7, 1993
  5. Grade level
    12 and up
  6. Reading age
    18 years and up
  7. Dimensions
    8.5 x 5.43 x 2.13 inches
  8. ISBN-10
    0140445757
  9. ISBN-13
    978-0140445756
  10. See all details
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About the Author

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany and studied in Bonn and Berlin. Influenced by Hegel, he later reacted against idealist philosophy and began to develop his own theory of historical materialism. He related the state of society to its economic foundations and mode of production, and recommended armed revolution on the part of the proletariat. Together with Engels, who he met in Paris, he wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. He lived in England as a refugee until his death in 1888, after participating in an unsuccessful revolution in Germany. Ernst Mandel was a member of the Belgian TUV from 1954 to 1963 and was chosen for the annual Alfred Marshall Lectures by Cambridge University in 1978. He died in 1995 and the Guardian described him as 'one of the most creative and independent-minded revolutionary Marxist thinkers of the post-war world.'

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics; Reprint edition (November 7, 1993)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 912 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140445757
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140445756
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.36 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 5.43 x 2.13 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 201 ratings

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Karl Marx

Karl Marx

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Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he believed socialism would, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism. This would emerge after a transitional period called the "dictatorship of the proletariat": a period sometimes referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy". In section one of The Communist Manifesto Marx describes feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical process: We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged...the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring order into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socio-economic change.

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4.7 out of 5 stars
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Christopher Wheeler
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2023
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Great book. Very eye-opening!
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William Mitchell
5.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile read
Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2018
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Read this Title years ago, though it would be good to re-read.
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Ercan Akkaya
5.0 out of 5 stars cover of the book got damaged
Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2013
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I think it is the fault of customs office of Turkey but amazon should consider sending books in a way that even though customs offices open the package, they will not able to damage the books.
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paul
5.0 out of 5 stars Great early work of Marx
Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2013
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This book helps set the tone for later ideas expressed in Marx's more popular work. Don't just read what other have to say about Marx's work, read it firsthand. this is a perfect start.
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JPGuevara
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2018
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Excellent quality
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Edgar H. Bristol
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
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C. robe
5.0 out of 5 stars The Reinvention of Marx
Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2013
The Grundrisse was largely unavailable until the late 1960s. It provoked something of a rediscovery of Marx-- along with the publication of the 1844 manuscripts-- in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Grundrisse revealed a smoother transition between the early and later Marx than critics like Louis Althusser and others imagined. In particular, in spite of its rough form, the Grundrisse offers much more nuance to core Marxist concepts than many of his finished texts. Its opening salvo problematizes any clear division between production and consumption. Although feminist critics are correct in observing that Marx typically often under-analyzed unwaged labor, the Grundrisse draws these other forms of labor in relationship to the circuits of capital. For example, he writes, "Consumption is also immediate production . . . This is also true of every kind of consumption which in one way or another produces human beings in some particular aspect. Consumptive production." Housework could clearly apply within such an observation, which is exactly what Italian feminists began to analyze during the 1970s.

Much like Gramsci's prison notebooks, the Grundrisse offers much less of a well-systematized argument than a problematic towards understanding the processes of capitalism and the vitality of living labour. Disjointed in many parts, the Grundrisse opens itself up to multiple interpretations.

Perhaps most importantly, the Grundrisse draws attention back to class struggle in ways that Das Kapital minimizes. Marx heeds particular close attention to the alienating conditions produced not by capitalism but by laborers themselves. Capital merely extracts surplus value from living labor, but it masquerades itself as the originator of its own profits. Marx writes, "The worker produces the conditions of necessary labour as conditions belonging to capital; but also the value-creating possibility, the realization which lies as a possibility within him, now likewise exists as surplus value, surplus product, in a word as capital, as master over living labour capacity, as value endowed with its own might and will, confronting him in his abstract, objectless, purely subjective poverty. He has produced not only the alien wealth and his own poverty, but also the relation of this wealth as independent, self-sufficient wealth, relative to himself as the poverty which this wealth consumes, and from which wealth thereby draws new vital spirits unto itself, and realizes itself anew" (453). The vampiric image of capital manifests itself fully in the aforementioned passage. Furthermore, it suggests that laborer has a certain power over capitalism in refusing to allow its living labor be extracted by it.

The Italian Autonomists made a lot of Marx's famous fragment on machines section within the Grundrisse. A particularly astute reading is found within Antonio Negri's *Marx Beyond Marx*. This section is where Marx imagines production extending from mere wage labor into the general intellect, abstract knowledge. It is a world no longer defined by necessary labor time, but instead where free time reigns and is constantly harnesses by capital in the search for surplus-value. He writes how capital "on the one side, [wants] to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour" (708). He asserts "general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it." The General Intellect siphons off the surplus-value of social life, free time. One needs only to reflect on the ways in which social networking sites like twitter or facebook (or amazon reviews even) operate from harnessing the living labor of people's free time to operate and generate their valorization.

And hence the rub of how we are both subsumed and negotiating such dialectal twists where capital attempts to valorize our activity, but our activity always exceeds the bounds of capitalism, too, forcing it to reroute itself and respond to our actions. For Marx, the first step that needs to occur is recognition of us being the sources of our alienating conditions, recognizing their historical contingency and uncertainty rather than their seeming transhistorical presence. Marx writes, "The recognition of the products as its own, and the judgment that its separation from the conditions of its realization is improper-- forcibly imposed-- is an enormous [advance in] awareness, itself the product of the mode of production resting on capital, and as much the knell to its doom as, with the slave's awareness that he cannot be the property of another" (463).

Of course, like any notebooks, there is a lot of gibberish, too. One doesn't so much read the Grundrisse as navigate it. It clearly should not be one's first foray into Marx. And it is strongly recommended that one reads Das Kapital, Vol 1 and the 1844 manuscripts first to see how the Grundrisse serves as a pivot between the two texts. But it is essential reading for anyone who truly wants to understand Marxist thought and delve into some of the nuance that none of his other texts possess.
43 people found this helpful
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Angela M Anderson
3.0 out of 5 stars Like reading someone's notebooks
Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2014
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Because that's what you're doing. Reading Marx's unedited notebooks. You can understand his thought process, but know also that it is frequently roundabout, repetitive, and unclear.
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S. Majumdar
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic
Reviewed in India on November 23, 2023
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All time great book.
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Anynomous
5.0 out of 5 stars Grest
Reviewed in Canada on November 21, 2018
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One of Marx's best texts
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Rinaldo Rasa
5.0 out of 5 stars I am recommending this book, both in paper and kindle version.
Reviewed in Italy on March 23, 2018
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Two hundred years passed since the birth of Karl Marx (1818 -1883), acclaimed philosopher of scientific socialism and after Machiavelli one of the most famous thinkers about Politics in the best sense of the word.Karl Marx and his friend, Friedrich Engels, both remain in the history in the wider sense. Marx in this great book called "Grundrisse" explains the outlines of Capitalism as a stage to a better society. In the mid of 20th century (e.g.) the Frankfurt School predicted a society founded on automatons governed by the humans as supervisors (particularly Herbert Marcuse and Friedrick Pollock focused their thought on a futuristic reading of the "Grundrisse"). Some page of this book, for the readers that are open minded, is a new point of view about Communism as the realization of the destiny of Capitalism. Of course the book is full of research on the economic field with first-hand data, and it is an example, a style for economic-political researchers.
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堂垣外弘忠
5.0 out of 5 stars この本とともに、資本論全三巻は、今や混迷の「世界を経営するためのバイブル」である！
Reviewed in Japan on November 8, 2020
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　本書は、ロンドンにおいて、本格的な経済学の研究を進めた結果として、最初にできた研究ノートであって、後の「資本論」の原型であり、考え方の基礎である。欧米では、"Grundrisse"（要綱）と呼ばれて、かなり広く読まれています。日本では、専門家の間で「経済学批判要綱」等の名で知られていますが、翻訳の入手が困難であるか、高価（日本では需要が少なく、かつ、かなり大部のためか）なためか、あまり読まれていないようです。類似の題名の「経済学批判」は、これよりのちに書かれた「資本論第一巻の別バージョンのようなもの」ですから、全くの別物です。本要綱の方が、広範で基礎的な思考過程から記載されているので、資本論全三巻を読むときの参考として大変役立ちます。
　したがって、この本とともに、資本論全三巻は、資本の運動を制御するための唯一の知識を与えるバイブルですから、発展段階の異なる資本主義国および国家資本主義国が混在し、激しく変化する国際経済を扱う政治家・ビジネスマンにとってますます必須のものとなってきているのである。いわば、「世界を経営するためのバイブル」である。
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Dawid Stanczak
5.0 out of 5 stars ... of Marx's classic work on money and capital is brilliant. First class delivery and great condition make the ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 8, 2014
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This copy of Marx's classic work on money and capital is brilliant. First class delivery and great condition make the read so much better.
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