Tips for further reading The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that Marxism is the philosophy of our time—that we cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances that engendered it. The literature about, for and against Marx and Marxism is therefore vast and ever increasing The following lists contain only a tiny fraction of all the books written on the subject, chosen for non-experts on the basis of readability, availability and up-to-dateness.
Texts
The best way to study Marx is to read what he and Engels wrote. Their most famous short writings — The Communist Manifesto; Wage-Labour and Capital; Value, Price and Profit; Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; Ludwig Feuerbach And the End of Classical German Philosophy; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and The State; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon; and Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 — are generally available in handy and cheap paperbacks published by Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, or Foreign Language Press, Peking. In the United States the International Publishing Company puts out these and many other writings by Marx and Engels.
These texts and others are usefully collected in Marx/Engels:
Selected Works In One Volume (Lawrence and Wishart,
London; International Publishing Co., New York). Further
selections include Marx/Engels: Basic Writings on Poiltics and
Philosophy, edited and introduced by Lewis S. Feuer
(Fontana, London; Doubleday, New York); and four Pelican
paperbacks: Early Writings, introduced by Lucio Colletti, and
The Revolutions of 1848, Surveys From Exile, and The First
International and After, all edited and introduced by David
Fernbach (Penguin New Left Review, London; Random
House, New York).
The three volumes of Capital are available from Lawrence
and Wishart. London and International Puhliqhinn fln Nw
paperback edited by Ernest Mandel. Engels’ Anti-Duhring is published by Progress Publishers, Moscow. The same publishers also produced the Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, as well as useful anthologies of their writings: On Britain; On Religion; On Colonialism; On Ireland.
For those who want to go further into the study of Marx and Engels, an English edition of their Collected Works in approximately 50 volumes is now under way (Lawrence and Wishart, London; International Publishing Co., New York). Six volumes have appeared thus far. Volume 3 contains the important Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and volume 5, The German Ideology
Commentaries
Useful introductions to Marx are Lenin’s essay, Karl Marx
(Foreign Language Publishing House, Peking; International
Publishing Co., New York); Karl Korsch’s Three Essays on
Marxism (Pluto Press, London; Monthly Review, New York);
David McLellari’s Marx (Fontana Modern Masters, London;
Viking, New York); and Ernst Fischer’s Marx in His Own
Words (Penguin).
Biographies
The most recent and readable biographies are: Isaiah Berlin,
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (Oxford University
Press); Werner Blumenberg, Karl Marx: an Illustrated
Biography (New Left Books, London; Herder and Herder,
New York); and David McLellari, Karl Marx: His Life and
Thought (Paladin, London; Viking, New York). These last
two contain useful lists of further reading.
Nevertheless ir the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive
monopoly.
6. Centralisation of means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children ir1 public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour inits present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.
Question 7: In what way does the proletarian differ from the
slave?
Answer; The slave is sold once and for all. The proletarian
must sell himself by the hour or by the day. Each individual
slave, being the direct property of a master, has his existence
assured, be that existence ever so wretched, if only because of
the interest of the slave owner. Each individual proletarian, the
property as it were of the whole bourgeois class, whose labor is
sold only when it is needed by the owning class, has no security
of life. Existence is merely guaranteed to the working class as a
whole. The slave is excluded from competition; the proletarian is
beset by competition and is a prey to all its fluctuations. The
slave is counted an object and not a member of civil society; the
proletarian is recognized as a person, as a member of civil
society. The slave may therefore be able to secure better
conditions of life than can the proletarian, but the proletarian
belongs to a higher stage of development of society than the
slave. The slave frees himself by rupturing, of all relations of
private ownership, only one, the relation of slavery and by this
act becomes himself a proletarian; the proletarian can only
achieve emancipation by abolishing private property in its
entirety.
Question 16: Will it be possible to bring about the abolition of private property by peaceful methods?
Answer: This is greatly to be desired, and communists would be the last persons in the world to stand in the way of a peaceful solution. Communists know only too well the futility and, indeed, the harmfulness of conspiratorial methods. They know only too well that revolutions are not made deliberately and arbitrarily, but that everywhere and at all times revolutions have been the necessary outcome of circumstances quite independent of the will or the guidance of particular parties and whole classes. But they also perceive that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries is violently suppressed. and that in this way opponents of communism are working full force to promote a revolution, then we communists will rally to the cause of the workers and be just as prompt to act as we are now to speak.
Real wages may remain the same, they may even rise, and yet relative wages fall. Let us suppose, for example, that all means of subsistence have gone down in price by two-thirds while wages per day have only fallen by one-third, that is to say, for example, from three marks to two marks. Although the worker can command a greater amount of commodities with these two marks than he previously could with three marks, yet his wages have gone down in relation to the profit of the capitalist. The profit of the capitalist (e.g. the manufacturer) has increased by one mark, that is. for a smaller sum of exchange values which he pays to the worker, the latter must produce a greater amount of exchange values than before. The share of capital relative to the share of labour has risen. The division of social wealth between capital and labour has become still more unequal. With the same capital, the capitalist commands a greater quantity of labour. The power of the capitalist class over the working class has grown, the social position of the worker has deteriorated, has been depressed one stage further below that of the capitalist. What then is the general law which determines the rise and fall of wages and profits in their reciprocal relation?
They stand in inverse ratio to each other. Capital’s share, profit, rises in the same proportion as labour’s share, wages, falls and
F vice versa. Profit rises to the extent that wages fall; it falls to the
extent that wages rise.
(Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital)
Marx to Engels, Sept. 8, 1852. “You will have seen from my letters that, as usual when I am right in the shit myself and not merely hearing about it from a distance, I show complete indifference. Anyway, qua faire? My house is a hospital and the crisis is so disrupting that it requires all my attention... The atmosphere is very disturbed: my wife is ill, Jennychen is ill and L.enchen has a kind of nervous fever. I couldn’t and can’t cell the doctor, because I have no money for the medicine. For eight or ten days I have managed to feed the family on bread and potatoes, but it is still doubtful whether I can get hold of any today... I have written no articles for Dana because I had not a penny to go and reed the newspaper... Besides there is the baker, milkman, greengrocer, and old butcher’s bills. How can I deal with all this devilish filth? And then finally, during the last eight or ten days I managed to borrow a few shillings and pence which were absolutely necessary If we were to avoid giving up the ghost. .
Karl MarxWorking in misery was not easy, and the Marx family of six became ever more proletarian in character during those London years. Sometimes Marx could not go out because his clothes were at the pawnbroker’s: Even paper to write on was lacking, as
well as the necessities for his family. During this Dean Street period, 1851, a daughter, Francesca, was born only to die in a year.
Jenny Marx describes the hard times in a letter to a friend: “Our three children lay down by us and we all wept for the little angel whose livid, lifeless body was in the next room. Our beloved child’s death occurred at the time of the hardest privation, our German friends being unable to help us just then. . . Anguish in my heart, I hurried to a French emigrant who lived not far away and used to come to see us, and begged him to help us in our terrible necessity. He immediately gave me two pounds with the friendliest sympathy. That money was used to pay for a coffin in which my child now rests in peace. She had no cradle when she came into the world and for a long time was refused a last resting place.
Iran Employment Employment in oil is very small: in
Iran only
1 percent of the employed population earn their livelihood in the industry; in Iraq 1 percent; in Saudi Arabia 2 percent. Altogether the total employment in oil in the Middle East is less than the employment in textiles in Egypt alone.
