By Peter Osborne

Cause on letting the reader event the excitement and highbrow stimulation in analyzing vintage authors, the find out how to learn sequence will facilitate and increase your figuring out of texts important to the canon.Emphasizing the Romantic historical past and modernist legacy of Karl Marx’s writings, Peter Osborne offers Marx’s concept as a constructing research into what it ability, concretely, for people to be sensible ancient beings. Drawing on passages from quite a lot of Marx’s writings, and exhibiting the hyperlinks between them, Osborne refutes the parable of Marx as a reductively economistic philosopher. What Marx intended by means of “materialism,” “communism,” and the “critique of political economic climate” was once a lot richer and extra unique, philosophically, than is mostly famous. With the renewed globalization of capitalism for the reason that 1989, Osborne argues, Marx’s analyses of the results of commodification are extra correct this present day than ever prior to. Extracts are taken from the total breadth of Marx’s writings, together with Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, the industrial and Philosophical Manuscripts, and The Communist Manifesto to Capital.

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Extra info for How to Read Marx (How to Read)

Sample text

He fou n d his inspirati on for criticism in an article by Engels, 'O utlines of a Critique of Political Economy ' , written in the autumn of 1 843 , and sent to Marx to be p ublished in the jo ur nal he was then setting up in Paris , the German-French Yearbook. However, Engels's critique was more or less exclusively politi­ cal - he described p olitical economy as 'an entire science of C R I T I Q U E O F P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M Y: A L I E N AT I O N 49 enrichment' (MECW 3, 4 1 8) and it was little more than a schema in form.

Marx began his critique with the alienation of the product because it is the one most obvi­ ously connected to private property - the worker does not own the product. It is also the one that most directly corres­ ponds to the structure of Hegel's account of objectification. But it is not the most significant, either existentially or theo­ retically. The second feature of alienated labour is the alienation of the activity, which is more basic than the alien­ ation of the product: after all, 'the p ro duct is simply the summary of the activity' .

This is especially true of the special type of individuality associated with fragments, whereby thoughts with a universal scope ('All so cial life . . All mysteries . . ) are reduced to crys­ talline, gnomic propositions (' . . is essentially practical . . find their rational solution in . ') . Such sentences move productively, but enigmatically, between the closed whole­ ness of an image, produ ced by their brevity - they can be apprehended in a glance - and the open infinity of their meaning.

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