Category: Book Review

‘Alienation: an Introduction to Marx’s Theory’ by Dan Swain is a introduction to a German philosopher, sociologist, economist and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx. Swain comments thought and economic theory of Marx by his key concept ‘alienation’.

Digests of each chapters are below.
Introduction – Marx described how our human activity could come to be experienced as something external, alien and hostile to us as the theory of alienation. Alienation affects negative to our body and mind.
Chapter 1 – Contemporary economics ignores social and political dimensions of economy. Classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricard considered the wealth in the relation among human beings, nature, labour and objects. Also Jean-Jaques French philosopher Rousseau stated technological and scientific progress brought misery, inequality and moral problem in people’s economic institutions. According to him, alienation brought individual rights and liberty, but we can’t give away them.
Chapter 2 – Marx’s philosophical thought mainly succeed to ideas of Georg Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. He was a Left Hegelian disputant. But Marx criticise both Hegel and Feuerbach, such as Hegel’s positive idealism, Feuerbach’s thought of ‘education settle the problem of alienation’ and his static conception of human nature, then he developed his own theory of alienation.
Chapter 3 – Capitalist society required dividing society into two classes, the bourgeoisie (capitalists) and the proletariat (workers). Proletarians have no means production and are in miserable condition. Though Marx believed that the proletariat is the class can abolish capitalism and class division by their collective struggles.
Chapter 4 – Essentially, human labour is collective, conscious and transforming engagement with the natural world. In capitalism society, labour works are shaped by wages. For Marx, alienation means lack of control of our process of production. The human labour transformed into a commodity, the affair is the most fundamental form of alienation in capitalism.
Chapter 5 – Under capitalism it occurs alienation from product. Proletarians work to produce things they can’t own themselves. The labour embodied by capital is as ‘dead’. The worker performs more, he pours into the dead labour.
Chapter 6 – People relate to each other through commodities. Marx defined it as ‘commodity fetishism’. Products of labour appears as piles of abstract labour. Thus our social and personal life become commodified and is regarded as a particular value form.
Chapter 7 – Alienation of labour altered our social life and relationships with others. Capitalism and its alienated labour place the second order mediation between man and man. Capitalism causes not only struggle between classes, but also its alienation encourages proletarians to compete with workmates. Even capitalists are slaves to their own inclinations and the markets.
Chapter 8 – Marx argued, capitalism also bad for our individuality. Organized labour work and its alienation harm our physical and mental condition. Under capitalism, we’ve lost control of ourselves.
Chapter 9 – Our alienation form labour and products also means becoming alienated from the natural world in which we live and work. This drives capitalist production that extend productivity itself. The global environment is catastrophically damaged by repetitions of these processes.
Chapter 10 – A new from of labour now dominated is ‘immaterial labour’ which means the production or manipulation of symbols, texts, emotions of feelings. And bosses in company restrained by his leadership and ‘employee autonomy’. Also one feature of labour market on these days is increasing the workers get ‘over-qualified’ jobs, the jobs need degree-level or higher qualifications. Problems of alienation of work still continues today.
Chapter 11 – ‘Young Marx’ thought labour as the way in which we can find fulfilment in the world also under capitalism society. And he argued that great productivity of capitalism reduce working time and give people to more leisure time and recreational activity. But ‘Mature Marx’, in ‘Capital’, would be changed his view point. The capitalist system is autonomous process breeds ills. There’s no human nature in it.
Chapter 12 – Engels argued by the concept of ‘socialised production’, the capitalist production is social and maintained an individualised method of exchange. The capitalist production processes are collective and cooperative, but the products are distributed to people entirely individually. This ambivalence is one of the causes of crisis within capitalism society.
Chapter 13 – Capitalism alienated people from each other and from themselves. And Marx believed people exist in alienated positions in society, the matter make difficult for people to illustrate the detailed shape of an alternative society. His settlement to problem of alienated labour lay in the need for revolution by proletarians. Revolution is a essential thing of overcoming alienation.

In this book, Dan Swain introduces and comments Marx’s theory, various topics of economics and today’s social problems by young Marx’s key concept ‘alienation’. Simultaneously Swain criticise the concept and Marx’s theory, and presents many opinions about them.
Author would think economics of Marx is a theory of relationship between products or production work and human nature or human being. Alienation is key to understand the economics. The concept of alienation has ambivalent aspects. Alienation made human nature independent from natural nature, as the same time alienated labour separated human nature from their own products and production. I think alienation is not only a negative concept or situation. Alienation from natural nature and products or commodities in democratic capitalism societies can make us control ourself, include fashion, education, media and medical service.
I think some chapters go beyond Marx’s own theory. They are only reports of today’s economic issues. Marx is a 19th century person, his theory restricted by the historical dogma and he couldn’t overcome his own ideology. Marx’s theory as it is, should not adjust to today’s problem. And I think author has dogmatic left-wing thinkings like below ‘Major companies exploit poor people.’, ‘Brand is bad and only a commercial mark tempts consumers.’…
But this book is one of lucid, comparatively critical and totally good introduction to Marx’s theory and ‘economics’ that is consideration on relationship between human beings and their products.

Alienation: An Introduction to Marx’s Theory
Dan Swain
Bookmarks Publications, London, 1 May 2012
112 pages, £5.00
ISBN: 978-1905192922
Contents:
Introduction
1. Alienation and Enlightenment
2. Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx
3. A Universal Class
4. Alienation from the Labour Process
5. Alienation from Product
6. Commodity Fetichism
7. Alienation from Others
8. Alienation from Self
9. Alienation from Nature
10. Has Work Changed?
11. Species-being and Controversies of Interpretation
12. Collective Control
13. Revolution
Further Reading
Notes

‘Marx’s Das Capital For Beginners’ by Michael Wayne and Sungyoon Choi is a introduction to ‘Das Kapital’ (Capital), the masterpiece in the modern world, by a German philosopher, sociologist, economist and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx.

Digests of each chapters are below.
Introduction – ‘Das Kapital’ is a criticism to capitalism, not only a explain about it. Marx’s economics in the book peculiar. it includes economics, philosophy, politics, sociology, history and literature. The chief aim of his consideration in ‘Das Kapital’ is why and how economic categories such as money, profit, capital and so forth actively repress the social content with determines them.
Chapter 1 – Commodity has a use value and an exchange value. Human beings have always produced use values in order to survive and in order to develop. But in capitalism society, use values are combined with exchange values. Exchange value is the value to exchange for each other and it finds its expression in price. The value is measured by money, means of easily exchange. Money is pure exchange value can exchange different qualities of commodities. On the hand human labor turned abstract, and this abstract labor produces value of commodities, then is equivalent, can be exchanged and measured by money.
Chapter 2 – Basically, our economics and daily life carry on circulation of equivalent exchange money and commodity in market. But, in capitalist or bourgeois society people are motivated by the pursuit of self-interest. Surplus value added commodities and the phenomenon brings imbalance and inequality to capitalist society.
Chapter 3 – Marx thought there are two circuits of exchange one is the simple circulation of commodities, another is the circulation of money as capital. The circulation of money, adds to itself a surplus value, which converts into capital. Workers sold their labor power in labor market. Labor became a commodity to be purchased by capitalists. Also human labor is the source of all social wealth, and produce ‘surplus’ value need not for survival. But capitalists don’t pay wages to ‘surplus labor time’ by Workers, which produces surplus values.
Chapter 4 – Author explains how Marx think about value. Marx divides capital into two types: constant capital and variable capital. Constant capital is the means and materials of production such as building, machine and raw materials. Variable capital is the human labor employed by capitalist. Value doesn’t produced only by constant capital. Making use of variable capital with constant capital adds value to commodities, and produces surplus values.
Chapter 5 – Author argues working condition and problems in modern world. Capitalists exploited surplus value produced by surplus labor work to gain private property. On the other hand, to produce surplus value, capitalist needs surplus labor by workers. Also innovation of technology made manager class labor workers. But excesses of surplus value consequences prices fall. Marx suggested innovation of technology shorten working hours, liberate human being from nature, and increase wealth for everyone. Marx is not only a revolutionist but also he considered social reforms by making use of the merits of capitalism.
Chapter 6 – Capitalist production is the system of reproducing production, and continuously extend the scale of itself. And, by Marx, capitalism expand and crises by overproduction. The causes are conflicts with the social inequalities caused by capitalism itself, and breakdowns in the flow of value caused by market competition. One of the consequences of crisis is the ‘centralization of capital’ which is the process whereby one portion of capital annexes, takes over and absorbs another portion of capital. And the process interacts with the ‘concentration of capital’ which refers to the growing mass of capital as a whole as more and more capital is accumulated.
Chapter 7 – Under capitalism, fetishism took the form of the commodity. The free worker is separated from the mean of production, the goods he produce. The commodity fetishism made by relationships of market, capital, commodities and money dominates our lives. Although the capitalist market made a realm of liberation, freedom, empowerment and individual agency. The general exchange of activities and products appears as to be a wide sphere of subjective and individual freedom. Influences of the material capitalist production dominate the means of mental production, and realized the ruling ideas of the ruling class. Phenomenal forms of the capitalist system (capital, commodities, exchange, markets, competition and so on) construct the idea-system or ideology. The idea system or ideology of bourgeois control social and economic interests, grasp ‘hegemony’ of a society.
Chapter 7 – Capitalism inverted the connection of human needs and their production. Value dominates the life of the human community, and people live in the world of commodity fetishism. Marx showed how capitalism placed the foundations for its own overthrow and its contradiction made the that necessary. The basis of transforming capitalism is capitalism itself.

This is a elementary introduction to ‘Das Capital’, not Marx’s entire life and thought. Author concentrates on comments on useful essences of ‘Das Kapital’ by making use of the fundamental economic key concepts of ‘Marx’s political economy’ such as capital, commodity, surplus value, fetishism and ideology. And he explains the theory of ‘Das Kapital’ by examples of economic cases, social affairs and social problems on contemporary society. Also he quotes statements to Marx and capitalism problems of many thinkers. Author comments a reasonable and neutral view point to Marx, neither criticise nor applause. In each chapters, he mainly states ‘how Marx thought’ in ‘Das Kapital’ and other works, then he applied Marx theory to today’s actual economic scene in modern and contemporary times. the system of capitalism
By this book you can grasp and make out Marx’s economics or political economy. I think today’s significance of Marxist theory is in his consideration on relations among human beings, money, labor (or work), objects (or commodities) and some values (include capitals), not like numerical value on accounts or finance in the contemporary economics. But Marx himself was swayed by and couldn’t overcome the historical ideology and historical limit. I think we need criticise, extent and apply Marx’s economic theory.
This book is only a easy commentary to theories in ‘Das Kapital’, and author states a few his own answer and conclusion. So yet this book is an excellent first-step primer on Karl Marx or his voluminous great work ‘Das Kapital’.

And this book is one book of ‘For Beginners’ series, but it is not cartoon guide book, only attaches Illustrations in text. So it’s very readable to me.

Marx’s Das Capital For Beginners (For Beginners)
Michael Wayne, Illustrations by Sungyoon Choi
For Beginners LLC, Danbury, 29 May 2012
144 pages $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-934389-59-1
Contents:
Introduction
1. The Commodity
2. The Exchange of Commodities
3. Circulation and the Buying of Labor-Power
4. Value
5. Work Under Capitalism
6. Reproduction and Crises
7. Commodity Fetishism and Ideology
8. After Capitalism?