Essential Writings of Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Communist Manifesto, Wage Labor and Capital, Critique of the Gotha Program

Anyone wanting to understand — really understand Karl Marx — should read this book. Not only does this edition contain the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, but the Critique of the Gotha Program and Wage Labor and Capital.There are many editions of these manuscripts. This is my choice of the one the interested reader should pick. This Red and Black Publications has an added advantage. It is prefaced with a detailed, extensive Introduction, analyzing these notebooks. Simply reading the Introduction, in fact, is all the General Reader needs to do. The Introduction serves as a great analysis of his musings in these notebooks, but an excellent introduction of Marx’s thought.As the title indicates they consist of notebooks maintained by Marx in his early career but not published until the early 1930s. Many commentaries point to differences in his ultimate thought by placing this in his “Early Marx” as opposed to the “later Marx.” I perceive no great difference between the two periods. It is essential to understand the contents of these notebooks to fully comprehend later works like Das Kapital. Doing so with the former certainly makes the reading of the latter easier.Certainly, reading the entire manuscripts is recommended. Reading Karl Marx can be challenging. He writes as the average author of his period, which means “convoluted and complex.” He did not always write in the most clear manner, and that style is presented in his notebooks. The General Reader may consider reading these notebooks as practice in getting used to Karl Marx’s writing style.Regardless, this is a foundational work which is highly recommended.

The works themselves are what they are; how you feel about them depends on the extent to which you agree with them. However, what is universally seen in this copy are the many typos/errors. I'm only on page 60, and already I have run into perhaps 7 typos. "Man" instead of "Marx"; "tame" instead of "time"; "were" instead of "where"; "was" instead of "war"; "is" instead of "in" (perhaps the inverse of that--I'm writing this off the top of my head), and others. There was one case of a repeated word: "even even." At this rate, I won't be surprised to find any more errors such as these, but it is a little bit annoying. Overall, I'm still glad I got this book, but was it really proof read? You can still buy this of course, because in aggregate you are still getting the bulk meaning of the text--just don't cling on every word.

This is a nice collection of works. And i Like its minimalist format.The preface of this book however has an awful interpretation of Marx's work, and its continuation. As well as how it presents dialectical materialism or misrepresents it i should say. Not sure who wrote it, but one of the most egregious examples is when they include a quote from Marx to help prove their point, but do not include the full line. Either from ignorance or maliciousness

Great classic read for anyone who is interested in economics and philosophy. Great intro which integrates Marx's theorieswith contemporary systems theory, which is currently important in physics, psychology, climate studies and beyond. Critiques the ways "Marxists" have misrepresented Marx. Good read.

What can I say? A classic.

This is about the publishing job by Red And Black Publishers, not the actual content of the books (which of course are classics). I don't like giving bad reviews to small lefty publishers, but a few minutes' effort would have made this much more readable. There is almost no formatting besides the default formatting of opening a new MS Word document. The numbers in the table of contents aren't right-justified, for instance. Worse is that there is no styling of section headers or anything else, so in Wage Labour and Capital, the section heading "By what is the price of a commodity determined?" appears as just another paragraph in the same font, size, boldness, etc; it's indistinguishable from an actual paragraph. It's not unreadable but it's much less nice to read.

I bought this book in order to get an understanding of Marx's core ideas. However, as I have been reading through, I find significant typoes on most pages - words missing a letter, adding a letter or changing a letter (often to make a different actual word, which is even more confusing, like of->or, thought->though, etc), words or whole phrases repeated, and suchlike. Since Marx is really hard to understand anyway, this causes significant hindrance in understanding, and it takes a long time to work out whether something I didn't understand is a typo or is actually just Marx being Marx.It is nice to have a hard-copy book to use rather than having to read online, but I'm disappointed with the quality of this book. I'd recommend you buy one that has been more carefully produced.