by Peter Singer
Marx: A Very Short Introduction
* * *
Very Short Introductions are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in more than 25 languages worldwide.
The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. Over the next few years it will grow to a library of around 200 volumes – a Very Short Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to conceptual art and cosmology.
* * *
Very Short Introductions available now:
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas
THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair
ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia
ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn
ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne
ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes
ART HISTORY Dana Arnold
ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland
THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin
ATHEISM Julian Baggini
AUGUSTINE Henry Chadwick
BARTHES Jonathan Culler
THE BIBLE John Riches
BRITISH POLITICS Anthony Wright
BUDDHA Michael Carrithers
BUDDHISM Damien Keown
CAPITALISM James Fulcher
THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe
CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham
CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson
CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson
CLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard
THE COLD WAR Robert McMahon
CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Simon Critchley
COSMOLOGY Peter Coles
CRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and Sean Murphy
DADA AND SURREALISM David Hopkins
DARWIN Jonathan Howard
DEMOCRACY Bernard Crick
DESCARTES Tom Sorell
DRUGS Leslie Iversen
THE EARTH Martin Redfern
EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY Geraldine Pinch
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford
THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball
EMOTION Dylan Evans
EMPIRE Stephen Howe
ENGELS Terrell Carver
ETHICS Simon Blackburn
THE EUROPEAN UNION John Pinder
EVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth
FASCISM Kevin Passmore
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle
FREUD Anthony Storr
GALILEO Stillman Drake
GANDHI Bhikhu Parekh
GLOBALIZATION Manfred Steger
HEGEL Peter Singer
HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood
HINDUISM Kim Knott
HISTORY John H. Arnold
HOBBES Richard Tuck
HUME A. J. Ayer
IDEOLOGY Michael Freeden
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton
INTELLIGENCE Ian J. Deary
ISLAM Malise Ruthven
JUDAISM Norman Solomon
JUNG Anthony Stevens
KANT Roger Scruton
KIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner
THE KORAN Michael Cook
LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews
LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler
LOCKE John Dunn
LOGIC Graham Priest
MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner
MARX Peter Singer
MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers
MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths
MODERN IRELAND Senia Pašeta
MOLECULES Philip Ball
MUSIC Nicholas Cook
NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew
NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland
PAUL E. P. Sanders
PHILOSOPHY Edward Craig
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Samir Okasha
PLATO Julia Annas
POLITICS Kenneth Minogue
POSTCOLONIALISM Robert Young
POSTMODERNISM Christopher Butler
POSTSTRUCTURALISM Catherine Belsey
PREHISTORY Chris Gosden
PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Catherine Osborne
PSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus
QUANTUM THEORY John Polkinghorne
ROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway
ROUSSEAU Robert Wokler
RUSSELL A. C. Grayling
RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION S. A. Smith
SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone
SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway
SHAKESPEARE Germaine Greer
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just
SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce
SOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor
SPINOZA Roger Scruton
STUART BRITAIN John Morrill
TERRORISM Charles Townshend
THEOLOGY David F. Ford
Available soon:
THE TUDORS John Guy
TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan
WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling
WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman
AFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone
ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw
THE BRAIN Michael O’Shea
BUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown
CHAOS Leonard Smith
CHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead
CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy
CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE Robert Tavernor
CLONING Arlene Judith Klotzko
CONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass
THE CRUSADES Christopher Tyerman
DERRIDA Simon Glendinning
DESIGN John Heskett
DINOSAURS David Norman
DREAMING J. Allan Hobson
ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta
THE END OF THE WORLD Bill McGuire
EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn
THE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard
FREE WILL Thomas Pink
FUNDAMENTALISM Malise Ruthven
HABERMAS Gordon Finlayson
HIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson
HIROSHIMA B. R. Tomlinson
HUMAN EVOLUTION Bernard Wood
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Paul Wilkinson
JAZZ Brian Morton
MANDELA Tom Lodge
MEDICAL ETHICS Tony Hope
THE MIND Martin Davies
MYTH Robert Segal
NATIONALISM Steven Grosby
PERCEPTION Richard Gregory
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot
PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards
THE RAJ Denis Judd
THE RENAISSANCE Jerry Brotton
RENAISSANCE ART Geraldine Johnson
SARTRE Christina Howells
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Helen Graham
TRAGEDY Adrian Poole
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Martin Conway
For more information visit our web site www.oup.co.uk/vsi
Marx A Very Short Introduction
Peter Singer
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© Peter Singer 1980
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 1980 as an Oxford University Press paperback
Reissued 1996
First published as a Very Short Introduction 2000
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographic rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 13: 978–0–19–285405–6
ISBN 10: 0–19–285405–4
9 10
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
1 A Life and its Impact
2 The Young Hegelian
3 From God to Money
4 Enter the Proletariat
5 The First Marxism
6 Alienation as a Theory of History
7 The Goal of History
8 Economics
9 Communism
10 An Assessment
Note on Sources
Further Reading
Index
Preface
There are many books on Marx, but a good brief introduction to his thought is still hard to find. Marx wrote at such enormous length, on so many different subjects, that it is not easy to see his ideas as a whole. I believe that there is a central idea, a vision of the world, which unifies all of Marx’s thought and explains what would otherwise be puzzling features of it. In this book I try to say, in terms comprehensible to those with little or no previous knowledge of Marx’s writings, what this central vision is. If I have succeeded, I need no further excuse for having added yet another book to the already abundant literature on Marx and Marxism.
For biographical details of Marx’s life, I am especially indebted to David McLellan’s fine work, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (Macmillan, London, 1973). My view of Marx’s conception of history was affected by G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979), although I do not accept all the conclusions of that challenging study. Gerald Cohen sent me detailed comments on the draft of this book, enabling me to correct several errors. Robert Heilbroner, Renata Singer, and Marilyn Weltz also made helpful comments on the draft, for which I am grateful.
In the interest of clear prose I have occasionally made minor amendments to the translations of Marx’s works from which I have quoted.
Finally, were it not for an invitation to take part in this series from Keith Thomas, the general editor of the series, and Henry Hardy, of Oxford University Press, I would never have attempted to write this book; and were it not for a period of leave granted me by Monash University, I would never have written it.
Peter Singer
Washington, DC, June 1979
Abbreviations
References in the text to Marx’s writings are generally given by an abbreviation of the title, followed by a page reference. Unless otherwise indicated below, these page references are to David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977).
B
‘On Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’
C I
Capital, Volume I (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1961)
C III
Capital, Volume III
CM
Communist Manifesto
D
Doctoral thesis
EB
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
EPM
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
G
Grundrisse (translated M. Nicolaus, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973)
GI
The German Ideology
GP
‘Critique of the Gotha Program’
I
‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’
J
‘On the Jewish Question’
M
‘On James Mill’ (notebook)
MC
Letters and miscellaneous writings cited in David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (Macmillan, London, 1973)
P
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
PP
The Poverty of Philosophy
R
Correspondence with Ruge of 1843
T
‘Theses on Feuerbach’
WLC
Wage Labour and Capital
WPP
‘Wages, Price and Profit’ (in K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1951)
List of Illustrations
1 Karl Marx (1818–83) 2
2 Lithograph showing the young Marx (1836) at a drinking club of Trier students at the University of Bonn
Courtesy of the International
Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam
3 The exterior of 41 Maitland Park Road, Haverstock Hill, London, where Marx spent the last fifteen years of his life
Courtesy of Hulton Getty
4 Marx with his eldest daughter, Jenny, in 1870
Courtesy of Hulton Getty
5 G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831)
6 Marx in 1836, aged 18.
Detail from the lithograph on p. 4
Courtesy of the International
Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam
7 Ludwig Feuerbach
(1804–72)
Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture
Library
8 Friedrich Engels
(1820–95) 45
9 English factories in the mid-nineteenth century: men and women at work in the Patent Renewable Stocking Factory at Tewkesbury in 1860
Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture
Library
10 David Ricardo (1772–1823)
Courtesy of Hulton Getty
11 The round reading room of the old British Library, opened in 1842, where Marx worked on Das Kapital
Courtesy of Hulton Getty
12 Cover of the first German edition of Das Kapital, vol. 1
Courtesy of AKG London
13 Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery in London
Courtesy of Hulton Getty
14 Joseph Stalin (1879–1953)
Courtesy of Hulton Getty
15 Military tanks passing a mural of key communist figures in a 1974 parade in Havana, Cuba, marking the anniversary of the Revolution
Courtesy of Miroslav Zaji/Corbis
The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
