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Email a friendConfusing aspects of Marx's theory
STEPHEN Shapiro's short volume is intended for students about to read Karl Marx for the first time. Unlike contemporaries of Marx, many will be doing so in an environment and culture which is not conducive to understanding his basic concepts and assumptions.
Following the chapters of Volume I of Capital, Shapiro seeks to explain their content. In doing so, he makes useful connections with other parts of the work, highlighting paradoxes and apparent contradictions.
But this well-intentioned book does not fully succeed according to its own lights. It is a useful introduction and commentary at an intermediate level, for readers who already have some grasp of economic and political ideas along with a rudimentary knowledge of Marx's economic concepts.
Students without these attributes are still likely to struggle with the author's attempts to clarify or simplify Marxist notions of, for example, use value and exchange value, abstract labour and concrete labour.
His definitions of capitalism and socialism are narrow and incomplete. Surely, one of the essential hallmarks of the former is generalised commodity production, while in the first or lower stage of communism - as Marx would have called it - workers would not be paid the full value of their labour, nor would price differentials or surplus value disappear. Unless Shapiro is equating socialism with the higher stage of communism, which would be just plain wrong.
Although Marx dealt with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in Volume III of Capital, he lays the theoretical basis for it in Volume I. Shapiro's decision not to mention it at all is understandable, but it leaves a large vacuum for his readers.
In this regard, Marx's Capital by Ben Fine provides wider coverage, but is more difficult for the beginner than Shapiro. My preference for the determined and intelligent novice would still be Hunt and Sherman's Economics - An Introduction to Traditional and Radical Views or Contemporary Capitalism and Marxist Economics by Jacques Governeur.
Finally, Shapiro uses the 20th-century English language translation of Capital by Ben Fowkes, as featured in Penguin editions. With due respect to Fowkes's labours, this is a practice not to be encouraged. The 19th century translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, approved by Frederick Engels, is the one preferred by Lawrence & Wishart, Progress Publishers and the international Communist movement. It is also the version to be found in the Collected Works and retains its precision and vitality to the present day.
ROBERT GRIFFITHS