Marxist socialistic thinking gripped the world for the last three hundred or so years. It has empowered and at the same time enslaved, segregated and at the same time united; it has emancipated millions and at the same time subjugated them. The key book that unlashed the socialistic whirlwind is definitely is DAS KAPITAL (DK). The present work, Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography traces the life of Karl Marx from 1840 to till his death in 1883. These were the years when Marx spent his entire time and energy in writing his magnum opus. Capital overwhelmed him. Very few
works have been written in the conditions of abject poverty that Marx endured while he researched and
wrote his DK, as he said to his closest comrade Engels: “I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff.” In a lucid and
style, the author explores Marx’s writing of Capital, the conditions in which he wrote and the richness of the text.Yet the work is unfinished. In his own lifetime, Carl Marx published only the first volume of the book; the second and third volumes were published by Frederic Engels putting together from the notes and drafts. It is not true that it was his abject poverty that prevented Marx from completing his works. No, the unfinished and fragmentary nature of the most of the works points to the way his
mind worked and the style of his
work. Unlike the dialectical theory he based, his mind was dialogical. The notebooks and scraps tell us that he was constantly in dialogue with himself and with the books that he was reading. He reviewed, and reread what he wrote; he was never satisfied. He had to rewrite again often. Hi s mind was in a perpetual quest as he tried to come to terms with socio-economic reality where in his won memorable phrase, “everything solid melts into air.” His style to meet the demands of his analysis of this reality was multi-layered, moving from the philosophical to the analytical to the historical to the ironic and the literary. The biography a book is indeed relevant because the book lives on. The ideas contained therein inspire and compel. Wheen has done a commendable job.
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