By Jon Elster
A concise and entire advent to Marx's social, political and financial inspiration for the start pupil. Jon Elster surveys in flip all the major subject matters of marxist concept: method, alienation, economics, exploitation, old materialism, periods, politics, and beliefs; in a last bankruptcy he assesses 'what resides and what's useless within the philosophy of Marx'. The emphasis all through is at the analytical constitution of Marx's arguments and the strategy is immediately sympathetic, undogmatic, and rigorous.
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Extra info for An Introduction to Karl Marx
Although not in itself a source of happiness, it is the basic condition for deriving happiness and satisfaction from other sources. Consumption, to be valuable, presupposes something that is not consumption. Self-esteem can also be derived from self-externalization without self-actualization - from doing or producing something that 45 Alienation others esteem sufficiently to pay for it, even if the work itself is monotonous and boring. What about the converse possibility? Self-actualization that remains inner and mute does not provide a durable satisfaction.
If we assert 1 and 3 simultaneously. we make a contradictory statement. This shows that a statement asserting the existence of contradictions is not itself contradictory. This observation naturally provokes three queries. One might ask. first. how propositions 1 and 2 could ever obtain simultaneously. It is true that we do not often observe this extreme form of contradictory belief systems. but there are many less extreme cases of people entertaining beliefs from which a logical contradiction can be derived.
Any phenomenon can be shown to benefit a number of groups or interests, especially if we are allowed to vary the time perspective. For instance, Marx argued that state policies not in the short-term interest of capitalists might - precisely because of that fact - be in their long-term interest. If we grant, for the sake of argument, that this is in fact the case, we still have no explanation. This would require the exhibition of a mechanism by which the satisfaction of long-tenn interests generates or sustains the policies.
An Introduction to Karl Marx by Jon Elster