Why Marx? A Story of Capital

Abstract

Why bother to talk about Marx or Marxism in the twenty-first century? Marx wrote in the nineteenth century, and a lot has changed since then — not the least of which is capitalism. So, rather than resurrect a long-dead economist who studied nineteenth-century capitalism in Western Europe, why not just look at what modern economists have to say, or, if we don’t like that, why not do what Marx himself did — analyse the modern economic system?

It is the ultimate aim of this work to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society …

Karl Marx (1977: 92)