A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse

By: David Harvey

Narrated by: David Stifel

David Harvey tackles Marx's notebooks that have spawned wide-ranging and raging controversies

When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse—his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital—in the 1950s in New York Public Library, he recognized it as "a work of fundamental importance," but declared "its unusual form" and "obscure manner of expression, made it far from suitable for reaching a wide circle of readers."

David Harvey's Companion to Marx's Grundrisse builds upon his widely acclaimed companions to the first and second volumes of Capital in a way that will reach as wide an audience as possible. Marx's stated ambition for this text is to reveal "the exact development of the concept of capital as the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself is the foundation of bourgeois society."

While respecting Marx's desire to "bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself," David Harvey also pithily illustrates the relevance of Marx's text to understanding the troubled state of contemporary capitalism.

©2023 David Harvey (P)2023 Tantor

An engaging reflection on Marx

Marx is a lot more sophisticated a thinker than I had given him credit for. In this companion, Harvey does a wonderful job of flushing out the connections and hidden implications in Marx’s least understood work. This companion gave me a new appreciation for Marx as a theorist of systems, a thinker whose careful analysis of the pressures, patterns and feedback loops of capital leads to an incredibly sophisticated and prescient analysis of the impacts of living in a capitalist model of production. A very insightful reflection.