I decided to read this after being called a Marxist/Communist by a former patron. I'm pretty sure she doesn't know the definition of either and I am not at all convinced that I would fall into these categories. I DO know that capitalism as we know it does NOT work in the best interests for all and it thrives and functions off the oppression of the poor. I'd say more about the actual book but I am an artist and not an economist and the theories therein were only somewhat comprehensible to me. ( )

Karl Marx believed that workers were being exploited by their capitalist employers; that they were being underpaid. He thought that the "surplus value" expropriated by bosses was too high relative to the value created by workers. To prove his point he had to assess the values of commodities, not a simple thing to do. Is the value of a commodity to be determined by the labor time that went into it? By its utility? By its scarcity? In the capitalist system, values were determined by market demand, how much consumers were willing to pay. If communism eliminated market competition, how then to determine values? This is only one of many complex problems raised by "Das Kapital," which predicts and calls for revolution because capitalism, says Marx, is wasteful and unstable and pursues money, not human welfare. Whether Marx proved his point is endlessly debatable. His predictions have had mixed results. But his book asks the right questions.

This audiobook is a good introduction to the economics of Marx and the historical impact of his book. It concludes that the Communist ideology of the Soviet Union had little to do with him. ( )