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Rating: 
Summary: Dialetical Materialism taking form
Review: I derived great amusement from the book's cover being that atrocious shade of hot pink. Perhaps red was too provocative for them?
Moving on to the contents itself, this books shows Marx's interesting interpretation of economics and its histroy. For such a dry topic, I found Marx's prose entertaining. He's not a skillful writer, such as Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, some of his sentences are long and torturous. But when his prose is overheated it is quite amusing. "Money is the pimp and whore of all nations."
His idea of alienation is not perhaps fully accurate psychologically, but it is a profound insight into our modern condition. Looking at the entertainment and advertising super-structure of Western society, you cannot help but be sickened by the objectification of man.
Class struggle is also interesting. That often seems to be true. The point is illustrated when higher tax breaks are given to the rich apposed to the poor.
I find it doubtful that all of history is subservient to an abstract economic movement though. This reduces man to a wholly material being as much as the machinery of capitalism does. Not that his cry to change the structure of society should go unheard. The most disturbing aspect is the way that Marx's ideas were implemented. The fact that the people in power are corrupt and pervert ideas to their own end says nothing about the idea itself. A highly readable introduction to Marx.
Rating:
Summary: The Marxian question
Review: The Paris manuscripts go back to a young and idealist Marx - perhaps one which few would bother to read, as today the concentration (and much contempt of Marxian theory) is based on his contributons to the understandings of a communist state. All that can be said is that Marx was trying not only to understand man as "homo economicus" (as seen clearly in Capital) but also as "homo sociologicus"...a fact which students of sociology should not forget.
Rating: 
Summary: Essential Marxism
Review: With the crumbling of the Berlin Wall--symbolizing for many the end of the relevance of Marx's political theory--and the veering toward a "third way" (read, neo-liberal way) in various Western European countries by formerly avowed socialist parties, Marxism, and its brand of socialism, is now universally assumed to be an historical artifact, and maybe neither a very interesting nor productive one at that. "The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844" offers a point of rebuttal to those neo-liberals and their quick-handed assumptions that the totality of Marx's theory can be gleaned from The Communist Manifesto, a work written with the intention of motivating political action. The "Manuscripts" is an essential read for those seeking Marx's revlevancy in the 21st century.
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