Marx in his own words / Tr. by Anna Bostock

The body of the book is a discussion of the central themes of Marxism, expressed mainly in Marx's own words, but Ernst Fischer and Franz Marek have also included a chronology of his life and longer passages from three of his major works: the Prefaces to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Capital, and an extract from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

'The comments set Marx very much in a contemporary perspective, showing the absurdity of the verdict of obsolescence passed by modern social commentators... Fischer is well placed to emphasize the young Karl, heady on Schiller's aesthetics and an erotic creed maintained in our own day by such libidinalist radicals as Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown... He shows that Marx foresaw problems not only of public consumption, but industrial over consumption of materials, an area emphasized recently by Buckminster Fuller and the conservationist thinkers... I don't know a better introduction to Marx' - Martin Day in The Times Educational Supplement