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On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left. By Randy Martin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 264p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper

Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market). By Allan Megill. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 352p. $85.00 cloth, 27.95 paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2004

Paul Thomas
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley

Extract

Reviewing these books in tandem is like comparing chalk with cheese. Both Allan Megill and Randy Martin claim to center their arguments on Marx, but only Megill makes good on the claim. Indeed, what needs saying right off the bat is that Megill's Karl Marx which sheds considerable light on Marx, is by far the better book. Martin's On Your Marx by contrast, casts very little light on Marx (or anyone else). Calling attention, in one of his happier turns of phrase, to “the tinniness with which rightist clarions of triumph now sound” (p. 13), Martin says but does not show that “(h)istory has not erased Marx, but vindicated him” (p. xiv), and that Marx remains “indispensable as a point of reference” (p. xv).

Type
Book Reviews
Copyright
2003 by the American Political Science Association

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