Book Review – A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxian Economics

Book cover image source: Haymarket Books

Many of us would like to understand what it is about capitalism that makes it so destructive, both for us and our planet. We also want to understand why it is that capitalism and capitalists continue to do the same things over and over, even when they are completely aware of the damage they’re doing.

Enter A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxian Economics, written by Hadas Thier and published in 2020 by Haymarket Books. All pulled together in this small book, the reader gets a detailed and thorough yet easily readable and understandable tool for understanding how capitalism works and why.

What makes it so good, and so useful for busy activists? It weighs in at only 250 pages and can be easily carried around and read well in just a few weeks of consistent reading. The author, Hadas Thier, provides us with a handy glossary with concise definitions of the concepts on their own, easy to find without searching through the text itself. Without oversimplifying, her writing is still accessible. There are intuitive illustrations that visually and clearly demonstrate various concepts. The book gives us examples that every reader has heard of or seen in the news or had direct experience with (in two concise paragraphs she uses the example of a Starbucks worker to illustrate the concepts of surplus labor and value more concretely than almost any other writer we’ve read). And after almost every one of her excellent, modern descriptions and examples of these concepts, she then provides us with the famous paragraph from Marx’s original work that introduces or describes that concept. This has the dual effect of making Marx’s original 19th century language and writing style more understandable to us modern readers, while also showing us how accurate his analysis was and still is. And on top of all those positives, and despite the seriousness of her subject matter, she even manages to make us laugh in a few places.

We still recommend reading Marx’s original Capital, particularly volume one. But it will take a few months, some dedicated energy, and serious and focused study. But if you want and need to understand capitalist political-economy as quickly as possible and put the knowledge to use as you work to show others why the system itself must go, then A People’s Guide to Capitalism is the book for you.

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