The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought

Cornel West (born 1953) is a Professor at Princeton, a philosopher, magnificent speaker, best-selling author (e.g., Race Matters, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Wisconsin Project on American Writers), etc.), and preeminent "public intellectual."

Although this book was first published in 1991, West writes in the Introduction that the book, "written over a decade ago when I was in my mid-twenties---was my attempt to understand Marxist thought as one grand stream, among others, of the larger modern articulation of historical consciousness, an articulation fanned by Romantic quests for harmony and wholeness and fueled by concrete revolutionary and reformist movements for freedom, equality, and democracy... Hence I take the reader---step by step, text by text---through Marx's own intellectual development in order to show how he incorporated modern historical consciousness ... in relation to his ethical values of individuality and democracy, and how these values clashed with what he viewed as the pernicious and vicious effects of the fundamental class-ridden capitalist processes of capital accumulation and the commodification of labor.