All I demand of the reader, James Joyce is supposed to have remarked of Finnegans Wake, is his lifetime. Fortunately and unfortunately, Karl Marx makes the same claim. Fortunately, because his work is so vast and rich that you can profitably spend a lifetime assimilating both its specific insights and a methodology that enables you to confront new and unprecedented realities. Unfortunately, because it is impossible to dabble in Marx. Such otherwise brilliant scholars as Karl Popper and Paul Samuelson have often written downright silly things about Marxism after acquiring a tourist's knowledge of it. There is probably a larger library of worthless writings on Marx than on any other major thinker in Western culture.