( ) (
Capital, in the English translation)
is an extensive
treatise on
political economy written in
German by
Karl Marx
and edited in part by
Friedrich
Engels. The book is a critical analysis of
capitalism. Its first volume was published in
1867.
Themes
According to Marx, the central driving force of capitalism was in
the exploitation and alienation of
labour. The ultimate source of capitalist
profits and surplus was the unpaid labor of wage laborers.
Employers could appropriate the new output value
because of their ownership of the productive capital
assets—protected by the state. By producing output as capital for
the employers, the workers constantly reproduced the condition of
capitalism by their labor.
Title page
However, though Marx is very concerned with the social aspects of
commerce, his book is not an ethical
treatise, but an attempt to explain the objective "laws of motion"
of the capitalist system as a whole, its origins and future. He
aims to reveal the causes and dynamics of the accumulation of
capital, the growth of
wage labor, the
transformation of the workplace, the concentration of capital,
competition, the banking and credit system, the
tendency of the rate of
profit to decline, land-rents and many other things.
Marx viewed the commodity as the "cell-form" or building unit of
capitalist society—it is an object useful to somebody else, but
with a trading value for the owner. Because commercial transactions
implied no particular morality beyond that required to settle
transactions, the growth of markets caused the economic sphere and
the moral-legal sphere to become separated in society: subjective
moral value becomes separated from
objective economic value. Political economy, which was originally
thought of as a "moral science" concerned with the just
distribution of wealth, or as a
"political arithmetick" for tax collection, gave way to the
separate disciplines of
economic science,
law and ethics.
Marx believed the political economists could study the scientific
laws of capitalism in an "objective" way, because the expansion of
markets had in reality objectified most economic relations: the
cash nexus stripped away all previous
religious and political illusions (only to replace them, however,
with another kind of illusion—
commodity fetishism). Marx also says
that he viewed "the economic formation of society as a process of
natural history". The growth of commerce happened as a process
which no individual could control or direct, creating an enormously
complex web of social interconnections globally. Thus a "society"
was formed "economically" before people actually began to
consciously master the enormous productive capacity and
interconnections they had created, in order to put it collectively
to the best use.
Marx’s analysis in
Capital, then, focuses primarily on the
structural
contradictions, rather than the class
antagonisms, that characterize capitalist society—the
“contradictory movement [
gegensätzliche Bewegung] [that]
has its origin in the twofold character of labour,” rather than in
the struggle between labor and capital,
i.e. between the
owning and the
working classes. These
contradictions, moreover, operate (as Marx describes using a phrase
borrowed from Hegel) “behind the backs” of both the capitalists and
workers, that is, as a result of their activities, and yet
irreducible to their conscious awareness either as individuals or
as classes. As such,
Capital, does not propose a theory of
revolution (led by the working class and
its representatives) but rather a theory of crises as the condition
for a potential revolution, or what Marx refers to in the
Communist Manifesto as a potential
“weapon,” “forged” by the owners of capital, “turned against the
bourgeoisie itself” by the working class. Such crises, according to
Marx, are rooted in the contradictory character of the commodity,
the most fundamental social form of capitalist society. In
capitalism, improvements in technology and rising levels of
productivity increase the amount of
material
wealth (or
use values) in society
while simultaneously diminishing the
economic value of this wealth, thereby
lowering the rate of profit—a tendency that leads to the paradox,
characteristic of crises in capitalism, of “poverty in the midst of
plenty,” or more precisely, crises of overproduction in the midst
of underconsumption.
Publication
Marx published
the first volume of
Capital in 1867, but he died before he could finish the
second and third ones, which he had already drafted; these were
edited by his friend and collaborator
Friedrich Engels and published in 1885 and
1894. As can be seen in the original title pages of the final two
volumes, Engels listed Marx as the author.
Curiously, the first foreign publication of
Capital
appeared in Russia in 1872. Despite Russian censorship laws that
prohibited 'the harmful doctrines of
socialism and communism', Marx's opus was
considered by censors a 'strictly scientific work' and
non-applicable to a country where 'capitalist exploitation' had
never been experienced, with one censor going as far as saying
'that very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will
understand it.'
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution
1891-1924(London 1996) pg.139
Capital's first print
run sold out within the year, with Marx acknowledging that it was
in Russia that the book "was read and valued more than
anywhere".
Influences
Marx bases his work on that of the
classical economists like
Adam Smith,
David
Ricardo,
John Stuart Mill and
even
Benjamin Franklin. However,
he reworks these authors' ideas, so his book is a synthesis that
does not follow the lead of any one thinker. It also reflects the
dialectical methodology applied by
G.W.F. Hegel in his books
The
Science of Logic and
The Phenomenology of Mind, and
the influence of French socialists such as
Charles Fourier,
Comte de Saint-Simon, and
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Marx said himself that his aim was "to bring a science [i.e.
political economy] by criticism to the point where it can be
dialectically represented", and in this way to "reveal the law of
motion of modern society". By showing how capitalist development
was the precursor of a new, socialist
mode of production, he aimed to provide a
scientific foundation for the modern
labour movement.
In preparation for his
book, he studied the economic literature available in his time for
a period of twelve years, mainly in the British Museum
in London.
Aristotle, and
Greek philosophy in general, was another
important (although often neglected) influence on Marx’s analysis
of capitalism.
Marx’s education at Bonn
centered on
Greek and Roman poets and philosophers. The dissertation he
completed at the university was a comparison of the
philosophy of nature in the works of
Democritus and
Epicurus. A number of scholars, moreover, have
argued that the basic architecture of
Capital – including
the categories of use and
exchange
value, as well as the “
syllogisms”
for simple commodity circulation and circulation of value as
capital (C-M-C' and M-C-M’) – was derived from the
Politics and the
Nicomachean Ethics. Moreover, Marx’s
description of
machinery under capitalist
relations of production as “self-acting
automata” is a direct reference to Aristotle’s
speculations on inanimate instruments capable of following commands
as the condition for the abolition of
slavery.
Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
"Volume IV"
A so-called Volume IV which Marx had intended to publish as a
critical history of the theories of surplus-value proposed by the
various political economists, and for which he left the draft
manuscripts, was first published in part by
Karl Kautsky and later in full as
Theories
of Surplus Value (3 parts) under the auspices of the Institute
of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow by
Progress Publishers, in London by
Lawrence & Wishart and New York by International
Publishers.
Translations
Capital has been translated into many languages.
An English
edition was translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling; it was reissued in the 1970s
by Progress Publishers of
Moscow
. More recent English translations by
David McLellan and Ben Fowkes are
also widely used.
See also
Online editions
Footnotes
Further reading
- Louis Althusser (1969)
How to Read Marx's Capital from
Marxism Today, October 1969,
302-305. Originally appeared (in French) in lHumanité on April 21,
1969.
- Capital: An Abridged Edition arl Marx (Author), David
McLellan (Editor), 2008, Oxford Paperbacks; Abridged edition,
Oxford, UK. ISBN 978-0-199535-70-5
- Karl Marx's Das Kapital: A Modern-day Interpretation of a
True Classic. Steve Shipside, 2009, Infinite Ideas, Oxford,
UK. ISBN 978-1-906821-04-3
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