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Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (German pronunciation: [das kapiˈtaːl]) (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 is in the exploitation and alienation of labour. The ultimate source of capitalist profits and surplus is the unpaid labor of wage laborers. Employers can 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 reproduce the condition of capitalism by their labor.

However, though Marx is very concerned with the social aspects of commerce, his book is not an ethical treatise, but rather 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,”^[1] 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.

According to Marx, 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.'^[2] 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".^[2]

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 Library 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 (Aristotle) 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.

Online editions

Capital, Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital
Capital, Volume I in audio format, from LibriVox.
Capital, Volume I 1906 edition, downloadable text and pdf from Google Books
Capital, Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital
Capital, Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole
"Capital, Volume IV": Theories of Surplus Value

Synopses

Reading Marx's Capital -- Series of video lectures by professor David Harvey
Fredrick Engels' Synopsis of Capital (PDF). Vol. I. Marxists. 1868. p. 54. (The first 4 parts (chapters) of the eventual 7 of Volume I)
Otto Ruhle's Abridgement of Karl Marx's Capital : A Critique of Political Economy (PDF). Workers' Liberty. p. 48.

Footnotes

^ Marx, Karl. Capital: The process of capitalist production. Tr. from the 3d German edition, 53.
^ ^a ^b A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924(London 1996) pg.139

External links

Annotations, Explanations and Clarifications to Capital. Will help with understanding the early concepts.
Wage Labour and Capital. An earlier document that deals with many of the ideas later expanded in Das Kapital.
First in a series of accessible columns on Capital by Joseph Choonara in Socialist Worker
Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey A university open course, consisting of a close reading of the text of Marx's Capital Volume I in 13 video lectures.
Japan gives a comic twist to 'Das Kapital'

[1] Marx, Karl. Capital: The process of capitalist production. Tr. from the 3d German edition, 53.

[A_People's_Tragedy_1996_pg.139-2] A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924(London 1996) pg.139

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[2]

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 '''''{{lang|de|Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie}}''''' ({{IPA-de|das kapiˈtaːl}}) ('''''Capital''''', in the English translation) is an extensive [[treatise]] on [[political economy]] written in [[German language|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.