Capital

Introduction

Capital (German Das Kapital) is Karl Marx's three-volume major theoretical work of systematic political economy. Volume I (subtitled The Process of Production of Capital) was published in 1867; Volumes II and III were edited by Friedrich Engels from Marx's manuscripts and published in 1885 and 1894 respectively, after Marx's death. Together they constitute one of the most influential single works of nineteenth-century thought and the foundational text of the Marxist tradition's economic analysis.

The project of Capital is the systematic critique of capitalist political economy. Volume I develops the foundational analysis: the commodity, the labor theory of value, surplus value, the working day, the process of capitalist accumulation. Volume II analyzes the circulation of capital. Volume III addresses the broader process of capitalist production, including the formation of the general rate of profit, the role of merchant and interest-bearing capital, and the analysis of ground rent. The work was substantial in scope, technically demanding, and self-consciously dialectical in its method.

Form, length, date, language

Capital totals approximately 800,000 words across its three published volumes in German. Volume I (the only volume Marx published in his own lifetime) is approximately 350,000 words; Volumes II and III are progressively shorter and less fully edited (Marx left them in various stages of draft, and Engels's editorial work substantially shaped how they appear in the published texts).

Volume I was published in Hamburg in 1867 in a first edition of 1,000 copies. Marx revised the text for subsequent German editions and for the French translation (1872–1875), which he treated as a substantially independent version. The relation among the various editions has been a continuing topic of textual scholarship.

Why it was written

Capital is the working out of the theoretical project Marx had been pursuing since the early 1840s: the systematic analysis of capitalism as a historical mode of production with its own structure, dynamics, and internal contradictions. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 had developed the early framework of alienation; the German Ideology (1845–1846, with Engels) had articulated historical materialism; the Grundrisse (1857–1858) had developed the immediate preparatory work; the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) had presented the first published portion. Capital is the mature realization of the project.

The specific intellectual context is the engagement with British classical political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill). Marx accepts substantial portions of the classical framework (the labor theory of value, the analysis of capital and labor) while developing it in a critical direction that the classical tradition itself had not pursued. The result is a work that engages classical political economy as a serious science while exposing what Marx takes to be its ideological function: the naturalization of the historically specific relations of capitalist production as if they were universal features of human economic life.

Structure and argument

Volume I, Part I: Commodities and Money. The opening analysis. The commodity is the elementary form of bourgeois wealth; the analysis of the commodity reveals the labor theory of value (commodities have value in proportion to the socially necessary labor required to produce them) and the famous concept of commodity fetishism (the social relations between humans that constitute capitalism take on the appearance of relations between things — the products of labor seem to have value independent of the labor that produced them).

Volume I, Part II: The Transformation of Money into Capital. The analysis of how money becomes capital. The capitalist purchases labor power on the market like any other commodity; the worker, lacking ownership of means of production, must sell their labor power to survive. The analysis sets up the central distinction of the work.

Volume I, Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus Value. The famous analysis of surplus value. The capitalist pays the worker the value of their labor power (the cost of producing the worker's continued existence as a worker); the worker, in working, produces value greater than this. The difference — surplus value — is appropriated by the capitalist. This is the source of profit and the foundation of capitalist accumulation. The Part includes the famous chapter on The Working Day (Chapter 10), which combines theoretical analysis with extensive historical documentation of the struggle over the length of the working day in nineteenth-century England.

Volume I, Part IV: The Production of Relative Surplus Value. The analysis of how technological development and increased productivity allow capital to extract more surplus value without lengthening the working day. The chapters on cooperation, manufacture, and modern industry (Chapter 13–15) develop this analysis in detail.

Volume I, Part V–VII. Further analyses of wages, the accumulation of capital, and the dynamics of capitalist development. The famous chapter on primitive accumulation (Chapter 26–33) traces the historical processes (enclosure, colonization, slavery) by which the conditions of capitalist production were established.

Volume II. The analysis of the circulation of capital: how capital moves through its cycles of production and exchange; the reproduction schemas that analyze the conditions of capitalism's continued operation.

Volume III. The most uneven of the three volumes editorially. Addresses the formation of the general rate of profit, the role of merchant and interest-bearing capital, the analysis of ground rent, and the famous (and contested) analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall — the long-term dynamic that Marx took to be one of the contradictions driving capitalism toward eventual crisis.

Key passages

• Volume I, Chapter 1 — the commodity, the labor theory of value, commodity fetishism.
• Volume I, Chapter 6 — the analysis of labor power as a commodity.
• Volume I, Chapter 7 — the analysis of the labor process and the valorization process.
• Volume I, Chapter 10 (The Working Day) — the combination of theoretical and historical analysis of the struggle over the length of the working day.
• Volume I, Chapter 15 — the analysis of machinery and modern industry.
• Volume I, Chapter 25 — the general law of capitalist accumulation; the chapter ends with the famous analysis of the reserve army of labor.
• Volume I, Chapters 26–33 — the analysis of primitive accumulation.
• Volume III, Part III — the analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Reception history

Capital was widely read in the European socialist movement from the late 1860s onward. Marx's reputation as the major theorist of socialism was substantially established by Volume I. The international reception developed gradually through the late nineteenth century, with German, French, Russian, and English translations all appearing within Marx's lifetime or shortly after.

The twentieth-century reception was shaped by political events. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent development of Marxism-Leninism made Capital the foundational economic text of a major world power; the Western Marxist tradition through Lukács, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School (especially Adorno and Marcuse), Althusser, and many others developed substantial readings independent of Soviet orthodoxy.

The academic reception in non-Marxist economics has been mixed. The labor theory of value, which is foundational to Capital's economic analysis, was largely abandoned by mainstream economics in the late nineteenth-century marginal revolution (Jevons, Menger, Walras); contemporary mainstream economics generally treats Capital as historically interesting but methodologically superseded. Heterodox economics (Sraffian, post-Keynesian, Marxian) maintains substantial engagement with Capital. The broader social-scientific and political-theoretical reception has remained continuously active.

Recent decades have seen renewed engagement with Capital outside academic Marxism. David Harvey's lecture series on Capital Volume I (begun in 1971) has become a major resource for contemporary readers; the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and subsequent crises of capitalism have produced renewed interest in Marx's analysis of capitalist dynamics; the new MEGA critical edition has continued to make the textual material available in reliable scholarly form.

Contemporary engagement

The standard scholarly editions are the MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe) and the Werke. The standard English translations are Ben Fowkes's Penguin edition of Volume I (1976), David Fernbach's Penguin editions of Volumes II and III (1978, 1981), and the older Moore-Aveling translation (still in use). Major recent scholarly work includes David Harvey's A Companion to Marx's Capital (Volume 1, 2010; Volume 2, 2013), Michael Heinrich's An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital (2012), and the substantial work of Moishe Postone, Robert Albritton, and others. Active scholarly debates concern the consistency of the labor theory of value with the analysis of prices in Volume III (the transformation problem), the relation between Marx's economic analysis and contemporary capitalism, the proper interpretation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the editorial relation between Marx's manuscripts and Engels's published versions of Volumes II and III.

Further reading

• Marx — the author
• German Idealism — the philosophical tradition behind the dialectical method
• Hegel — the philosophical predecessor whose dialectic Marx materialized
• Phenomenology of Spirit — the Hegelian work that shaped Marx's method
• Dialectic — the methodological core
• Justice — the political concept the analysis implicitly engages

Marx's major theoretical work. The foundational text of Marxist economic analysis.