Das Kapital

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Capital: Critique of Political Economy
Author(s)	Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (editor)
Original title	Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie
Country	Germany
Language	German, subsequently into many languages
Genre(s)	Economics, Political theory
Publisher	Verlag von Otto Meisner
Publication date	1867, 1885, 1894

Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (German pronunciation: [das kapiˈtaːl]; Capital: Critique of Political Economy), by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.

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Themes

In Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), Karl Marx proposes that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labour, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of profit and surplus value. The employer can claim right to the profits (new output value), because he or she owns the productive capital assets (means of production), which are legally protected by the State through property rights. In producing capital (money) rather than commodities (goods and services), the workers continually reproduce the economic conditions by which they labour. Capital proposes an explanation of the “laws of motion” of the capitalist economic system, from its origins to its future, by describing the dynamics of the accumulation of capital, the growth of wage labour, the transformation of the workplace, the concentration of capital, commercial competition, the banking system, the decline of the profit rate, land-rents, et cetera.

The critique of the political economy of capitalism proposes that:

• The commodity is the foundational “cell-form” (trade unit) of a capitalist society, which has commercial value for the owner of the means of production. Moreover, because commerce, as a human activity, implied no morality beyond that required to buy and sell goods and services, the growth of the market system made discrete entities of the economic, the moral, and the legal spheres of human activity in society; hence, subjective moral value is separate from objective economic value. Subsequently, political economy — the just distribution of wealth and “political arithmetick” about taxes — became three discrete fields of human activity: Economics, Law, and Ethics, politics and economics divorced.
• “The economic formation of society [is] a process of natural history", thus it is possible for a political economist to objectively study the scientific laws of capitalism, given that its expansion of the market system of commerce had objectified human economic relations; the use of money (cash nexus) voided religious and political illusions about its economic value, and replaced them with commodity fetishism, the belief that an object (commodity) has inherent economic value. Because societal economic formation is an historical process, no one person could control or direct it, thereby creating a global complex of social connections among capitalists; thus, the economic formation (individual commerce) of a society precedes the human administration of an economy (organised commerce).
• The structural contradictions of a capitalist economy, the gegensätzliche Bewegung, describe the contradictory movement originating from the two-fold character of labour; not the class struggle between labour and capital, the wage labourer and the owner of the means of production. These capitalist economy contradictions operate “behind the backs” of the capitalists and the workers, as a result of their activities, and yet remain beyond their perceptions as men and women and as social classes.^[1]
• The economic crises (recession, depression, etc.) that are rooted in the contradictory character of the economic value of the commodity (cell-unit) of a capitalist society, are the conditions that propitiate proletarian revolution; which the Communist Manifesto (1848) collectively identified as a weapon, forged by the capitalists, which the working class “turned against the bourgeoisie, itself”.
• In a capitalist economy, technological improvement and its consequent increased production augment the amount of material wealth (use value) in society, whilst simultaneously diminishing the economic value of the same wealth, thereby diminishing the rate of profit — a paradox characteristic of economic crisis in a capitalist economy; “poverty in the midst of plenty” consequent to over-production and under-consumption.

Capital: Critique of Political Economy

This section requires expansion.

Capital Volume I

Capital Volume II

Capital Volume III

Intellectual influences

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The purpose of Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) was a scientific foundation for the politics of the modern labour movement; the analyses were meant “to bring a science, by criticism, to the point where it can be dialectically represented” and so “reveal the law of motion of modern society” to describe how the capitalist mode of production was the precursor of the socialist mode of production. The argument is a critique of the classical economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Benjamin Franklin, drawing on the dialectical method that G.W.F. Hegel developed in The Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit; other intellectual influences upon Capital were the French socialists Charles Fourier, Comte de Saint-Simon, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; and the Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle.

At university, Marx wrote a dissertation comparing the philosophy of nature in the works of the pre-Socratic philosophers Democritus (ca. 460–370 BC) and Epicurus (341–270 BC); from which academic speculation proposes is the derivation of the logical architecture of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, because exchange value, the “syllogisms” (C-M-C' and M-C-M') for simple commodity circulation, and the circulation of value as capital, derive from the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle. Moreover, the description of machinery, under capitalist relations of production, as “self-acting automata” derives from Aristotle’s speculations about inanimate instruments capable of obeying commands as the condition for the abolition of slavery. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx’s research of the available politico-economic literature required twelve years, usually in the British Library, London.

Capital, Volume IV

Das Kapital: Karl Kautsky, author of Theories of Surplus Value.

At the time of his death (1883) Karl Marx had prepared the manuscript for Capital, Volume IV, a critical history of theories of surplus value of his time, the nineteenth century. The philosopher Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) published a partial edition of Marx’s surplus-value critique, and later published a full, three-volume edition as Theorien über den Mehrwert (Theories of Surplus Value, 1905–1910); the first volume was published in English as A History of Economic Theories (1952).^[2]

Publication

Capital, Volume I (1867) was published in Marx’s lifetime, but he died, in 1883, before completing the manuscripts for Capital, Volume II (1885) and Capital, Volume III (1894), which friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels edited and published as the work of Karl Marx. The first translated publication of Capital: Critique of Political Economy was in Imperial Russia, in March 1872. It was the first foreign publication, the English edition appeared in 1887.^[3] Despite Tsarist censorship proscribing “the harmful doctrines of socialism and communism”, the Russian censors considered Capital as a “strictly scientific work” of political economy the content of which did not apply to monarchic Russia, where “capitalist exploitation” had never occurred, and was officially dismissed, given that “that very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will understand it”; nonetheless, Karl Marx acknowledged that Russia was the country where Capital “was read and valued more than anywhere.” The Russian edition was the fastest selling. 3,000 copies were sold in 1 year while the German edition took 5 years to sell 1,000 (15 times slower). ^[4]

Translations

The foreign editions of Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), by Karl Marx, include a Russian translation by the revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). An English translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling was reissued in the 1970s by Progress Publishers in Moscow; recent English translations are by David McLellan and Ben Fowkes.

See also

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
• (PDF) Fredrick Engels' Synopsis of Capital. I. Marxists. 1868. pp. 54. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Engels_Synopsis_of_Capital.pdf.  (The first 4 parts (chapters) of the eventual 7 of Volume I)
• (PDF) Otto Ruhle's Abridgement of Karl Marx's Capital : A Critique of Political Economy. Workers' Liberty. pp. 48. http://www.workersliberty.org/system/files/fscache/FB/9B/FB9B4414. 

Footnotes

Further reading

• Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Étienne. Reading Capital. London: Verso, 2009.
• Louis Althusser (1969) How to Read Marx's Capital from Marxism Today, October 1969, 302-305. Originally appeared (in French) in Humanité on April 21, 1969.
• Bottomore, Tom, ed. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
• Fine, Ben. Marx's Capital. 5th ed. London: Pluto, 2010.
• Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx's Capital. London: Verso, 2010.
• Harvey, David. The Limits of Capital. London: Verso, 2006.
• Mandel, Ernest. Marxist Economic Theory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.
• Capital: An Abridged Edition, Karl Marx (Author), David McLellan (Editor), 2008, Oxford Paperbacks; Abridged edition, Oxford, UK. ISBN 978-0-199535-70-5
• Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Shipside, Steve. Karl Marx's Das Kapital: A Modern-day Interpretation of a True Classic. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2009. ISBN 978-1-906821-04-3
• Wheen, Francis. Marx's Das Kapital--A Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0802143945.

External links

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• 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.