WorkKarl Marx

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

The one volume of his great work Marx finished: an anatomy of capitalism that begins with a single commodity and ends at the source of profit — unpaid labour.

by Karl Marx4,095 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Das Kapital
First published: 1867(aged 49)
Original language: German

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Overview

Marx planned a work in several volumes that would lay bare the whole machinery of modern capitalism, and he finished exactly one of them. That volume, Capital, appeared in Hamburg in 1867 after nearly two decades of labour, poverty and illness, published by Otto Meissner in a first run of a thousand copies. Its method is to start from the most ordinary thing in economic life — a single commodity offered for sale — and to keep asking where its value comes from until the answer indicts the whole system. Marx's pivot is a distinction earlier economists had slid past: the worker sells not his labour but his labour-power, his capacity to work, and the employer pays for that capacity while keeping the extra value the working day produces beyond it. That unpaid surplus, hidden because the wage looks like a fair price, is where profit is born. Around it Marx builds his accounts of the factory, the fight over the length of the working day, and the bloody history he called primitive accumulation. Germany met the book with near-silence at first — Marx and Engels planted anonymous reviews to force discussion — but it found its earliest foreign readers in Russia, where the censor passed an 1872 translation as too difficult to be dangerous, and there it sold. Marx never completed the rest. Engels spent the decade after Marx died deciphering the manuscripts, publishing the second volume in 1885 and the third in 1894.

Key concepts

What is 'commodity fetishism'?

Marx's name for an illusion built into market life: the social relations between people who produce for exchange come to appear as relations between things. A price seems to be a natural property of a coat or a table, as weight is, when really it reflects the labour and the social arrangements behind it. The market hides human relations inside the objects it trades.

What's the difference between 'use value' and 'exchange value'?

Use value is a thing's usefulness, what a coat does when you wear it. Exchange value is the proportion in which it trades for other goods, so many coats for so much linen or money. Every commodity has both, and Capital opens by prising them apart, because the puzzle of where profit comes from lives in the gap between them.

What is 'socially necessary labour time'?

The measure of a commodity's value: not the hours any particular worker happened to spend, but the labour time normally required to make it under average conditions of skill and technology. A lazy or ill-equipped producer creates no extra value by working slowly. This standard is what lets Marx treat value as an objective magnitude rather than a matter of opinion.

What does the formula M-C-M' mean?

It is Marx's shorthand for capital in motion. A simple exchange runs commodity-money-commodity: you sell in order to buy something you need. Capital reverses it, money buys a commodity in order to sell for more money, M-C-M', where the prime marks the increase. That extra is surplus value, and the formula captures money used not to consume but to breed more money.

What is the 'reserve army of labour'?

The pool of unemployed and underemployed workers that capitalism constantly reproduces. As machinery and accumulation throw hands out of work, this surplus population stands ready, and its existence disciplines those in jobs, keeping wages down and workers pliant. For Marx the reserve army is not an accident of bad times but a permanent condition the system needs to function.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Hidden Source of Profit

A single commodity looks like an honest trade at its price — so where does profit come from without someone being cheated? Following value to its root turns into an indictment of the whole system.

Starting from the most ordinary thing in economic life, Marx presses on the distinction earlier economists slid past: the worker sells not his labour but his labour-power, and the employer pays for that capacity while keeping the extra value the working day yields beyond it. That unpaid surplus, hidden because the wage looks like a fair price, is where profit is born. On this pivot Marx builds his account of exploitation, the factory, and the bloody fight over the length of the working day.

commodity
value
value theory
labor
labor power
surplus value
exploitation
profit
wages
production

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Accumulation and the Machinery of Capital

Once profit is understood, how does capital renew and enlarge itself, and where did the first capital come from? The anatomy widens from a single workshop to a whole system in motion.

Around the theory of surplus value Marx assembles the dynamics of the whole: how capital splits into constant and variable parts, reproduces itself, and drives to accumulate, raising productivity while competition presses on the rate of profit. He closes volume one with the history he called primitive accumulation — the violence that first tore workers from the land. Germany met the book with near-silence, and its earliest foreign readers were in Russia; Engels assembled the later volumes from the manuscripts after Marx died.

capital
capital accumulation
accumulation
reproduction
profit rate
productivity
constant capital
variable capital
fixed capital
circulation
competition
capitalism

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Within this work

passages held: 4,095
distinct concepts: 2,230
by passages held, corpus-wide: #6

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “surplus value” and “variable capital”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 78 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
surplus value	variable capital	137
capital accumulation	surplus value	105
constant capital	variable capital	101
profit rate	surplus value	100
surplus value	wages	88
capital circulation	surplus value	87
constant capital	surplus value	81
capital turnover	surplus value	71
variable capital	wages	48
capital turnover	variable capital	43
capital accumulation	constant capital	42
capital accumulation	variable capital	40
capital circulation	variable capital	40
constant capital	profit rate	35
profit rate	variable capital	33
profit rate	wages	32
capital circulation	capital turnover	30
capital circulation	wages	28
capital accumulation	capital circulation	27
capital turnover	profit rate	24
capital accumulation	profit rate	23
capital circulation	constant capital	20
capital accumulation	wages	17
constant capital	wages	12
capital circulation	profit rate	9
capital turnover	wages	8
capital turnover	constant capital	6
capital accumulation	capital turnover	4

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1844 On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)
Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.
DE
1845 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik)
Overwhelmingly Marx's despite the shared title page, and aimed squarely at Bruno Bauer's circle. It sits on the hinge between the Young Hegelian quarrels Marx was leaving and the historical materialism he was about to work out.
DE
1848 The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei)
Commissioned to a deadline as revolution gathered in 1848, and the most public thing Marx ever put his name to — the opposite pole from the manuscripts he left unfinished in drawers. It states in a few pages the view of history his longer works spent decades grounding.
DE
1849 Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital)
An early, popular run at the economics Marx would spend the next twenty years perfecting. Engels reissued it in 1891 with the term "labour-power" set where Marx had written "labour" — repairing it with a concept that arrived only later.
DE
1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte)
Marx as historian and political analyst rather than economist or agitator: a close reading of a single French coup, written for a New York émigré paper in 1852. It handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence from the classes beneath it.
DE
1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital) you are here DE
1888 Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach)
Eleven notebook jottings, not an argument built for readers but private markers Marx set down in 1845 and Engels rescued in 1888. They register the moment he broke with Feuerbach and put human practice at the centre of his thinking.
DE
1898 Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit)
A pair of lectures rather than a book — Marx answering a fellow member at the General Council of the International in 1865, in English. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898, and it became the shortest way into the economics of Capital.
DE
1927 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts)
His earliest sustained work, written at twenty-five before he had read a page of political economy: a reckoning with the German idealism he had been raised inside. Its published introduction announced the proletariat; the manuscript behind it waited eighty years for a reader.
DE
1939 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie)
Written a decade before Capital and unknown for almost a century: the notebooks Marx filled to clarify his own thinking, rediscovered only after 1953 and central to the Marx revival that came with the New Left.
DE

— or open another of their works