First edition title page of Volume I (1867)
Volume II and Volume III were published in 1885 and 1894, respectively | |
| Author | Karl Marx |
|---|---|
| Original title | Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Oekonomie |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
| Published | 1867 |
| Publisher | Verlag von Otto Meisner |
Das Kapital, also called Capital. A Critique of Political Economy (German: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, pronounced [das kapiˈtaːl kʁɪˈtiːk deːɐ poˈliːtɪʃən økonomˈiː]; 1867–1883) by Karl Marx is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, economics and politics. Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. While Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, they were both completed from his notes and published after his death by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.
Themes
In Das Kapital (1867), Marx proposes that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labor, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value. The owner of the means of production is able to claim the right to this surplus value because he or she is legally protected by the ruling regime through property rights and the legally established distribution of shares
which are by law only to be distributed to company owners and their
board members. The historical section shows how these rights were
acquired in the first place chiefly through plunder and conquest and the
activity of the merchant and "middle-man". In producing capital (produced goods), the workers continually reproduce the economic conditions by which they labour. Das Kapital
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:
- Wage-labour is the basic "cell-form" (trade unit) of a capitalist society. 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, namely 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 a historical process, no one person could control or direct it, thereby creating a global complex of social connections among capitalists.[citation needed] The economic formation (individual commerce) of a society thus precedes the human administration of an economy (organised commerce).
- The structural contradictions of a capitalist economy (German: gegensätzliche Bewegung), describe the contradictory movement originating from the two-fold character of labour and so the class struggle between labour and capital, the wage labourer and the owner of the means of production. These capitalist economic contradictions operate "behind the backs" of the capitalists and the workers as a result of their activities and yet remain beyond their immediate perceptions as men and women and as social classes.
- The economic crises (recession, depression, et cetera) 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 while 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.
After two decades of economic study and preparatory work (especially regarding the theory of surplus value), the first volume appeared in 1867 as The Production Process of Capital. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels introduced Volume II: The Circulation Process of Capital in 1885; and Volume III: The Overall Process of Capitalist Production in 1894 from manuscripts and the first volume. These three volumes are collectively known as Das Kapital.
Synopsis
Capital. Volume I
Capital, Volume I (1867) is a critical analysis of political economy, meant to reveal the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of production. The first of three volumes of Das Kapital was published on 14 September 1867, dedicated to Wilhelm Wolff and was the sole volume published in Marx's lifetime.
Capital. Volume II
Capital, Volume II, subtitled The Process of Circulation of Capital, was prepared by Engels from notes left by Marx and published in 1885. It is divided into three parts:
- The Metamorphoses of Capital and Their Circuits
- The Turnover of Capital
- The Reproduction and Circulation of the Aggregate Social Capital.
In Volume II, the main ideas behind the marketplace are to be
found, namely how value and surplus-value are realized. Its dramatis
personae, not so much the worker and the industrialist (as in Volume I),
but rather the money owner and money lender, the wholesale merchant,
the trader and the entrepreneur or functioning capitalist. Moreover,
workers appear in Volume II essentially as buyers of consumer goods and
therefore as sellers of the commodity labour power, rather than producers of value and surplus-value,
although this latter quality established in Volume I remains the solid
foundation on which the whole of the unfolding analysis is based.
Marx wrote in a letter sent to Engels on 30 April 1868: "In Book 1
[...] we content ourselves with the assumption that if in the
self-expansion process £100 becomes £110, the latter will find already in existence in the market
the elements into which it will change once more. But now we
investigate the conditions under which these elements are found at hand,
namely the social intertwining of the different capitals, of the
component parts of capital and of revenue (= s)". This intertwining,
conceived as a movement of commodities and of money, enabled Marx to
work out at least the essential elements, if not the definitive form of a
coherent theory of the trade cycle, based upon the inevitability of
periodic disequilibrium between supply and demand under the capitalist mode of production (Ernest Mandel, Intro to Volume II of Capital, 1978). Part 3 is the point of departure for the topic of capital accumulation which was given its Marxist treatment later in detail by Rosa Luxemburg, among others.
Capital. Volume III
Capital, Volume III, subtitled The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, was prepared by Engels from notes left by Marx and published in 1894.
| Part | Contents |
|---|---|
| 1 | The conversion of Surplus Value into Profit and the rate of Surplus Value into the rate of Profit |
| 2 | Conversion of Profit into Average Profit |
| 3 | The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall |
| 4 | Conversion of Commodity Capital and Money Capital into Commercial Capital and Money-Dealing Capital (Merchant's Capital) |
| 5 | Division of Profit Into Interest and Profit of Enterprise, Interest Bearing Capital. |
| 6 | Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground Rent. |
| 7 | Revenues and Their Sources |
The work is best known today for Part 3 which in summary says that as
the organic fixed capital requirements of production rise as a result
of advancements in production generally, the rate of profit tends to fall. This result which orthodox Marxists
believe is a principal contradictory characteristic leading to an
inevitable collapse of the capitalist order was held by Marx and Engels
to—as a result of various contradictions in the capitalist mode of production—result in crises
whose resolution necessitates the emergence of an entirely new mode of
production as the culmination of the same historical dialectic that led
to the emergence of capitalism from prior forms.
Intellectual influences
The purpose of Das Kapital (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 Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit. Other intellectual influences on Capital were the French socialists Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi 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 philosophers Democritus (circa 460–370 BC) and Epicurus (341–270 BC). The logical architecture of Das Kapital is derived in part from the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, including the fundamental distinction between use value and exchange value, the syllogisms (C-M-C' and M-C-M') for simple commodity circulation and the circulation of value as capital. 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 19th century, Marx's research of the available politico-economic literature required twelve years, usually in the British Library in London.
Capital, Volume IV
Karl Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, 1956
Karl Kautsky, editor of Theories of Surplus Value
At the time of his death (1883), Marx had prepared the manuscript for Das Kapital, Volume IV, a critical history of theories of surplus value of his time, the 19th 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).
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 Marx. The first translated publication of Das Kapital was in Imperial Russia in March 1872. It was the first foreign publication and the English edition appeared in 1887. Despite Tsarist censorship proscribing "the harmful doctrines of socialism and communism", the Russian censors considered Das Kapital 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 very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will understand it". Nonetheless, Marx acknowledged that Russia was the country where Das Kapital
"was read and valued more than anywhere". For instance, the Russian
edition was the fastest selling as 3,000 copies were sold in one year
while the German edition took five years to sell 1,000, therefore the
Russian translation sold fifteen times faster than the German original.
In the wake of the Great Recession caused by the global economic collapse of 2008–2009, Das Kapital was reportedly in high demand in Germany. In 2012, Red Quill Books released Capital: In Manga!,
a comic book version of Volume I which is an expanded English
translation of the wildly successful 2008 Japanese pocket version Das Kapital known as Manga de Dokuha.
Translations
The foreign editions of Capital. Critique of Political Economy (1867) by Karl Marx include a Russian translation by the revolutionary socialist Mikhail Bakunin
(1814–1876). Eventually, Marx's work was translated into all major
languages. The English translation by Samuel Moore and Marx's son-in-law
Edward Aveling of book 1, overseen by Engels, was published in 1887 as Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production by Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, & Co. and reissued in the 1970s by Progress Publishers
in Moscow while a more recent English translation was made by Ben
Fowkes and David Fernbach (the Penguin edition). The definitive critical
edition of Marx's works, known as MEGA II (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe), includes Das Kapital
in German (only the first volume is in French) and shows all the
versions and alterations made to the text as well as a very extensive
apparatus of footnotes and cross-references.
Reviews
In 2017, the historian Gareth Stedman Jones wrote in the Books and Arts section of the scientific journal Nature:
What is extraordinary about Das Kapital is that it offers a still-unrivalled picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale. It firmly embedded concepts such as commodity and capital in the lexicon. And it highlights some of the vulnerabilities of capitalism, including its unsettling disruption of states and political systems. [...] If Das Kapital has now emerged as one of the great landmarks of nineteenth-century thought, it is [because it connects] critical analysis of the economy of his time with its historical roots. In doing so, he inaugurated a debate about how best to reform or transform politics and social relations, which has gone on ever since.
Positive reception also cited the soundness of the
methodology used in producing the book, which is called immanent
critique. This approach, which starts from simple category and gradually
unfolds into complex categories, employed "internal" criticism that
finds contradiction within and between categories while discovering
aspects of reality that the categories cannot explain.
This meant that Marx had to build his arguments on historical
narratives and empirical evidence rather than the arbitrary application
of his ideas in his evaluation of capitalism.
On the other hand, Das Kapital was also criticized for a
number of supposed weaknesses. For instance, there are theorists who
claimed that this text was unable to reconcile capitalist exploitation
with prices dependent upon subjective wants in exchange relations. Marxists generally reply that only socially necessary labor time,
that is, labor which is spent on commodities for which there is
market-demand, can be considered productive labour and therefore
exploited on Marx's account. There are also those who argued that Marx's
so-called immiseration thesis is presumed to mean that the proletariat is absolutely immiserated., although the existing scholarly consensus tends towards the opposite view that Marx believed that only relative immiseration would occur, that is, a fall in labor's share of output. Marx himself frequently polemicized against the view "that the amount of real wages ... is a fixed amount".
