Das Kapital

Why is Capital Marx's principal work?

If the Communist Manifesto is the movement's programme, Capital is the economic analysis that programme rests on. In the 1867 preface to Volume I Marx stated his aim: "it is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society". It tries to explain as one system why capitalism grows without end and runs into crises, how a worker paid a fair wage is nonetheless exploited, and why wealth piles up on one side.

… und es ist der letzte Endzweck dieses Werks, das ökonomische Bewegungsgesetz der modernen Gesellschaft zu enthüllen …

The subtitle is "Critique of Political Economy". As the German Wikipedia explains, "critique" here means not condemnation but, in the sense current since Kant, an examination of the premises a discipline rests on and of its inner contradictions. Marx took over the results of the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo while showing that the categories they treated as eternal laws of nature are forms of a particular historical society. Capital thus stands where the three sources of Marxism meet: German classical philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

How was it written and how many volumes appeared?

Capital was the fruit of decades of research. According to the English Wikipedia, Marx drew up a plan in 1857 for six books, on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market and crises; after the vast draft of 1857–1858 known as the Grundrisse he published the first instalment of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859. According to the German Wikipedia, the manuscript written in 23 notebooks between January 1862 and July 1863 was the first systematic draft of Capital, and its historical part later became the Theories of Surplus Value.

Volume I appeared in mid-September 1867 from the Hamburg publisher Otto Meissner in an edition of 1,000 copies. For the second edition of 1872–1873 Marx substantially rewrote the first chapter, on the commodity. The first translation was Russian. According to the Russian Wikipedia, Nikolai Danielson initiated it; Mikhail Bakunin began and gave up, German Lopatin translated a third, and Danielson and Nikolai Lyubavin finished it, so that 3,000 copies appeared in St Petersburg in April 1872. According to the English Wikipedia the censors passed it on the grounds that its complex arguments had no application to Russia and so could not be subversive, and Marx noted in his afterword to the second edition that it was almost sold out. The French edition, issued in instalments in 1872–1875, was translated by Joseph Roy and so heavily reworked by Marx, who rewrote whole passages, that it was the last version he revised.

After Marx's death in 1883 Engels brought out the third (1883) and fourth (1890) editions of Volume I, taking in part of the French revisions, and in 1887 the first English edition appeared, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Engels, with Marx's youngest daughter Eleanor restoring the English originals of the quotations. Engels then spent the last decade or so of his life on the remaining manuscripts. In the 1885 preface to Volume II he described drafts mostly not worked out in language and a handwriting Marx himself sometimes could not read, and wrote: "I have confined myself to reproducing the manuscripts as literally as possible." Volume III, published in 1894, rested essentially on a single manuscript of 1864–1865 and bears more of Engels's hand. Its last chapter, chapter 52 on "Classes", ends after a few paragraphs with the editorial note "here the manuscript breaks off".

Ich habe mich damit begnügt, die Manuskripte so wörtlich wie möglich wiederzugeben …

After Engels's death Karl Kautsky edited the historical part of the 1861–1863 manuscript as the three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value (1905–1910). Since Marx had planned this part as the historical-critical "fourth book" of Capital, it is often called Volume IV. Today the new historical-critical edition MEGA² prints the manuscripts and the editions separately, and how faithfully Engels's editing rendered Marx's intentions has become a subject of research.

How is Volume I organised?

Volume I opens: "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an 'immense collection of commodities', the individual commodity as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity."

Der Reichtum der Gesellschaften, in welchen kapitalistische Produktionsweise herrscht, erscheint als eine „ungeheure Warensammlung“, die einzelne Ware als seine Elementarform.

Part One, "Commodities and Money", starts from the two faces of the commodity, use value and value, with socially necessary labour time as the substance of value, and proceeds to the formation of money. Its last section is on commodity fetishism: the relations between people's labours appear on the market as relations between things, as movements of prices. "It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which here assumes for them the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things." The passage became the starting point for later discussions of reification and alienation.

Es ist nur das bestimmte gesellschaftliche Verhältnis der Menschen selbst, welches hier für sie die phantasmagorische Form eines Verhältnisses von Dingen annimmt.

Part Two, "The Transformation of Money into Capital", brings the decisive discovery. The market offers one commodity whose use creates more value than it has itself: labour-power. The capitalist buys labour-power at its value, the worker's means of subsistence, yet has the working day create more value than that, and keeps the difference. This is surplus value, the secret of how exploitation takes place although exchange is fair. Parts Three to Five treat absolute surplus value, gained by lengthening the working day, and relative surplus value, gained by raising productivity, describing from the reports of the English factory inspectors the struggle over the working day (chapter 8), co-operation, manufacture, and machinery and large-scale industry. Part Six shows why wages appear to pay for the whole of labour.

Part Seven, "The Process of Accumulation of Capital", follows surplus value as it becomes capital again. Chapter 23 sets out "the general law of capitalist accumulation", under which accumulation produces an "industrial reserve army" of the unemployed, wealth at one pole and misery at the other. Chapter 24, "The So-Called Primitive Accumulation", shows that capitalism began not with industrious saving but with the expropriation of the peasantry, colonial plunder and state violence: "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one." The chapter also forecasts capitalism's end: "The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."

Die Stunde des kapitalistischen Privateigentums schlägt. Die Expropriateurs werden expropriiert.

What do Volumes II and III cover?

If Volume I deals with how surplus value arises in production, Volume II deals with the fact that it must be realised by sale. Capital circulates through the forms of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital, and its turnover time affects the size of capital and of profit. The reproduction schemes of the last part calculate under what conditions exchange between the department producing means of production and the department producing consumer goods balances out. The schemes were taken up again in Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital (1913).

Volume III deals with how surplus value appears on the surface of competition. Surplus value appears as profit and the rate of surplus value as the rate of profit; competition among capitals evens out different rates of profit into an average rate and turns values into prices of production. This "transformation problem" set off a long dispute over its mathematical solution. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the organic composition of capital rises, and the factors counteracting it, follow, then merchant capital, interest-bearing capital and credit, fictitious capital, and ground rent. The last part concludes that the "trinity formula", in which capital yields profit, land rent and labour wages, hides that all three revenues flow from one source, the value created by living labour.

What does turning Hegel upside down mean?

The most quoted text on the method of Capital is the afterword to the second edition of 1873. Answering German reviewers who decried "Hegelian sophistry", Marx wrote: "My dialectical method is in its foundation not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite. For Hegel the process of thinking, which under the name of the Idea he even turns into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing other than the material transposed and translated in the human head." Yet he credited Hegel with being the first to present the general forms of motion of dialectics in a comprehensive and conscious way: "With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

Sie steht bei ihm auf dem Kopf. Man muß sie umstülpen, um den rationellen Kern in der mystischen Hülle zu entdecken.

In the same afterword Marx wrote that this dialectic is "a scandal" to the bourgeoisie because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists the understanding of its negation and inevitable destruction. In the 1867 preface he had warned that while he painted capitalist and landlord in no rosy colours, he dealt with them only as "personifications of economic categories", not to hold individuals responsible. Reading Hegel's Logic in his philosophical notebooks of 1914–1915, Lenin noted: "It is impossible fully to grasp Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!" The relation of Capital to Hegel, and the meaning of the "rational kernel" discussed under dialectics, are disputed to this day.

Нельзя вполне понять «Капитала» Маркса и особенно его I главы, не проштудировав и не поняв всей Логики Гегеля.

How has it been read?

In his 1886 preface to the English edition, Engels wrote that "Das Kapital" was often called on the Continent "the Bible of the working class". It did serve as the theoretical foundation of social democracy in the era of the Second International, though, as the English Wikipedia relates, much of the younger generation came to Marxism through Engels's Anti-Dühring and its abridgement Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Kautsky recalled that only through Anti-Dühring did he learn to read Capital properly. In the early twentieth century Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital (1910), Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital (1913) and Lenin's Imperialism (1917) tried to apply its categories to a new age of capitalism.

"Das Kapital" is often called, on the Continent, "the Bible of the working class."

Criticism never ceased. The marginalist and neoclassical economics that arose from the 1870s explains value by subjective preferences rather than production and so rejects the labour theory of value, and the transformation problem and the law of the falling rate of profit have long been disputed among Marxist economists too. In philosophy, Louis Althusser's "epistemological break", which separates the Marx of Capital from the early writings, stood against readings of commodity fetishism as a continuation of the theory of alienation. Germany's "New Reading of Marx" holds that Engels and the later editions simplified Capital in popularising it. In 2013 UNESCO entered Marx's annotated personal copy of Volume I in the Memory of the World Register.