Capital, Volume I

Summary

Capital, Volume I, subtitled The Process of Capitalist Production, is the only volume of Karl Marx's critique of political economy that he saw through the press. It was published in German in Hamburg in 1867, after more than fifteen years of research in the British Museum Reading Room, and revised by Marx for later editions. The first English translation, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling under the editorship of Friedrich Engels, appeared in London in 1887; the library uses that translation as revised by Ernest Untermann from the fourth German edition for the Chicago publisher Charles H. Kerr. The book begins with the commodity, which Marx treats as the basic cell of capitalist wealth. Following the classical economists, especially Ricardo, he argues that the value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce them, and he analyses money and the fetishism of commodities, by which social relations among producers appear as relations among things. Parts II through VI explain how money becomes capital. The worker sells not labour but labour-power, the capacity to work, at its value, the cost of the worker's subsistence; because labour-power can produce more value than it costs, the capitalist gains surplus-value. Marx examines how this surplus is increased absolutely by lengthening the working day and relatively by raising productivity through cooperation, the division of labour and machinery. Long chapters draw on British factory inspectors' reports and parliamentary inquiries into child labour, hours and conditions, and on the Factory Acts that limited them. Part VII argues that the accumulation of capital tends to concentrate wealth while creating a reserve army of unemployed labour. Part VIII, on so-called primitive accumulation, traces the origins of capitalism to enclosures, the expropriation of peasants, harsh laws against vagrancy, colonial conquest and the slave trade, and predicts that capitalist private property will in turn be expropriated. Capital became the central text of the socialist and communist movements and influenced history, sociology and economics. It has also drawn sustained criticism: economists of the marginalist and Austrian schools, such as Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Ludwig von Mises, rejected its labour theory of value and argued that socialism could not calculate economically, and the record of twentieth-century states that claimed Marx's authority remains a subject of intense debate.

Top Lessons

• A theory of exploitation

  Marx argues that profit comes from unpaid labour time, even when wages are paid at their full value. Whether one accepts or rejects the theory, it is essential for understanding the history of socialist thought and labour movements.

• Evidence from the factory

  Capital draws heavily on official reports of long hours, child labour and dangerous conditions in Victorian industry, and on the Factory Acts that limited them. These chapters are among the most vivid historical documents of the Industrial Revolution.

• Things that hide relationships

  The idea of commodity fetishism suggests that market prices can conceal the human relationships behind the goods we buy. Readers can test the idea against their own experience of buying products made far away.

• Testing a theory against history

  Marx predicted the growing concentration of capital and the impoverishment of workers. Comparing these predictions with what actually happened in industrial countries, and with the record of states that claimed his authority, is a lesson in weighing theories by their results.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Marx cites official medical and public-health reports on the effects of long hours, night work, child labour and poor housing on workers' health, which make parts of the book a source for the history of occupational medicine.