Das Kapital (IPA: [das kapiˈtaːl]) (Capital, in the English translation) is an extensive treatise on political economy written in German by Karl Marx and edited in part by Friedrich Engels. Marxism is the political philosophy and practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party ( often referred to as The Communist Manifesto, was first published on February 21, 1848, and is The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon was written by Karl Marx between December 1851 and March 1852 and originally published in 1852 in Die Revolution On the Jewish Question is a work by Karl Marx, written in 1843, and first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie ( German, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy) is a lengthy Manuscript by the The German Ideology (1845 was a book written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1845. Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (also referred to as The Paris Manuscripts) are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 The " Theses on Feuerbach " are eleven short philosophical notes written by Karl Marx in 1845. Marx's theory of alienation ( Entfremdung in German) as expressed in the writings of young Karl Marx, refers to the separation of things that naturally Class consciousness, literally is consciousness of one's Social class. In Marxist theory Commodity Fetishism is a state of social relations said to arise in capitalist market based societies in which social relationships Communism is a Socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless Society based Cultural hegemony is a Concept coined by Marxist Philosopher Antonio Gramsci. The rate of exploitation is a concept in Marxian Political economy. Marx's theory of human nature occupies an important place in his critique of Capitalism, his conception of Communism, and his ' materialist conception of history An ideology is a set of beliefs aims and Ideas especially in politics The proletariat (from Latin la ''proles'' "offspring" is a term used to identify a lower Social class; a member of such a class is proletarian Reification ( German: Verdinglichung, literally "thing-ification" (from Latin "Res" meaning "thing" or Versachlichung, literally Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the Means of production and distribution Relations of production (German Produktionsverhältnisse) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx in his theory of Historical materialism and in Note Marxian economics is not restricted to Marxist economics as it includes the economic thought of those inspired by Marx's works who do not identify with Labour power (in German Arbeitskraft, or labour force is a crucial concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist Political economy The law of value is a concept in Karl Marx 's critique of Political economy. Means Of Production is a compilation of Aim 's early 12" and EP releases recorded between 1995 and 1998 In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of Historical materialism, a mode of production (in German Produktionsweise, meaning 'the Productive forces, "productive powers" or "forces of production" German ''Produktivkräfte'' is a central concept in Marxism and Historical materialism Surplus labour is a concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of Political economy. Surplus value is a concept created by Karl Marx in his critique of Political economy, where its ultimate source is unpaid Surplus labor In 20th century discussions of Karl Marx 's Economics the transformation problem is the problem of finding a general rule to transform the "values" of commodities Wage labour is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer in which the worker sells their labour under a Contract ( Employment Anarchism and Marxism are related political philosophies which emerged in the nineteenth century In Marxian economic discourse the capitalist mode of production refers to the socio-economic base of capitalist society which began to grow rapidly in Western Europe from the Class struggle is the active expression of Class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective The " dictatorship of the proletariat " or workers' state is a term employed by Marxists that refers to what they see as a temporary state between the Primitive Accumulation of capital is a concept introduced by Karl Marx in part 8 of the first volume of Das Kapital (in German ursprüngliche Akkumulation A proletarian revolution is a social and/or political Revolution in which the Working class attempts to overthrow the Bourgeoisie. International Socialism redirects here For the journal of the same name see International Socialism (journal Proletarian internationalism is a This is about the concept of world revolution in Marxist theory See also Marxian economics, Marxism Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are terms which cover work in Philosophy Historical materialism is the methodological approach to the study of society economics and history which was first articulated by Karl Marx ( 1818 - 1883 Dialectical materialism, according to many followers of Karl Marx 's thinking is the philosophical basis of Marxism. Analytical Marxism refers to a style of thinking about Marxism that was prominent amongst English-speaking philosophers and social scientists during the 1980s Autonomism refers to a set of Left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. Marxist feminism is a sub-type of Feminist theory which focuses on the dismantling of Capitalism as a way to liberate women Marxist humanism is a branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on Marx's earlier writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marxist geography is a Critical geography which utilises the theories and philosophy of Marxism to examine the spatial relations of Human geography Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on Structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe (and more recently North Libertarian Marxism is a school of Marxism that describes itself as taking a less Authoritarian view of Marxist theory than conventional currents such as Stalinism Young Marx is one half of the concept in Marxology that Karl Marx ’s intellectual development can be broken into two broad categories the other being ‘ Mature Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895 was a German social scientist and philosopher, who Karl Kautsky ( October 16 1854 - October 17 1938) was a leading theoretician of Social democracy. Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (Георгий Валентинович Плеханов ( December 11, 1856 &ndash May 30, 1918; Rosa Luxemburg (Róża Luksemburg 5 March 1870 or 1871 15 January 1919 was a Polish-born Jewish German Marxist theorist, socialist Leon Trotsky ( Russian:, Lev Davidovich Trotsky, also transliterated Leo, Lyev, Trotskii, Trotski, Trotskij György Lukács (pronounced in IPA dyɶrdyə ˈlukɑtʃ) ( April 13, 1885 – June 4, 1971) was a Hungarian Guy Ernest Debord ( December 28, 1931 - November 30, 1994) was a Marxist theorist French writer Filmmaker, hypergraphist Antonio Gramsci ('ɡramʃi ( January 23, 1891 &ndash April 27, 1937) was an Italian Philosopher, Writer, Karl Korsch ( August 15, 1886 - October 21, 1961) was a German Marxist theorist Ernesto "Che" Guevara (June 14 Following the Cuban revolution,Guevara reviewed The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist Critical theory, Social research, and Philosophy. Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 &ndash 15 April 1980 commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (ʒɑ̃ pol saʁtʁə was a French Louis Pierre Althusser (Pronunciation altuˡseʁ ( October 16, 1918 – October 22, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. Various aspects of Marxist theory have been criticized These criticisms concern both the theory itself and its later interpretations and implementations A treatise is a formal lengthy systematic Discourse on some subject Political economy originally was the term for studying production buying and selling and their relations with law custom and government The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895 was a German social scientist and philosopher, who The book is a critical analysis of capitalism and its practical economic application and also, in part, a critique of other related theories. Capitalism is the Economic system in which the Means of production are owned by private Persons and operated for Profit and where Its first volume was published in 1867.
Contents |
Themes
The central driving force of capitalism, according to Marx, was in the exploitation and alienation of labour. The ultimate source of the new profits and value-added was that employers paid workers the market value of their labour-capacity, but the value of the commodities workers produced exceeded that market value. Market value is the price at which an asset would trade in a competitive Walrasian auction setting In classical Political economy and especially Karl Marx 's critique of Political economy, a commodity is any good or service produced by human labour and offered as Employers were entitled to appropriate the new output value because of their ownership of the productive capital assets. Employment is a Contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. By producing output as capital for the employers, the workers constantly reproduced the condition of capitalism by their labour.
However, though Marx is very concerned with the social aspects of commerce, his book is not an ethical treatise, but an attempt to explain the objective "laws of motion" of the capitalist system as a whole, its origins and future. Commerce is a division of trade or production which deals with the exchange of goods and services from producer to final consumer He aims to reveal the causes and dynamics of the accumulation of capital, the growth of wage labour, the transformation of the workplace, the concentration of capital, competition, the banking and credit system, the tendency of the rate of profit to decline, land-rents and many other things.
Marx viewed the commodity as the "cell-form" or building unit of capitalist society — it is an object useful to somebody else, but with a trading value for the owner. Because commercial transactions implied no particular morality beyond that required to settle transactions, the growth of markets caused the economic sphere and the moral-legal sphere to become separated in society: subjective moral value becomes separated from objective economic value. Political economy, which was originally thought of as a "moral science" concerned with the just distribution of wealth, or as a "political arithmetick" for tax collection, gave way to the separate disciplines of economic science, law and ethics.
Marx believed the political economists could study the scientific laws of capitalism in an "objective" way, because the expansion of markets had in reality objectified most economic relations: the cash nexus stripped away all previous religious and political illusions (only to replace them, however, with another kind of illusion -- commodity fetishism). In Marxist theory Commodity Fetishism is a state of social relations said to arise in capitalist market based societies in which social relationships Marx also says that he viewed "the economic formation of society as a process of natural history". The growth of commerce happened as a process which no individuals could control or direct, creating an enormously complex web of social interconnections globally. Thus a "society" was formed "economically" before people actually began to consciously master the enormous productive capacity and interconnections they had created, in order to put it collectively to the best use.
Marx’s analysis in Capital, then, focuses primarily on the structural contradictions, rather than the class antagonisms, that characterize capitalist society -- the “contradictory movement [gegensätzliche Bewegung] [that] has its origin in the twofold character of labour,” rather than in the struggle between labor and capital, or rather between the owning and the working classes. These contradictions, moreover, operate (as Marx describes using a phrase borrowed from Hegel) “behind the backs” of both the capitalists and workers, that is, as a result of their activities, and yet irreducible to their conscious awareness either as individuals or as classes. As such, Capital, does not propose a theory of revolution (led by the working class and its representatives) but rather a theory of crises as the condition for a potential revolution, or what Marx refers to in the Communist Manifesto as a potential “weapon,” “forged” by the owners of capital, “turned against the bourgeoisie itself” by the working class. A revolution (from the Latin revolutio, "a turnaround" is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively Manifesto of the Communist Party ( often referred to as The Communist Manifesto, was first published on February 21, 1848, and is Such crises, according to Marx, are rooted in the contradictory character of the commodity, the most fundamental social form of capitalist society. In capitalism, improvements in technology and rising levels of productivity increase the amount of material wealth (or use values) in society while simultaneously diminishing the economic value of this wealth, thereby lowering the rate of profit – a tendency that leads to the peculiar situation, characteristic of crises in capitalism, of “poverty in the midst of plenty,” or more precisely, crises of overproduction in the midst of underconsumption. In Marx's critique of Political economy, any labor-product has a value and a use value, and if it is traded as a Commodity in markets it The economic value of a good or service has puzzled economists since the beginning of the discipline
Publication
Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867, but he died before he could finish the second and third ones which he had already drafted; these were edited by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels and published in 1885 and 1894. Capital Volume I is the first of three volumes in Karl Marx 's monumental work Das Kapital, and the only volume to be published during his lifetime Year 1867 ( MDCCCLXVII) was a Common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common year starting Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895 was a German social scientist and philosopher, who Year 1885 ( MDCCCLXXXV) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common Year 1894 ( MDCCCXCIV) was a Common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common As can be seen in the original title pages of the final two volumes, Engels listed Marx as the author.
Influences
Marx bases his work on that of the classical economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and even Benjamin Franklin. Classical economics is widely regarded as the first modern school of economic thought. Adam Smith ( baptised 16 June 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of Political economy. David Ricardo (18 April 1772 &ndash 11 September 1823 was an English political economist, often credited with systematizing economics and was one of the most influential John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 &ndash 8 May 1873 British Philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential Benjamin Franklin ( April 17 1790 was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. However, he reworks these authors' ideas, so his book is a synthesis that does not follow the lead of any one thinker. It also reflects the dialectical methodology applied by G.W.F. Hegel in his books The Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Mind, and the influence of French socialists such as Charles Fourier, Comte de Saint-Simon, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. François Marie Charles Fourier ( April 7, 1772 - October 10, 1837) was a French Utopian Claude Henri de Rouvroy comte de Saint-Simon, often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon ( October 17, 1760 &ndash May 19, 1825) was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (ˈpruːd ɒn in British English, dɔ̃ in French) ( 15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was
Marx said himself that his aim was "to bring a science [i. e. political economy] by criticism to the point where it can be dialectically represented", and in this way to "reveal the law of motion of modern society". By showing how capitalist development was the precursor of a new, socialist mode of production, he aimed to provide a scientific foundation for the modern labour movement. In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of Historical materialism, a mode of production (in German Produktionsweise, meaning 'the In preparation for his book, he studied the economic literature available in his time for a period of twelve years, mainly in the British Museum in London. The British Museum is a Museum of human history and culture in London.
Aristotle, and Greek philosophy in general, was another important (although often neglected) influence on Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Aristotle (Greek Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC was a Greek philosopher a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. Ancient Greek philosophy focused on the role of Reason and Inquiry. Marx’s education at Bonn centered on Greek and Roman poets and philosophers. Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located about 20 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia The dissertation he completed at the university was a comparison of the philosophy of nature in the works of Democritus and Epicurus. For the current in the 19th century German idealism see Naturphilosophie Natural philosophy or the philosophy of nature (from Democritus ( Greek:) was a pre-Socratic Greek Materialist Philosopher (born at Abdera in Thrace ca A number of scholars, moreover, have argued that the basic architecture of Capital – including the categories of use and exchange value, as well as the “syllogisms” for simple and expanded circulation (M-C-M and M-C-M’) – was derived from the Politics (Aristotle) and the Nicomachean Ethics. A syllogism, or logical appeal, (συλλογισμός &mdash "conclusion" "inference" (usually the categorical syllogism) is a kind of Aristotle's Politics ( Greek Πολιτικά is a work of Political philosophy. Nicomachean Ethics (sometimes spelled "Nichomachean" or Ta Ethika, is a work by Aristotle on Virtue and Moral character which Moreover, Marx’s description of machinery under capitalist relations of production as “self-acting automata” is a direct reference to Aristotle’s speculations on inanimate instruments capable of following commands as the condition for the abolition of slavery. A machine is any device that uses Energy to perform some activity As a social-economic system slavery is a legal institution under which a Person (called "a slave" is compelled to work for another
Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
Volume IV
A so-called Volume IV is claimed by some, apparently constituted from fragmentary notes that were written prior to the publication of Das Kapital (full text linked below). Capital Volume I is the first of three volumes in Karl Marx 's monumental work Das Kapital, and the only volume to be published during his lifetime Capital, Volume 2 subtitled The Process of Circulation of Capital was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published 'Capital' Volume 3 subtitled The Process of Captialist Production as a Whole was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1894
See also
- Accumulation by dispossession
- Etienne Balibar
- Capital, Volume I
- Capital (economics)
- Capital accumulation
- Capitalism
- Commodity fetishism
- Cost of capital
- Culture of capitalism
- History of theory of capitalism
- Krisis Groupe
- Labor theory of value
- Law of accumulation
- Law of value
- Marx's theory of alienation
- Primitive accumulation of capital
- Profit
- Relations of production
- Return on capital
- Surplus labour
- Surplus value
- Valorisation
- Value added
Online editions
- Capital, Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital
- 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
External links
- Summary and analysis of Das Kapital
- Annotations, Explanations and Clarifications to Capital. Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist Academic David Harvey, which defines the Neoliberal changes in many western Étienne Balibar (born April 23, 1942 in Avallon, Bourgogne, France) is a French Marxist Philosopher Capital Volume I is the first of three volumes in Karl Marx 's monumental work Das Kapital, and the only volume to be published during his lifetime In Economics, capital or capital Goods or real capital refers to items of extensive value Most generally the accumulation of capital refers simply to the gathering or amassment of objects of value the increase in wealth or the creation of wealth Capitalism is the Economic system in which the Means of production are owned by private Persons and operated for Profit and where In Marxist theory Commodity Fetishism is a state of social relations said to arise in capitalist market based societies in which social relationships The cost of capital is an Expected return that the provider of capital plans to earn on their investment The Culture of capitalism is a term used to refer to the Lifestyle of the people living within a capitalist nation or the international influence of such a nation The labor theories of value (LTV are theories in Economics according to which the values of Commodities are related to the labor needed to Accumulation can refer to a cumulative or compound increase in a variable or to Capital accumulation. The law of value is a concept in Karl Marx 's critique of Political economy. Marx's theory of alienation ( Entfremdung in German) as expressed in the writings of young Karl Marx, refers to the separation of things that naturally Primitive Accumulation of capital is a concept introduced by Karl Marx in part 8 of the first volume of Das Kapital (in German ursprüngliche Akkumulation Relations of production (German Produktionsverhältnisse) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx in his theory of Historical materialism and in Return on invested capital (ROIC is a financial measure that quantifies how well a company generates cash flow relative to the capital it has invested in its business Surplus labour is a concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of Political economy. Surplus value is a concept created by Karl Marx in his critique of Political economy, where its ultimate source is unpaid Surplus labor The valorization of capital is a concept created by Karl Marx in his critique of Political economy. Value added refers to the additional value of a commodity over the cost of commodities used to produce it from the previous stage of production Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans OCRs, and stores in its digital database 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
Synopses
- A synopsis of Capital by Engels (PDF document, 54 pages). Socialist Worker is the name of several socialist / communist Newspapers It is a weekly newspaper published by the International Socialist
- A synopsis of Capital by Otto Ruhle (PDF document, 48 pages)
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