Das Kapital

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (also popularly known in the English-speaking world by its original German title, Das Kapital) by Karl Marx is an influential critique of capitalism that sought to define the economic system’s functions. The first volume—which is the only volume fully written by Karl Marx himself—was published in 1867. Two further volumes were written by Marx’s long-time collaborator, Friedrich Engels, based on Marx’s notes, and were published in 1885 and 1894. Although socialism as an economic and social philosophy existed before Capital, the book would become a foundational document for later socialist movements.

This guide refers to the 1982 Penguin Books edition.

Summary

Capital is an effort to scientifically describe and understand the “capitalist mode of production” that had come to dominate British society by Marx’s time and that was rapidly spreading throughout the world (125). Rather than being a natural social and economic system that would last forever, as other economists writing before Marx described it, Marx proposed instead that capitalism is the result of a series of historical developments that can be traced back to the decline of serfdom in 14th-century Europe. Since capitalism is just the end result of a series of specific historical changes and developments, it follows that, eventually, it too will give way to another mode of production.

Labor is what determines the value of any item for sale on the market, which Marx calls “commodities.” However, capitalism denies the importance of the worker and their labor. Instead, the labor of any worker is “alienated” and “appropriated” from the worker themselves (716). This means that workers do not receive a wage that actually represents how much value and productivity they produce through working. Also, under property laws, workers have no claim to any products they make for their employers. Overall, the capitalist mode of production overwhelmingly benefits the capitalist over the worker, even though the capitalist is a middleman who does not directly participate in the work they profit from. At the same time, the only real goal of capitalist production is to generate “surplus-value” (251)—pure profits for the personal use of the capitalist.

Due to this economic structure, capitalism allows “unrestricted waste of human life” as all human activity and life is bent toward the production of surplus value for the select few (605). Factory workers and agricultural laborers suffer from pay so low that they struggle to earn enough to eat, live in substandard housing, work long hours in dangerous conditions, and suffer illness as a result of their work. Child workers are denied an education, and adult workers lose any leisure or social time, while all the benefits of their labor go to capitalists. This is how Marx explains the “economic paradox” of ever-advancing technology (532), which should make work easier yet more productive for workers as time goes on. Instead, this more efficient technology was used to wring more value out of workers through practices like 14-hour workdays.

However, there is hope in the fact that industrial technology requires workers to work together in complex organizations, which makes it easier for workers to organize for better pay and conditions. Marx believes this will eventually lead to a new mode of production in which workers, not capitalists, control the means of production, allowing people to decouple human activity from the pursuit of surplus-value generation for the owning class of capitalists.