Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

Capital #1

by Karl Marx

Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the only volume to be completed and edited by Marx himself, avoids some of the mistakes that have marred earlier versions and seeks to do justice to the literary qualities of the work. The introduction is by Ernest Mandel, author of Late Capitalism, one of the only comprehensive attempts to develop the theoretical legacy of Capital.

1152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1887

About the author

With the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.

German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.

Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).

The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.

Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.

Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.

Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.

Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .

People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.

Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louis Althusser wrote a preface to a French translation of Capital and in it he gives lots of advice on how to read this book – I recommend you read this book according to that advice, even if I didn’t quite do that myself. A big part of that advice is to not read in the order that Marx wrote. You see, the first few chapters on the commodity are seriously hard going. Much harder going than just about anything else in the book. In fact, Althusser was pretty well just following Marx’s on advice that the first few chapters could be skipped and then come back to later on. So, it wasn’t that he didn’t know the first bits were hard –he made them hard for a reason.

And that reason, Althusser says, is Hegel. Be that as it may, I feel that Marx pretty well has to start by explaining what a commodity is, because capitalism, which he is trying to understand, explain and criticise in this book, can’t be understood without understanding commodities. Why is that? Well, a large part of the point of capitalism is turning into commodities of more and more things that have never been commodities before. So much so that today just about everything can be a commodity – but this certainly wasn’t always the case. In fact, as Marx shows, prior to capitalism very few things were commodities.

Marx starts by stressing that a commodity needs to have a use value. This is really important, not least because often this is where people both start and end too. You know, why would you buy something if you had no use for it? But Marx makes the point that the use value of the commodity is actually the bit of the commodity that, by definition, the person selling the commodity is least interested in. If the person selling the commodity had a use for the commodity, why would they be selling it? A true commodity is something the person producing it has no use for at all. It has, instead, an exchange value for this person. And that exchange value can be expressed in money – money being a socially recognised store of value which allows for the trade of disparate things as if they were all the same thing. That is, if I make trousers I can sell those trousers for money and then use that money to buy any other kind of thing knowing that I am exchanging value for like value.

Which then begs the question, where does that value actually come from? And how can I exchange things knowing they actually do have ‘a like value’? Often you will hear that value is created by supply and demand. If there isn’t very much of something and everyone wants it, then it will have a particularly high value, if there is hardly any of it and no one wants it, or if there is lots and lots of it and everyone wants it, it will have a lower or perhaps no value at all. Everyone wants air, but air mostly ‘just is’ – and so has no exchange value, despite how essential it is – try not breathing for a while if you doubt this.

Marx argues this supply and demand idea isn’t where commodities really get their value from. In fact, he goes so far as to say that rare things (like gold and diamonds) often don’t get sold at their true value – so rather than their rarity increasing their value, it actually undermines their ‘true’ value. Instead he shows that it isn’t ‘how much of it’ that exists that decides something’s value, but rather how much ‘socially necessary labour time’ is incorporated into it that decides how expensive it is going to be. If it takes me six hours to make a pair of trousers and you two hours to catch a pound of fish, then I’m hardly going to exchange my trousers for your fish – it would make more sense for me to just spend two hours fishing myself if both have the same ‘value’. Marx says that in the end everything sells at its cost of production. That is, it sells for the price of the labour that is incorporated in it and for no more. Which then begs the question, where does profit come from. He spends quite a long time explaining that profit can’t come from ‘buying cheap and selling dear’ as that would mean the second capitalist would just be sending the first capitalist broke. Instead, Marx makes a really interesting move in showing that labour has an interesting property that makes it the essential commodity in commodity production, and therefore in capitalist production. That is, its ability to produce more than it costs to reproduce itself.

This sounds like getting money for nothing, but it is anything but that. Let’s say you are a capitalist (and like in a game of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, being a capitalist is by far the better option). To be a capitalist you need to buy a worker’s (or in fact, lots of workers) labour power. That is, you buy from them the only thing they have available to sell, their ability to work. But, just like you with the commodities that you well sell once the worker has finished making them, the labourer sells their labour power at its cost of production (or reproduction in this case). That means it will cost you as the capitalist a certain amount to employ the labourer their wages and that is the amount of money that it takes for the labourer to feed, clothe, house and raise their family (you’re going to need more labourers one day – and the labourer is going to provide them for you by using the money you pay them in wages to literally reproduce themselves). This amount of money is the cost of the labourer’s labour power. But the thing is that that labour power can produce more than just what it takes for it to reproduce itself. If the work day is 8 hours, the labourer might be able to produce enough product to pay for the reproduction of their labour power in only 4 hours. But they still have to work for the whole 8 hours. That means that you, the capitalist that employed the labourer, pays the labourer wages the full price of the workers first four hours of work, but after that four hours is up, the capitalist gets to keep everything the labourer produces for the next four hours and doesn’t really have to pay the labourer at all for that final four hours. And this is what Marx called ‘surplus value’: the value over and above that which is necessary to reproduce the labour of the labourer. And that is where the capitalist’s profits come from.

Sure, it isn’t all profit. The capitalist has to buy tools for the worker to work with, and raw materials for the worker to transform into commodities, but the capitalist receives whatever profit they are going to make out of the surplus labour time they get the worker to work.

The other bit to this is that capitalism is driven by the need to increasingly socialise the means of production. For instance, if I go to market with the trousers I have made, I really do need to sell them, ‘a man cannot live by trousers alone’. I need bread, meat, wine, tea, books, shirts and so on. But the whole process only works on the basis that while I’ve been making trousers everyone else has been making everything else that I need. If everyone was making trousers, we wouldn’t really get very far. It is only when the whole of society is actively engaged in producing commodities that the society can operate at all. And this socialisation goes all the way down, not only is it true that I can’t live by making trousers alone, but often I don’t even make all of the trousers anymore. Without us living in a society we could achieve literally nothing alone. This is a huge change from Feudalism, where peasant farmers mostly made everything they needed for life. Today, most of us are so specialised we hardly know what it is we actually help to ‘make’ at all. Marx calls this the alienation of labour.

Capitalism seeks to make everything as cheap as possible and it does this by finding ways to endlessly reduce the amount of labour that is needed to make any particular commodity. So, if it once took two weeks to produce a car, capitalism constantly seeks to find ways to speed up this process so that less and less actual labour will be incorporated in each car – and therefore each car will be cheaper. It does this by making each of the steps in the process of making the car isolated. This is the whole idea of a conveyor belt. One person doing one thing over and over again is more productive than that same person moving about doing many things. But doing the one thing over and over again is pretty well the definition of becoming ‘deskilled’ – and Marx stresses that if capitalism is good at anything, it is good at deskilling workers. Actually, that is exactly the point, as the less skill a labourer has the less you have to pay them. And it is worse that that, as it also means the easier it is to train someone to come in and replace them. A large part of this book looks at the horrors of 19th century workplaces, and a large part of those horrors involved the women and children that worked in those factories for very little wages. They could only do this because the processes had been made so simple literally a child could do them. Changing the laws may have taken kids out of the factories, but the same rule applied – the skill levels plummeted and with them the cost of labour continually dropped.

But this was for two reasons, one was that the labour labourers were selling was completely deskilled and so therefore much cheaper to reproduce. The second was that that labour was producing many more commodities and so it was literally costing less to reproduce that labour in the first place. I mean, if I need a loaf of bread and a t-shirt and shorts to survive and yesterday those things took two hours to produce and today they only take one hour to produce – then effectively my wages have dropped and more of my ‘labour time’ can be donated directly as surplus value into the pocket of the capitalist.

My productivity is the only thing the capitalist is interested in, but that interest is rapacious. Every means available to the capitalist to squeeze the last drop of value out of my labour will be tried. What is interesting is that once there appears to be no further ways of drawing surplus value out of me, and this is basically when my wages have been squeezed to the utmost and yet there is still not enough ‘value’ coming out of me, then the capitalist turns to machines. My understanding of this is that a machine is different from a tool in a very important respect. A tool is something a skilled worker uses in their work. A machine is something that transforms that work to do away with the skilled worker. That is, the very process of producing things is transformed by machines, not just to do what the worker and tool did previously, but to utterly transform how that process occurred. And machines then help to do away with more labour so that the cost of the commodities produced continually falls, especially the cost of that most important commodity, labour.

The other thing that Marx was able to show was that the rate of exploitation of labour was always greatest in countries with the most developed productive forces – the most machines. So, the English worker in Marx’s day was the most exploited worker in the world.

As I said, a large part of this book documents the utter horrors of lives of the working classes in Marx’s day. And it is gobsmacking. But there is a part of the modern reader that says while reading this things like, “well, things have certainly improved”. And this is definitely the case. However, like so many other things in life, it is only half of the story. As Marx points out, a large part of the reason why we are better off now than in his day is that commodities are so much cheaper to produce today. And this means that meeting the needs of large sections of the population is cheaper and easier than ever before. The problem is that so much of the wealth that is produced now gushes to the wealthiest sections of society as never before. For instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQ...

Marx basically said that there are two great classes in society. We like to talk about there being a 1%, a middle class (virtually everyone else) and a working class – who I guess we pretty much think are like the middle class, just with less class. This is, of course, a confusion of categories. The opposite of ‘middle class’ isn’t ‘working class’ – the opposite of ‘working class’ would have to be something like ‘leisured class’ – as someone who likes to say they are middle class, I can’t really say I’m ‘leisured’. Marx is very clear – everyone who has nothing else to sell other than their labour power is working class. Those who own the means of production and buy your labour power from you are capitalist. The other classes are those who still exist as artisans or small shop owners or intellectuals. But, before you get too smug, the whole point of capitalism is to do away with these ‘skilled’ jobs. Controlling labour and deskilling it is how profits are made and maximised. Increasingly, then, the working class will grow and the capitalist class, and all other classes will shrink.

Marx saw this as inevitably leading to a situation where a revolution would occur and the workers would take back what had been taken from them – the product of their surplus labour. But while Marx saw this as inevitable and of urgent necessity in his day, it is worth remembering that this book was written in 1867 – as close to 150 years ago as you might like – and that was a time before there was a motor car, before there were computers, moving pictures, MP3 players, flying machines, a world wide web of cat videos… I don’t need to go on, do I? The point is that capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx envisaged. That said, a lot of what Marx had to say about capitalism still holds true today. If capitalism has become kinder, it is mostly due to it being forced kicking and screaming to do so. But even those reforms are proving anything but permanent. More and more is being clawed back by capital every day – a book I read recently suggested that perhaps 50% of Americans are at or below the poverty line, certainly America’s prison population goes some way to confirm Marx’s vision of the ‘reserve army’ and the redundant population that needs to be shifted ‘somewhere else’. And today capital, as Marx predicted, is truly international – so much so that we have seen the deindustrialisation of large parts of the ‘developed’ world with millions of jobs moved to low wage countries – low wage, low environmental controls, low health and safety regulations… Capital is just as unfriendly today as it was in the 1860s, it probably even employs just as many kids.

I tried to read this book years ago and ever since have told people it is too turgid to read. This isn’t really true, and that was because I got stuck in the first few chapters. The advice of Althusser and of Marx himself, that is, skip the hard bits and come back to them later, is probably really good advice. This is one of the most influential books of all time. That doesn’t mean you have to read it, but to have never read it does put you at a bit of a disadvantage – in much the same way that saying you’ve never read The Interpretation of Dreams or On the Origin of the Species puts you at a disadvantage. Not the end of the world, but these books are famous for pretty good reasons.

[Kevin (the Conspiracy is Capitalism) · Rating 5 out of 5]

De-mystifying the Left’s “Bible”:

Preamble:
--Friedrich Engels apparently called this book “the Bible of the working class” (which I believe was, in part, tongue in cheek, coming from a secular historical materialist), so I’m also referencing this tongue in cheek. I might add that Marx's “opium of the people” quote on religion had nuance, and my favourite quote comes from an advocate of Liberation Theology (Hélder Câmara):

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

--When COVID shutdowns started, my “Economic Development” class with Jim Glassman was in its last weeks. Foreseeing that I would really miss the campus group-learning environment, I decided to start a Goodreads study group. I’ve always been disappointed with how little engagement there is on Goodreads for critical nonfiction compared with fiction. Where else can you find folks from all over the world reading the same obscure books?! Members who read critical nonfiction tend to just track their reading, while the few extended discussions are often siloed in one-on-one messaging.
--So, I really wanted a project for us to work on together, in depth, and what better book than Marx’s infamous Capital Volume 1 to bring us together? We ended up dividing into 3 meeting groups for different time-zones and reading paces, and each group has provided rewarding experiences. Check out Carlos Martinez’s interviews to inspire our efforts:
-with Vijay Prashad: https://youtu.be/BgiKOlMjUoo
-with Radhika Desai: https://youtu.be/8EkpdYH0Bhg
--Many leftists only read the The Communist Manifesto (indeed, same goes for the opposition, at least those who bother to read), a political pamphlet Marx/Engels wrote when they were age 29/27 in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 (“A specter is haunting Europe”… “you have nothing to lose but your chains!”); after the revolutions were co-opted by the bourgeoisie, Marx/Engels’ later preface explains how they left the Manifesto unaltered as a historical record.
--Marx’s Capital project, on the other hand, was a sober, lifelong academic pursuit. Marx had planned some 5-6 “books”, each with multiple volumes. He only finished Volume 1 (1,000+ pages) of the 1st book, with Engels piecing together Volume 2, 3, and 4(?) from Marx’s mountain of notes. The minority who make it through Volume 1 really drop off for the subsequent volumes, which are fragmented and dominated by Marx’s dry accounting style (whereas Volume 1 also features Marx’s literary depth and biting critique).
--Academic: which opposition has taken Classical political economy idols Adam Smith/David Ricardo etc. more seriously/extensively than Marx? …Certainly not today’s “mainstream Economics”, i.e. Neoclassical (“anti-Classical” according to Michael Hudson/Anwar Shaikh), where status quo shilling devolves into simply quoting the “Invisible Hand” passage without context (Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not to mention capitalism evolving beyond petty shopkeepers of butchers/bakers/brewers, face-palm) while deliberately rejecting Classical foundations (class distinctions/struggle, labour theory of value, economic rent, historical change, turbulent competition, etc.).

Highlights:

--I ended up splitting Volume 1 into 2 halves: Market Circulation and Production. Throughout, Marx is particularly interested in uncovering capitalism’s:
(i) Abstractions: historical social relations (i.e. power relations, interactions for social needs) that are hidden, where the surface appears as natural (physical/human nature) thus inevitable (crucial for social consent!).
(ii) Contradictions: potential sources of crises.

1) Capitalism’s Value system; Market Circulation of Capital:

--With the first sentences, we immediately get a sense that we’re reading the interaction between a science textbook (chemistry’s Periodic Table) and philosophical treatise (theory of value): “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”
--Note: Marx mimics scientific reductionism where simplifying assumptions are made to “turn off” certain parts in order to isolate and discover other parts (see The New Economics: A Manifesto for a useful distinction between this vs. the “constructionism” of utopic mainstream economics making “domain assumptions”). Thus, it’s a crucial challenge to keep track of what assumptions are at play throughout the book (and the entire Capital project).

…Starting with the commodity, Marx distinguishes its:
(i) Use-value: satisfies human wants/needs; a quality.
(ii) Exchange-value: the economic gain from selling something on the market, represented by price; a quantity.
…How these contradicting natures manifest in various scenarios is carefully unraveled, where market exchange prioritizes exchange-value while abstracting use-value (it’s difficult to compare heterogeneous qualities).
--Given the heterogeneous qualities of the commodities exchanged, the (general) commonality between commodities is both are products of labour; thus, Marx starts with the Classical Smith/Ricardo “labour theory of value”. However, Marx emphasizes that labour here must also be abstracted (heterogeneous labour becomes homogeneous; Marx calls the result “value”).
--We can theoretically measure “value” as “socially necessary labour-time” (the normal labour-time the society requires to produce the commodity), foreshadowing another contradiction: increase productivity = increase use-value produced (more commodities) but decrease “value” (shorter socially necessary labour-time needed, thus labour-power and the commodity are cheapened; see later).

--Private labour becomes social labour since it is now producing for social use (sold on ever-expanding market), but this social labour is contradicted by the relation only being via market exchange, thus indirect (sold to strangers). This stranger-to-stranger relation is mediated by the commodity sold/bought, resulting in “commodity fetishism” where social labour is concealed/objectified in the commodity itself. Just think of how visible the commodity/its price are, compared to all the labour relations/conditions throughout the commodity chain (let alone environmental conditions)!
--Let’s add some anthropology: despite economists trying to naturalize market exchange (esp. convenient thought-experiments of how human social relations started with barter), the actual mechanisms of market exchange (instantaneous exchange between strangers competing to maximize their own gain) is clearly not what built human sociability (families/tribes/communities). Not stopping to realize this shows how close our social assumptions are to anti-social Randian zealots; to dispel Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and revive social imagination, see Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
…This abstraction of labour (“value”) involves the Great Transformation from a “society with markets” (precapitalist, where markets were on the periphery) to a “market society” (capitalism); here I’m referring to the accessible intro Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails, channeling The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, on how capitalism required State violence during the Enclosures' privatization of the Commons to create the land market (to grow wool for the rising global market) and thus the labour market (from those dispossessed of land thus forced to sell their own labour).
...Marx describes how precapitalist personal landed property (“no land without its master”) became capitalist impersonal property (“money has no master”). Marx returns to this in the last part of the book, critiquing Smith’s so-called “primitive accumulation” (convenient assumption that capitalists got their capital from savings/hard work, thus the idyllic original accumulation) by describing the top-down violent dispossession of the domestic Enclosures (The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation) and even colonial enclosures (Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital).

--Another way to conceptualize the Great Transformation:
(i) C-M-C: precapitalist exchange of Commodity-for-Commodity (facilitated by Money). This is “selling in order to buy” because the end goal is the consumption of the Commodity (consuming its use-value). This end goal means the circulation stops, thus the inherent limits.
(ii) M-C-M’: “General Formula of Capital” where Money is invested for more Money (via producing and selling Commodity). This is “buying in order to sell” (speculation!) where the end is exchange-value (more Money), which starts another circulation of capital if re-invested. As David Harvey stresses, capital is a process that must be endless to survive (endless accumulation). Thus, the endless growth driving our existential ecological crises is at the heart of capitalism’s logic; economic growth = economic health under capitalism, even when the growth is viral/cancerous/self-destructive (must-read: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World).
…speaking of speculation, M-M’ is also mentioned in the context of interest-bearing capital, and the contradictions of money fetishism: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and [the capitalist] might just as well have intended to make money without producing at all” (see: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present and The Bubble and Beyond).
...Note: the contradictions of money as means-of-exchange vs. store-of-wealth are surprisingly central in the Patnaiks’ Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
--Capitalism’s value system treats the environment as a free gift (see The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power on capitalism externalizing costs by dumping it onto the environment). During Marx’s time, soil depletion was a major concern, where England was forced to import guano (seabird droppings from colonized islands) as fertilizer; Marx also mentions the disturbance of the metabolic relationship between humans and the environment from capitalist urbanization, spurring Ecological Marxism (Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).

…see the comments below for the 2nd half of the review (Volume 1’s focus on Capitalist Production)!

[Always Pouting · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember seeing a review on here for this book from a guy who said he bought two copies of this book, one for himself and one for his girlfriend and that he didn't have a girlfriend anymore. I'm bringing this up because actually my boyfriend got me this book, as one of my birthday gifts none the less, and I have to say for the first three hundred pages it felt like I could really empathize with the other man's girlfriend.

This was really really annoying to read I'm going to be honest. I personally feel like a lot of my own politics align with the left and I think a lot of the ideas Marx brings up are important and good, especially surplus value. But like there's probably a reason people hate reading theory.

I think that if I have been reading this in the 1860s I would've liked it a lot more because all of the things being discussed would be contemporaneous but now I know all this stuff about industrial UK in the late 1800s and I don't know what I would do with that information?

I think the foreword was really useful and good once again though, and it did suggest not necessarily reading everything in order. It also gave some context that made things easier to understand. I do think some of the chapters were better than others and are much more useful for the context of understanding capitalism today. I also get why it was organized and structured the way it was originally to build up to the ideas Marx thought were important and wanted to juxtapose with the ideas of the economists of the day.

I think I could've gotten more out of this if I knew more about economics honestly, like the whole thing about monetary theory probably went straight over my head.

Honestly just glad I made it through it and I would just once again like to say that I still think reading source material is overrated and boring, I think we can usually get the best main ideas from older writing in better contemporary formats.

[David M · Rating 5 out of 5]

10/4/19 - A literary masterpiece and probably the greatest work of social theory. Rereading it with comrades, following the sudden collapse of our political home, proved to be an unexpected source of joy for me this year.

***
More than anything else, the genius of Marx lies in him having given us a dialectical framework for understanding and - hopefully - changing the world. Is that too pretentious a way of putting it? No, I don't think so...

A little over a hundred and fifty years since the publication of Capital, Volume 1, and the world has seen both horrors and progress that Marx himself could scarcely have imagined.

In chapter 15 ('machinery and large scale industry') Marx details how the introduction of machinery immediately caused workers to rebel wherever it happened. Much as he sympathizes with them, however, this is not Marx's own approach. Liberation will not come through the simple rejection of the social order but only through its dialectical transformation.

Marx leaves the question of revolution versus reform very much open, in my view. His discussion of the Factory Acts in chapter 10 hardly suggests a rejection of parliamentary tactics. What counts as a "revolution" is also an interesting question. It should not be controversial to assert that, in addition to creating unprecedented growth, capitalism also tends to plunge whole societies into unprecedented catastrophes.

Living when he did, Marx could only begin to have an inkling of the latter, but here he is on great Irish famine

Ireland, having during the last twenty years reduced its population by nearly one-half, is at this moment undergoing the process of still further reducing the number of its inhabitants to a level which will correspond exactly with the requirements of its landlords and the English woollen manufacturers. - pp 572

In the last part of the 19th century, Ireland proved to be a harbinger of a global phenomenon, as perhaps 50 million people died in famines caused by European imperial expansion (see Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World). Capital is not the black book of capitalism, but it does continue provide the best framework for understanding human civilization for the past couple centuries. Without Marx, all we can do is either avert our gaze (eg, Steven Pinker) or else simply go insane from the parade of meaningless suffering.

***
9/12/2017 - I manage to finish Marx's opus a couple days before the 150th anniversary of its first publication. Per usual, I find the mere feat of powering through a great & difficult book doesn't automatically lead to an increase in wisdom. I'll have to cogitate on this one a while.

Yes, it's a brilliant, messy thing. Chapters of abstract algebra alternate with harrowing pieces of journalism and history. Marx's exact thesis, if he has one, is often elusive. Before reading it, I was under the impression that it was only the young, romantic Marx who was concerned with matters such as alienation. So I was pleasantly surprised by the many darkly lyrical passages here on the commodity form. While truth be told I struggled with the intricacies of his theory of value, I'd say old Marx is still the indispensable entry point for a critique of modern society.

*

Capital, which has such "good reasons" for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers surrounding it, allows its actual movement to be determined as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by probable fall of the earth into the sun - pp 380

Not clear if Marx thought he was being ironic here. One hundred fifty years later, these words read more starkly literal than they could have at the time. Capitalism is killing the planet. The past century and half hasn't been a total bust in terms of human progress. Even so, the crises and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production have yet to be resolved.

Marx wrote Capital in part as polemic against the liberals of his day (Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill come in for memorable drubbings). While he agreed with them in denouncing slavery and other premodern varieties of domination, he also sought to expose he new kind of oppression masked in the commodity form. Bourgeois freedoms, if not completely illusory, were certainly inadequate to ensure a just society.

This strand of his thought remains controversial. Many have seen Marxism as an authoritarian doctrine. Given the history of really existing socialism in the twentieth century, this has sometimes been fair. Nonetheless, it seems to me there's never been a better time to renew a Marxist critique of liberalism than right now. As Slavoj Zizek once slyly remarked, we're all supposed to have a great big orgasm whenever we hear the word 'democracy,' but we're also not supposed to talk about the conditions under which people are able to make meaningful decisions about their lives.

The granting of formal democracy to much of the earth's population does not seem to be doing much to stay the plagues of social stratification and climate change. Indeed it's hard to take the word 'democracy' as much more than a joke in a world where 6 individuals have as much combined wealth as the poorer half of humanity. In the US, home of freedom and capitalist hegemon par excellence, we are seeing a shockingly unprecedented collapse in living standards; in the richest country in the world, a drop in life expectancy for a large demographic (that would be the infamous 'white working class').

Which is just to say we may be on the cusp of a new dark ages, or we may have already passed over and be in the early stages of it. Marx's 19th century vision of proletarian revolution is not necessarily the solution. What ​​is necessary is a lucid critique of the current social system if we have any hope to transform it. For this , Capital remains an incomparable resource.

*

How did Marx foresee the end of capitalism? This book really has far more to say about its origins. As a revolutionary he was always committed to the belief that a more just society was possible, and yet still we find passages such as

It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance - pp 899

Not just brute exploitation, but also the spell of ideology. How then is it possible to awaken to revolutionary consciousness? Thirty pages later we get something of an answer

Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated - pp 929

The fame of this passage is out of all proportion to its place in the book. In context it almost comes across as a non sequitur. In a massive book devoted overwhelmingly to the genesis and logic of capitalism, Marx suddenly shifts to speak, for less than a page, of the possibility of socialism.

Marx's marvelous rhetoric here may conflict with the substance of his point. He's not arguing that an increase in misery per se will lead to a revolutionary class. Plainly suffering does not necessarily empower or enlighten. Marx's political horizon is tied to the specific conditions of the industrial working class of time. The notion, say, of 'seizing the means of production' was by no means abstract or metaphorical in its original context. A highly disciplined army of workers could very well seize ownership of the factory in which they toiled. If this happened on the scale of the whole society, capitalism itself could be abolished.

At the time of his writing, and for decades afterwards, it was a plausible enough hypothesis. However, ultimately it was not borne out by history. For all the historic achievements the labor movement, it never managed to defeat capitalism for good. The capitalist mode of production has survived the advent of deindustrialization in the advanced western countries. To find a guide to the present conjuncture, then, I don't think we should look to his triumphalist mode about an ever-growing workers' movement. Rather, we can find insight in is earlier remarks (see page 783) about the progress of capital accumulation creating a redundant population.

Today we see not so much a strong proletariat growing in confidence, but an angry mass divided against itself, painfully aware of its own redundancy. In lieu of a strong revolutionary left, we're likely to see atomized communities continue competing with each other to prove who is more or less redundant. This is why reinventing class consciousness is such a daunting yet necessary task for then 21st century.

[anique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you know how many pages this is? 1152. And worth every leaf on the tree. A must read for anyone willing or wanting to wax grand about capitalism.

Picture it: My first semester in graduate school. Day two. My professor goes over the syllabus, week one: Das Kapital (Marx)/ chps. 1 - 15, 22, 27 etc. I cry for three days lamenting the decision to pursue higher education. Then I read that shit and my little world changes.

[Prerna · Rating 4 out of 5]

So my adventure of three years finally comes to an end and I find myself to be so much more wiser with it. For the last year or so I've been annoying and asking capitalist npcs if they know of the labour theory of value (hint:they don't.)

I had several setbacks and there were times when I thought of entirely giving it up. But my perseverance (which is not a trait that comes naturally to me, I'm a very lazy person) finally seems to have yielded something. Despite the difficult nature of the text, a patient reading of it (of even just the first four chapters really) will induce a long epiphany. I realise now how stupid I was before I read the book. Maybe I'll write a longer review some day, when I feel qualified enough to do so. For now, I am so glad to have finished it and I'm gonna flex for a decade at least.

Edit: I found the math (which I've been told is intimidating) fairly easy to follow. It maybe because I am physics grad student or it may be because I never thought of it as intimidating and it really wasn't, so my lack of fear helped. I think trying to approach this book fearlessly is the first step. Nevertheless here are some tips and suggestions:

1) Establish a reading circle/ study group: This was a key contributor to my perseverance. Just as I started reading Capital, I was fortunate enough to find this study group here on Goodreads. Although it eventually became inactive, the initial biweekly meetings helped me get through the most difficult chapters, and the interactions with others from different parts of the world helped me stay connected to the text. So my advice would be to find a reading circle or start one on your own if you're ambitious enough. Either way, Capital is very difficult to read all on your own.

2) David Harvey lectures: These are easily available on YouTube and help a great deal. Also, if you play the videos at a speed of 1.25 or 1.5, they're almost thrilling.

3) Secondary reading/supplementary texts: Although I have referred to fragments from different books, there are easily available texts and written notes online that are very helpful. Even a simple google search will yield at least a few good results. I must have scoured the internet for commodity fetishism because even though there isn't much about it volume 1, it's a key Marxian concept.

4) Podcasts: This must have been my most important resource after the reading group. And this is the simplest because you can listen to them even while doing chores, it might even almost be like a meditation. My favorite podcasts were Marx madness, Reading Capital with comrades and Introduction to Marx/Marxism.

Remember to not get too intimidated. Trust me, the math isn't really all that hard, especially if you use the right, easily available resources. Happy reading!

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do you criticize a classic? It's better than a classic, a pillar of modern capitalism.
As a result, no mistake, Marx is, by turn, a sociologist, historian, philosopher, and classical economist. However, it does not question the foundations of classical theories. Instead, he adds his vision, his critique of the workings of society, and the exploitation of man by man, but we are at the very heart of the classical theory.
Capital reads like Zola, for the most part. However, lifestyle and consumption habits are described realistically. The descriptions of the habitats or the bread are particularly highlighted.
Of course, the book has cost a wrinkle—one or a few. However, the inequalities remain, and some ideas are surprisingly modern (or desperate).

[Roy Lotz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marx was a man badly in need of an editor. For all of the financial, amiable, and intellectual support provided by Engels, one wishes that Engels had only he had been more ruthless is cutting the fat from his partner's work. This would have been easy enough at the time, but by now Marx’s writing has acquired a sacred aura.

The main meat of this bloated tome is all in the first few hundred pages. Marx actually lays out his ideas in a very pleasing and pithy manner. I wish the rest of the book was like this. By chapter 3, Marx has descended fully into prolix pedantry. By the middle of the book, the reader is lost in a sea of irrelevant information. Part of this is due to a general lack of integration of Marx’s interests.

Marx’s intellect was broad. He could write skillfully about philosophy, economics, history, and current events. He could write in an ultra-precise, actuarial style, or in beautiful literary prose. In short, Marx was a rare genius. But unlike other rare geniuses who possessed these sweeping talents, Marx seems incapable of making these interests fit under one roof. He dons different hats for different chapters, creating abrupt shifts in tone and substance. One moment, you are reading sublime, abstract philosophy; another moment, the tabloids.

In some ways, this book is similar to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . Like Kant, Marx is trying to overcome all of human knowledge in one grand sweep. Also like Kant, Marx is trying to integrate previously separate and antagonistic traditions. Most notably, Marx tries to wed German idealistic philosophy with English political-economy. But the marriage is strange and unhappy.

An underlying tension that runs through Capital is between a metaphysical/rationalist way of viewing the world, and a materialist/empiricist one. Of course, Marx is now famous for being a materialist; and he did everything in his power to create this impression. But one finds traces of his German penchant for metaphysics in his love of theory, which involves examining problems at the highest possible level of abstraction. Another continental quality is Marx’s use of dialectical reasoning throughout the work. The result is that some chapters are just as far from observable fact as anything Hegel could have written.

But then there’s the English side. All at once, Marx will set off on his charts and figures and statistics. He will include quote after quote from reports, newspapers, speeches, and addresses. He will examine specific historical and geographic cases in great detail. And when this happens, gone is the abstraction and ideation and dialectic.

So the text is disorganized. But what of the ideas? I had high hopes for this book. Marx is treated like a religious figure in many circles, and this book is held to be his greatest. I was expecting some serious and profound reflections on capitalism.

But Capital didn’t pay. This, in my opinion, is almost entirely due to his reliance on the “labour theory of value”. (For those who don’t know, Marx did not originate this idea; one can find the basic form as far back as John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.) Let me explain. Roughly, the idea is that all the value in an economy is ultimately derived from labour. This is why cars are worth more than toy cars, and those fancy drinks at Starbucks are worth more than a cup of coffee.

At first glance, this seems to hold. But the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. For one, the amount of labour involved in making a cup of coffee at Starbucks is standard. Yet, getting a cup in Manhattan is about twenty cents more expensive than getting a cup in Queens. Moreover, the price of a cup of coffee varies over time, yet the steps involved in making a cup of coffee have been standard for years. So clearly there must be more to it than labor.

Marx responds that he is not interested in superficial fluctuations in price. The value he is interested in is the natural price to which fluctuations return. So to speak, the ‘signal’ behind the ‘noise’.

Again, this seems to satisfy. But let’s think about it a little more. Take diamonds. Diamonds are now egregiously expensive. But the reason for this is not that producing a cut diamond requires an enormous amount of labour. It is because a single company controls the supply of diamonds, tightening it to make them artificially rare. And at the same time, advertising for diamond rings has substantially increased the demand. The price of diamonds has been high for years. So where is the ‘signal’ to the ‘noise’?

The truth is, the labour theory of value is untenable as a theory. A commodity’s price is determined by (A) effective demand (i.e. people who want it that have the resources to get it); and (B) how rare it is. This is economics 101, but Marxists would disagree. Take this quote from Ernest Mandel’s introduction, where he defends the labour theory of value with orthodox vigor:

Even when thousands of people are dying of hunger, and the ‘intensity of need’ for bread is certainly a thousand times greater than the ‘intensity of need’ for aeroplanes, the first commodity will remain immensely cheaper than the second, because much less socially necessary labour has been spent on its production.

It is true. People are starving every day, yet the price of food shows no sign of approaching the price of jet planes. But when people are starving, this is not demand in the economic sense—it is not effective demand. If they had the resources to get food, then they wouldn’t be starving. So this defense is fallacious. I can sit in my room and profoundly hope for a supermodel to walk in the door. But this is not demand on the economic sense.

Let’s take a more banal example. Say you have a horrendous, intolerable headache. You wander into the nearest drug store. You are in the touristy part of town, and everything is seriously overpriced. You look at the price tag of headache medicine and hesitate. But another second and your mind is made up—your head hurts so much, you’ll pay any price.

Here’s another example. Let’s say I came into possession of the handwritten manuscript of Marx’s Capital. I sell it at auction for three million dollars. Is that manuscript worth so much because there is three million dollar’s worth of labour congealed in it? Or because (A) there’s only one, and (B) people really want it. Supply and demand.

I know I’m belaboring this point. But I’m doing so because the entirety of Marx’s analysis rests on this faulty premise. Once you reject this theory of value, the entire edifice collapses and you’re left with nothing. Therefore, I feel confident in saying that I learned nothing about capitalism from this book.

I would even go so far as to say that accepting this theory of value blinds you to actual problems with capitalism. Here’s a real contradiction. Competition between owners will lead them to competitively cut their worker’s pay, in order to maximize profits. But if every owner, system-wide, is cutting pay, then you have a problem—a lack of effective demand. And if nobody is buying anything, business will stagnate. This demand problem can be temporary circumvented by giving people credit, but then you eventually get yourself into a debt trap, which is what just happened to our economy.

This is simple enough. But even this thought would have been impossible had I accepted the labour theory of value.

There is another serious flaw in Marx’s thinking. True to his reputation, this book is about the exploitation of one class by another. And it should be said, this class dynamic is integral to capitalism. But concentrating exclusively on inter-class struggles blinds Marx to the equally important intra-class struggles. In fact, capitalism is driven by competition between equals. Workers compete with workers, bosses with bosses, owners with owners. Instead of the homogenized blocks of people that Marx imagines, the economy is heterogenous, filled with individuals who are all employing different strategies. So this makes Marx’s analysis simplistic.

So I think there are systematic and serious problems with Marx’s thinking. He almost completely misses the ball. Yet whenever there’s an economic crisis in the future, the Marxists will all come out brandishing their copies of Capital and screaming that Marx predicted it. (By the way, isn’t there some sort of statute of limitations on predictions? At some point, we have to admit that Marx was wrong…). Yes, yes, and every time there’s a food shortage, we’ll have to go screaming back to Malthus.

I’m being very hard on the guy. But that’s only because I fear some people still take him at his word. Please, for the love of Marx, don’t get your economic information solely from him and his followers. You will get an extraordinarily warped picture of things.

But there is something charming about Marx’s writing. Maybe it’s his dorkiness. Reading through these pages often felt like hearing about the latest conspiracy theory about the Pixar movies. It is set forth in such an urgent tone, and such an elaborate argument is built up, that one cannot but help be dazzled. I also like Marx’s prose. It’s hard to put your finger on just what’s so good about it. At first glance it looks ordinary enough. But there’s always an unexpected turn, a satisfying cadence, or a captivating idea lurking around the corner. The man could write.

I also believe it is valuable to work yourself through an intellectual system such as this. If he is mistaken, Marx is at least wonderfully consistent, and builds an impressive theoretical apparatus. You can spend hours wandering its recesses, and applying it to new materials. It’s satisfying intellectual play. This book is also a fascinating historical document. During its bloated middle section, Marx includes some mind-blowing information about the working class in England. Conditions were truly horrible, which makes you understand why the man was convinced that capitalism was evil.

In regards to communism (hardly touched upon in this book), I have some frustrations with Marxists. I have yet to hear, in any substantial detail, how their perfect utopian system would work. All I am told is that it will be utopia. But the coup de grâce is that they use this imagined society, empty of suffering and full of brotherly love, to make our current society look bad. But this makes no sense. This is to compare an actual state of things with a phantasm of the imagination. Even if it is worked out in glorious detail in your mind, it still remains a thought. And no communist would point to its failed and horrifying manifestations in history as an example. This leaves them groundless.

I have gone on for far too long. I am also a man badly in need of an editor. I’m both very glad I read this book, and very disappointed with it. I am glad because Marx is a charming writer and an original thinker, and because his analysis was so influential. But I am disappointed that is is so bankrupt of ideas, and seems to be just as “scientific” (to use a favorite word of his) as L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics.

[Graham Latham · Rating 5 out of 5]

READ THE SHIT OUT OF THIS FKN DOORSTOP. LONG LIVE SOCIALISM.

[Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common.'

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had long avoided reading Das Kapital because I thought it would be too mathematically advanced for me. Taking courses with the Marxist philosopher and mathematician, David Schweickart, induced me to make the effort since his assignments and my own readings of Marx had already become pretty extensive and the avoidance of his most important text seemed silly. So, on my own now, I began carrying the tome about in my backpack, reading most of it at Jim's Deli across Sheridan Road from the Lake Shore Campus of Loyola University Chicago.

To my great surprise, the first volume of Capital was actually a rather quick and easy read, none of the formulations requiring more than the most elementary understanding of arithmetic. (I learned later that Marx himself only got as far as the calculus later in life.) Additionally, it made sense as an explanation of economic behavior, adding a dimension, that of class, not much appearing in Adam Smith, the only other classical economist I'd studied seriously previously. Indeed, the section on Primitive Accumulation was, for me, emotionally powerful stuff.

Getting over Capital and finding it not only illuminating but fun helped me overcome my fear of economics. I went on to read quite a bit more in the field and began purchasing and reading the International Publishers fifty volume set of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels as they became available--ultimately finishing about half of it before becoming bogged down in his notes of the mid 1860s.

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well that was a journey. Finally reached the end after two months of trudging through 10-15 pages a day. I'll write a proper review once I've finished going through my notes, but the thought I'll leave here for now is: read Capital! It's not impossible. A few chapters are tough going, and you should just go slowly (and accept that it's fine if you don't quite understand a few ideas - come back to them next time). But the core concepts are so insightful and profound, and the writing is powerful, poetic and funny. A strange thing to say about a book that came out 150 years ago, but it's indispensable for understanding modern society. And yes it's long, but as Radhika Desai says, show me any reading list and I'll happily remove three average-length books in order to make way for Capital Volume 1.

[Petre · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opener

[nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to say, this joint is bangin'. I find it useful when I'm in the club. P.S. Check out the total or expanded form of value. It's defective!

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vampires, monsters, fetishes! Stick with Marx through the saga of the coat and the M-C-M' and the rewards are so rich. When he guides you from the realm of exchange into the realm of production, I dare you not to feel like you are involved in cracking an incredible mystery. Because you are.

[Saleem · Rating 5 out of 5]

you will never see 20 yards of linen or one coat the same way again

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

k@rl marx i$t ein c00ler typ der g€ile bücher für junge l€ute schr€ibt

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-values, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser."

You could probably fill a library with insightful reviews, responses, commentary, and reflections on Marx's Capital, and many of the reviews on this site do add colour to the illustrious picture. However, since I don't feel that I would be able to add much, I won't waste anybody's time trying to add my own views or commentary.

Instead, I'll offer brief pointers on reading Capital:
*Read the book! Obvious, I know, but if you're like me you've probably expended a great deal of energy reading everything but the book itself, as a kind of countertransference, to escape getting the book read.

*Be wary of guidebooks and guidance. Sure Louis Althusser, Michael Heinrich, Ben Fine, and David Harvey all may have a great understanding and reading of Capital, but getting to read Capital on your own terms should be the first step towards understanding it, and focusing on somebody's else's perspective (and all of the digressions involved in that) will likely distract you. Also, not all advice is good advice ... except mine of course ;).

*Analyse the text, don't be a passive reader. Engage with the text, scribble on it, make notes, highlight it, put sticky notes on it, underline etc. Don't simply scan it passively like a newspaper article. Remember, this is one of the most important and influential texts in the social science canon, regardless of your individual view on its contents and style.

*Try and have a basic grasp of some of the context(s) of Marx's work. This means getting an idea of who Adam Smith is, who the Physiocrats were, why the Poor Laws existed etc, and having a basic knowledge of Marx's philosophy. Don't distract yourself by trying to get an expansive view of everything around Marx's life and context, but a brief read on Marxism like Karl Marx: His Life and Environment or this, may be helpful, provided that it doesn't distract you from the book.

*Read the footnotes and endnotes, most of them are pretty useful.

*Break the book up into chunks. Reading a 750-1100 page book (depending on edition) will obviously seem like a mammoth challenge. But reading a chapter/subchapter, or say 10, 20, or 40 pages a day, is nothing. Doing this will help you understand the book a lot better, since you can review what you have read, and will ensure that you don't just gloss over the words in huge stretches. It should also seem like less of a commitment, so you can keep gaming or whatever you nonsense you get up to.

*READ THE BOOK!

*If all else fails, there's always the abridged version Das Kapital

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh boy, this review is dated. In the interest of encouraging people to share their thoughts about Capital, and put words to paper generally, I'll leave this review up. Once I've gotten through it a second time though, I'm tidying all this up.

Marxism is one of those things where you think you know what it's all about as long as you read the Sparknotes and 'get' the key terms. Marx wrote the Capital to underline that his theory and vision isn't just a bunch of words, but a living, developing dialogue with a system that thrives when its benefactors close their eyes and which meets its victims disguised as random acts of failure and violence.

Like a dog on acid, Marx bites down on the concept of 'value', which chase turns into a variegated and constantly revolving exploration of the nature of the 'commodity' as a historically and socially determined relation, the rise and fall of classes, accumulation and centralisation of capital, and most of all, exploitation of labour and the massive social upheaval, degradation, squalor and death that goes along with it. The Capital doesn't allow itself to be reduced to any single category: it's economics, but it only concerns itself with 'price' to the extent that it is a symptom of value as such; it's the description of the logic of capitalism, but doesn't stay within the boundaries of the formal and the abstract; it's history, but defies chronology. It swashbuckles into a different perspective and focus with every chapter, with the only constant being the concern for the exploited. Helpfully, many illustrations of capitalist logic at work (collateral famines, forced migration, imposition of starvation wages and generally senseless inhumane division of labour) are contained in footnotes and thus the reader is allowed to focus on the core of the system at their leisure; nevertheless, I sometimes found myself wanting to return to the most interesting of Capital's contributions, namely the production, accumulation and circulation of value.

As with Freud, who in trying to describe the workings of the unconscious can only resort to descriptions distinctly tainted by conscious schemata, Marx seeks to penetrate prices, wages, credit, machines, infrastructure and resources to reach the value underlying the logic with which capitalism sets these facets in motion, but can never articulate it unless by mediating it through precisely these value-forms: it only becomes visible at the edges, peripherally emanating from a system not explainable by its overt symptoms. And yet, Marx constructs a water-tight set of pipes, valves and tubes around this shimmering fluid of value; after absorbing the first 150 or so pages, the reader starts piecing this infernal machine together themselves, almost intuitively. By page 300, the different pneumatic forces unveil themselves, the carrousel expanding and folding outwards. All of Capital’s disparate bits and pieces introduced earlier (and some to-be-introduced) get swept up and contribute to the totality of the analysis.

Judging Capital by its wokeness seems like a false metric, but nevertheless it proves to be remarkably foresighted: even as he laments the ruinous effects on families and children wrought by women’s inclusion in the work force (which ruinous effects obviously also included their own health, women and children being used primarily in the most heavily mechanized sectors of industry), he notes the resulting unprecedented emancipation relative to men, and concludes that any just future society must necessarily break down all barriers between genders in matters of work and employment. Any moral outrage in the book over lewd, callous and ‘rude’ behaviour of these working women and children seems quoted from contemporaries, but never echoed. While less pronounced, and oftentimes eclipsed by an emphasis on resource and land productivity for the good of the people, roots of ecological thought can too be found in the book.

In short, everyone must read it, everyone must read it and everyone must read it. Distorted beyond caricature in western popular discourse, frequently misunderstood even by adherents acting in good faith, its pertinence increasing with every day: there's no excuse for not getting to Capital, the source of it all.

[Vic u · Rating 5 out of 5]

call me an uneducated Marxist now. No but fr this monstrosity of a book is worth the many headaches. It truly is, as Engels says, "the bible of the working class".

[Xander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone knows Marx. And everyone knows Das Kapital. Or rather: everyone knows about Marx and Das Kapital. His name seems to come up with great frequency in public debates and public discourse; almost always in a polemical sense: someone either uses Marx or marxism as charicature to defend radical liberalism or someone uses Marx or marxism as ideal to promote radical equality (on any topic, basically: cultural marxism is as widespread as economic marxism).

I'm just like everyone. I heard and read about Marx. In school, and later when reading about philosophy and economics. Being a child of the 80's, I grew up with the idea of Western supremacy and the failure of marxism. Some years ago I watched a BBC documentary on the economic crisis of 2008, in which the host of the show used Marx, Keynes and Hayek to explain the different views (on both cause and solution) on solving the financial/banking crisis. In this documentary, it became clear to me that Marx wasn't some nutjob who simply wanted revolution; he seemed to be a clear-minded and consequentual thinker. Ever since, reading Marx has been on my list.

In this review I won't outline the whole book - this would be impossible, since the book itself contains 840 pages (and this is just the text). Besides impossible, it would also be highly obscure, since Marx's message is pretty clear and short, and he uses more than half of the book to offer detailed descriptions about the conditions of the worker, the statistics of economic trends and cycles, etc. Simply put: the message of Capitcal can be summarized rather quick.

According to Marx, in the fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe saw a major shift. Before this time, Europe consisted of mostly regional agricultural societies, in which most peasants owned some land, had to work on the land of their landlord or give some part of their produce to the landlord in order to pay rent, and lived a fairly decent live, in which family and community were important pillars of stability.

During the fifteenth century, things started to change. Due to local power shifts, the possessors of land started to confiscate the lands of peasants and expulse these peasants and their families to the towns. This trend was intensified by the Reformation, when most of the European states started to confiscate the enemy church's lands and divide these lands among the wealthy nobles. Later on, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the aristocracy (for example in Britain) started stealing lands from the state, as well.

Almost at the same time, there happened a shift in agriculture. No longer was arable land needed; pasture was what would be the future. Further, due to technological improvements, farmers could do with fewer and fewer hired personnel - meaning even more trekking to the towns. In these towns, guilds and cooperations were the protection of artisans and traders. This meant that these ever-growing towns were put under more and more strain of an increasing population of poor, unskilled labour force.

But even though these huge shifts in European societies created a totally new form of living for many, they didn't radically change the relations between labour and production. This changed with the scientific and technological breakthroughs in the seventeenth century, combined with the economic changes (for example, the origin of the banking system, the system of public debt and the colonization of the New World, etc.). Now it was possible to apply the newest technologies and inventions to produce more efficiently and cost-effective. The owner of the means of production - the natural resources/materials and the machinery - could buy labour force to create value. This is - according to Marx - the very foundation of capitalism.

Before capitalism there was division of labour, in the sense that each labourer produced a product. Later, when manufacture became possible (i.e. putting a group of labourers together in a building), the output could be increased. But the social division of labour only happened when the Industrial Revolution started: now the making of products was broken down in sequences of tiny steps, in which first each labourer would be selected for one single step in this process of production, and later on the labourer was replaced by machinery that could accomplish those tiny steps in the process of production much faster and much more accurate. This was capitalism at its finest: before this time, the labourer used to tools to produce, now the capitalist bought machinery that used up labour force to produce. Human beings went from creators to being simple input into machinery to produce value.

I should rather add some important caveat to this last point. This is Marx's second main thesis in Capital. The labourer is used up - as labour force - by the means of production (i.e. the machinery), in order to create value. But value for whom? According to Marx, this is the main stumbling block in (contemporary) economics. The economists before him - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc. - thought value was created by the laws of supply and demand: the capitalist would sell his products on the market above the cost price and make profits off them (Smith's 'invisible hand'). But Marx claims these economists either were mistaken, or worse were frauds and henchmen of the bourgeousie. According to Marx, value is not created by the law of supply and demand, but value is created by labour.

How does this work? Well, due to the economic and social changes in Europe, capital accumulated in the hands of the rich few - the capitalists. The masses were driven to the towns, creating a huge potential labour force. The problem is, all men - capitalist and proletarian alike - need to eat, drink, live in a house, raise a family, etc. This means that every man, woman and child needs to earn enough to procure these means of subsistence. Before capitalism, this wasn't a problem: everyone could produce his own means of subsistence and live off the land (so to speak). Now the situation was drastically altered: in order to buy the means of subsistence the masses had to sell their one and only product - labour force. The capitalist was the buyer, the worker the seller.

But the labour market is no free market (in the sense of Adam Smith's invisible hand): the capitalist has the monopoly on the means of production, meaning, in effect, that he could demand anything from the worker. If the worker had to work 5 hours in order to earn enough wages to procure the means of subsistence for him and his family, the capitalist wouldn't be happy. He wouldn't make any profit. So what happened? The capitalists demanded - over decades and centuries - ever longer working days. At the time of Marx's writing, men, women and children had to work (slave is a more appropriate word here) for 14-18 hours in factories and industrial plants, in abominable conditions (safe and decent conditions cost money...). This meant that all the hours above the fictional 5 hours were hours in which the worker produced value for the capitalist without getting anything in return for this.

And now we see immediately what is the foundation of capitalism: the capitalist creates value by buying more and more means of production, which continuously use up labour force.

There is an intrinsic drive to extremities within this capitalist system of production. According to Marx, capital consists of two parts: constant capital (i.e. the macinery, the natural materials used in production, etc.) and variable capital (i.e. the labour force). Over time, the capitalist will invest his generated capital into more constant capital: he will buy more, and more sophisticated machinery and natural resources. You might think this is good news for the worker, since this means more work. No so fast. Technological improvements lead to replacing the worker - who was degraded to doing insanely routine micro-steps within the process of production anyways - by machines. Machines need to be tended to, but one doesn't need as skilled a person to watch a machine compared to a person who needs to produce with his own hands. This meant that the male work force was steadily sacked; women, and preferably children (some as young as 5 or 6 years old), were now demanded. Lower skilled workers; less wages. Capital wins.

Over time, capitalism uses up the Earth and its inhabitants as material; its only goals is creating value, creating more capital. Or rather: letting the Earth and its inhabitants create more value - at the cost of themselves. Since capital attracts capital, capitalists will take over rival capitalists - leading to an accumulation of more and more capital in the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists. But since the capitalist only can produce value (or rather: let others produce it for him) when there's a market for his products, throwing more and more people into abject poverty is not really good for business. This is the internal contradiction in the capitalist system of production, at least according to Marx. The system will break down eventually, when capital cannot create any new capital anymore. The machinery has consumed itself, so to speak.

This is when the workers need to scare away - or kill off, Marx never was that clear on this - the remaining capitalists and confiscate the means of production for themselves. According to Marx, who applied so Hegelian dialectic on the system of production, capitalism was the negation of the former state in which the individual worker produced for himself and his family. Eventually, capitalism is negated by another negation (a 'negation of the negation'), namely the taking over of the means of production by the workers. Communism as a Hegelian dialectical end-state - how convenient.

The above is, in a sense, the main message of Das Kapital. The strength of the book lies in that fact that Marx doesn't just offer us a technical analysis of capitalism - he backs up his arguments with facts, statistics and illustrations. So when he talks about how the poor are being used up by the system as material (i.e. labour force - literally dehumanized beings, only counted in labour hours), he cites report after report by British Commissions send to investigate the working conditions and life standards of the workers. It is really shocking and heart-breaking to read these stories. Young boys who would work 20+ hours in mines - without light - and be 'lived up' when reaching 20; the housing conditions of the poor, where tens of people would sleep together, crammed up, only to switch beds with the workers returning from night shifts; the brutal working conditions, including all the injuries and deaths, of men, women and children; the continuous lobbying of capitalists and economists to increase the pressure on the poor; the diseases and epidemics running rampant in the poor districts and workplaces - in a word: the awful dehumanization of human beings.

No matter how touching it all is (it really is, in my opinion), one should also ask questions of truth when such radical claims are made. There are some major points in the book where Marx's moral anger seems to fly out of control. For starters, he divides up society in capitalists and proletarians. This is much too simplistic: there's always a huge room for graduate and intermediate positions. Not everyone was equally effected by the capitalist system of production - for better or for worse. Next, his labour theory of surplus value is wrong. Commodities can't be bought and sold to create value; but neither can capital create value. At least not in the sense that Marx mentions (maybe the modern day global banking system is a vindication of Marx's theory?).

Also, Marx's view of history as a process of dialectic progress towards communism is a Hegelian illusion. Hegel thought history follows a law (the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis; this synthesis forms the start, a new thesis, for a new dialectical process, and so on), and this law would result in the end-state. For Hegel, this was the Prussion state. For Marx, this is the Communist state. No matter what state one prefers, the claim is based on the assumption that history follows a law (or laws). This is proven to be impossible (cf. Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism [1957]). History doesn't follow laws, so Marx's fundamental assumption is false. Last, Marx put forward his theories on capitalism as scientific. The problem is: Marx's predictions (for example, the revolution coming in the most highly developed countries; the revolution coming - at all; etc.) were falsified by experience. In the USA, people like Henri Ford started to treat and pay their workers better, so they had a bigger market for their products. If you pay your workers better, they can buy your cars, and you will earn even more. In this sense, the solution of the horrors of industrial capitalism were (and are - in my opinion) to be sought for WITHIN capitalism, rather than throwing away the baby with the bathwather.

Anno 2018, Marx is usually brought up in highly intellectual debates on eceonomic policies or some such subject. Reading Das Kapital really made me see this is such a distorted view. Das Kapital is, first and foremost, an analysis of a capitalist system of production that crushed millions of people - worldwide - under its wheels, all for the benefit of the upper echelons. Second, it made me realize the unscrupulous attitude of the economists, especially in the UK and France, to support oppression by distorting the truth and giving politicians fance arguments to increase the oppression of the poor. Third, the book really struck a tone - its humanity, its cynical treatment of all the henchmen of capitalism, and its message (stop the oppression). Fourth, the book is, simply put, one of the building blocks of our modern world.

I can truly recommend teading this book - it would be great if more people had an inkling of an idea about what Marx actually wrote (and what not), instead of all the mainstream propaganda - pro or contra.

[Tanroop]

"If money...comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

Simultaneously one of the most difficult and rewarding books I have ever read, Karl Marx's Capital, Vol. 1 is rightfully held in high esteem. In many ways, it defies categorization. Is it a critique of bourgeois economics? A history of capitalism? An analysis of the degradations of industrial life in mid-1800s Britain? It is all of these things in part, and Marx executes all of these varied tasks really well. As a whole, those constituent parts form what is one of the most influential books in modern history, and still perhaps the most incisive critique of the socio-economic system that looms large over us all.

I'm not really qualified to judge the finer details of Marx's economic theories, and I'm still new to political economy as a whole. (That, and the length of time I took to read this book is why I haven't given it a star rating, but rest assured it would be a high one.) However, I found his analysis incredibly enlightening. When he described the laws that govern capitalist production and the tendencies of the capitalist class, I couldn't help but see it all at work around me. If Capital feels timeless, it is because Marx identified key aspects of capitalism that are still extant, sometimes in modified forms, today. As he writes, "the intimate connection between the pangs of hunger suffered by the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, is only uncovered when the economic laws are known."

One of the most important contributions here, in my view, is the fact that Marx shows the historically contingent nature of the capitalist mode of production. There was a world before capitalism and, surely, there will be a world after it; Marx seeks to remind the reader, over and over, that things were not always this way. They don't have to continue to be this way, either.

This book is a towering achievement, and has influenced the world in so many ways since it was first published. Long may it continue.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could excise two pieces of literature from the Western intellectual canon, I would axe The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli and The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; both for the same reason. I would do so not out of hatred for my old friends Nick and Charlie, but rather from a maternal, henlike affection for them, and a desire not to see their extraordinary bodies of work overshadowed and their reputations bludgeoned to death by their shortest and most polemical—and thus most popular—treatises.

Though separated by three centuries, The Prince prefigures the Manifesto because both prescribe spectacular acts of revolutionary violence as a means of establishing new foundations of power in a world where the old modes and orders have lost their legitimacy. Novelty, being unstable and indeterminate by its very nature, must puncture the plated cuirass of the given like an arrow fired from a bow. It is unsurprising, when these works are assigned in discrete isolation in undergraduate political philosophy courses, that their outsized reputation portrays their authors as cynical marauders in the public imagination.

Yet however troubling these writers are in the normative realm, those who study them in depth come to appreciate their descriptive and analytical genius. Machiavelli doted on his hypothetical prophet-prince with far less attention and enthusiasm than that which he applied to his exegesis of Livy’s antique republicanism. Marx, for his part, was not at all given to the hazy utopian thinking so often ascribed to him, but dedicated the bulk of his prolific intellectual career to the analysis of a social system—masquerading as an economic system—called capitalism.

That capitalism is a system at all—a mode of material social relations embodied in a particular historical context and thus subject to transformation by the vagaries of human endeavor, and not merely a fixity of human life, which, like the weather, can be mitigated in its wrath and enjoyed in its benevolence but never superseded altogether—is Marx’s original and perhaps most profound move. By snatching the capitalist mode of production from the upper room of assumption and delivering it to the earth to instruct mankind on its existence and functionality, Marx figures as an antitype of his favorite dramatic personage, Aeschylus’s Prometheus, whose famous line in Prometheus Bound, “In sooth all gods I hate”, was understood by Marx to be the lodestar of all philosophy.

The task of philosophy, for Marx, is to expose and confront the hidden gods haunting the shadows of social normativity for the liberation of the human will. Philosophy is the sword and shield of philanthropy. In this sense Marx is a forerunner of today’s critical theorists in the humanities and social sciences, notorious for their obsession with “deconstruction” and their reduction of every normative social system to an arbitrary expression of power—a cult of a false god. The ensuing identitarian anarchy of our time may be an indication that man cannot extract himself from the realm of the gods without mutilating himself in the process; but that’s another discussion.

Marx’s Prometheanism, his subordination of the ideal and timeless to the material and socially determined, thus informs his understanding of what he calls the capitalist mode of production. He defines capitalism in very specific terms; and this is the first of many places where most of his critics go astray. Capitalism, for Marx, is not simply the production and exchange of commodities; these are characteristics of most of the historical modes of production. Nor is it defined by the existence of a money commodity: a universal “language” of value through which various use-values (i.e. the actual usefulness of a commodity) are “translated” into exchange-values, represented by money, through which they can be exchanged for other commodities. Capitalism, more precisely, is a mode of production in which the traditional form of exchange—in which commodities are exchanged with one another and money is merely a means of circulation (by representing the exchange-values of the commodities in question)—is replaced by a new model of exchange in which money uses commodities to increase itself in the hands of its original owner.

The C—M—C form is replaced by the M—C—M’ form. The M’ represents the increased amount of money the money owner gets back after selling the commodity that he used his money to procure in the first place; the extra money is what Marx calls surplus-value. Capitalism is about the commodification of money; the decisive phase of a social phenomenon called commodity fetishism: the (mis)perception of commodity production and exchange as a series of relationships between things, instead of what they really are: a series of relationships between people.

The value of commodities (including money itself) does not exist in any purely objective sense. Value is determined socially; Marx invokes Smith and Ricardo (as well as Benjamin Franklin, surprisingly enough), while adjusting their conceptions, to define value as socially necessary labor time, or the average time spent working to create a particular commodity within a particular social context. Commodities are embodiments of human labor, and so when we buy and sell them we are trading in the abstracted and alienated labor-time of workers. Because we don’t see this, we don’t recognize the sharply disproportionate accumulation of wealth by the biggest money owners for what it is: an exploitative and arbitrarily hierarchical social system in which human labor power—encompassing the physical, intellectual, emotional, and artistic creativity of human beings—is alienated from the workers and taken captive by people who didn’t produce them.

Many of Marx’s critics don’t realize just how highly he values labor. For him it is absolutely central to human life. Though his materialist conception of history allows him to posit few human universals since most social norms are epiphenomena of historically-contingent relations of production, labor itself is something truly innate to human character. If there is such a thing as “human nature”—or, as Marx calls it, species-being—it is constituted by the uniquely human capacity to view one’s own life as a product of labor; to use our exclusive capacity for forethought (there’s Prometheus again) to imagine a desired creative end and then to work to bring it about from the given elements of nature. Our labor transforms the world around us by creating use-values, and it also transforms us, as the things we create reshape us in turn. Labor is thus a field through which nature and culture are mediated. Marx says that labor regulates the “metabolism” between nature and humanity: the two join together just as our bodies “join” with the things we eat when we digest them.

It is painfully ironic that the socialist tradition pioneered by Marx has become known as a creed for layabouts who want to live off the work of others. Marx would agree emphatically with your standard free-market Republican who claims to reject any form of social organization in which the wealth one has earned through hard work is taken from him and redistributed to those who haven’t earned it. He would merely identify a different culprit. It is not the poorest who are confiscating our hard-earned dollars, but the wealthiest: the large corporate CEOs, the major shareholders, the real estate moguls, the creditors, the speculators, and the industrial tycoons, who confiscate the value produced by workers as surplus-value—which is distributed unevenly at the top and then reinvested into the enterprise to create yet more surplus-value—and then give the workers who created the surplus-value a paycheck which is worth less than they value they produced. It is a critical condition for human flourishing that people are able to enjoy the fruits of their labor, but that metabolic fusion of labor and laborer is severed by the alienating process of capital accumulation.

Nor would Marx disagree with a libertarian skepticism of central planning; in fact he would embrace it wholeheartedly. But why, he would ask, do libertarians rightly criticize the central planners of the state without even acknowledging the central planners of the so-called private sector? The executives of the big tech companies, the retail sector, the pharmaceutical industry, and all manner of other enterprises which have totally reshaped our way of life are as much engaged in central planning and social engineering as any government initiative; the only major difference is that nobody voted for them, and they are held to no standard of responsibility except to deliver profit to their shareholders. There are many who sport the Gadsden flag on their patios and car bumpers who are routinely tread on by employers because they’re in the precarious position of having their livelihoods tied to their ability to work for wages from a boss who can fire them at his discretion. Theoretically they can sell their labor elsewhere, but have our libertarian friends considered how it came to be that so many people were reduced to such a condition that the only commodity they could reliably sell was so many hours of work? Marx has.

Marx remains the greatest analyst and critic of the social order of capitalism. Yet the prescriptive problem remains: how could a new order be instituted in the flow of history without the arbitrary violence of revolution—without the Prince? The twentieth century had more than its share of princes and revolutions. Stalin was said to have read and annotated The Prince, in addition to his obvious infatuation with the Manifesto. The history of political vanguardism in the cause of socialist revolution has an unbelievably hideous track record. If socialists are merely democrats who extend their democratism to the corporate realm, change will have to come through democratic processes, or perhaps from a more fundamental change in popular consciousness.

Capitalism has already adapted itself dramatically over its now centuries-long history, and there’s the obvious fact that the brutal conditions of industrial labor in the Victorian Britain of Marx’s time have mostly passed away—or been exported to the global south. Capitalism is more ubiquitous than it was when Marx was writing, but it has also become softer around the edges; at least in those parts of the world where labor has been organized, democracy has been stable, and individual rights have traditionally been respected. It could be that capitalism will simply keep on adjusting itself, bit by bit, until it transforms into something new. Yet if Marx’s materialism is well-founded, then our changes in awareness can only follow haltingly on the heels of changes in the social order. It may be that in the final account, Prometheus will have to come to an understanding with the gods.

[Fug o' Slavia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"First you get the primitive accumulation then you get the Linen, Then you get the Coats, Then you get the Capital, Then you Get the Labour, Then you get The Surplus Value, then you get the mechanization, then you get more Surplus Value" - Tony Montana

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not read this book, but am familiar with the gist of it. Until recently, even though I share Marx's aversion of Big Capital in the hands of a Few Individuals, I had not appreciated the real impact.

Every product has two values: the intrinsic value of the product, created by the poor labourer, and the exchange value, which the capitalist sells it for: usually much higher than the intrinsic value. The capitalist pockets the difference, and grows fat like a leech on the life-blood of the poor labourer, who lives and dies in penury.

Amazon is the CAPITALIST. Big time. Grown fat and bloated. Now it has swallowed GoodReads, and is growing fat on the reviews of us poor book-slaves.

THE TIME FOR THE BLOODY REVOLUTION IS AT HAND.

Reviewers of the cyber-world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your GR account!

FUCK AMAZON!

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a lot of editions of Marx's Das Kapital out there; some shorter, some longer and multi-volume. I read the one-volume 869-page Modern Library edition (which I can't seem to find on here). Marx's examination of the rise of capitalism from feudal roots is illuminating and his accounts of human exploitation in the early industrial age in England are harrowing. His examination of the mathematics of production was a little dense for me, but I stuck with it and did derive some insight. It's heavy duty stuff but way more fun than the much shorter Communist Manifesto. A memorable read, affording me also the bragging rights of saying I actually got through it.

(KevinR@Ky, with slight amendments in 2016)

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

A spectre is haunting the body of the Earth. If you're lucky, you'll see the former tear the latter to shreds.

Liberals and humanists are liars. You are not a human being. You are not free. You have no dignity and you have no rights. You are, quite simply, a mode of capital, a moment in its self-valorisation, nothing more than a container of labour-power. You are fundamentally no different than a "lifeless instrument of labour"; in fact, you might as well be one, condemned as you likely are to repetitious and mindless work. Soft-hearts would like you to believe at least that self-care is revolutionary, but even that forms a necessary component of the reproduction of capital. As soon as that is no longer necessary, you will be disposed of—if the biosphere doesn't burn down first.

That is, unless the expropriators are expropriated. It's a matter of life or death. Capitalism is destroying the planet, polluting the atmosphere and oceans, draining groundwater, spreading deserts. If we get rid of the greedy capitalists, everything will be alright. That's certainly what your leftist friends will tell you. They haven't read their Marx.

Marx stood Hegel on his head, stripping the dialectic of its preposterous idealism and giving it a materialist content. In this way, Marx brutalises the political economy of his day with sarcasm and style, throwing Smith, Malthus, Bentham and others into a whirlwind of critique from which they don't emerge alive. But Marx, for all his genius (and he is a genius) is a prisoner of his time. I have said before that Georges Sorel is the most honest successor to Marx, that his Reflections on Violence reflects the most respectable attempt to build on his musings about the post-capitalist world. In my review of that, I wrote: "The dream of indefinite progress is no longer tenable today... socialism will not rescue industrial society from barbarism. Industrial society is barbarism. Finite planet, finite resources, finite time. The story of the rise of the proletariat is not an epic. It is, in truth, quite tragic. But mostly it's a farce."

You see, modern political Marxism is a well-intentioned joke, whose endpoint seems to be the construction of a bloodless Christian heaven-on-Earth. Marx, whatever he thought the future might look like, surely did not think it would look like that. A society in which fully-developed individuals hold the means of production in common is not one where the process of technological development or wealth creation ends, but one where the process is accelerated. Importing this doctrine uncritically into the 21st century is only marginally less absurd than organising a party in the hopes of instituting Plato's Republic. Realising Marx's dream now would only mean kicking industrial society's omnicide program in hyper-hyperdrive. Besides, comrades, you missed the boat back in 1988.

It was always going to end up this way. Marx didn't realise it, but Capital is a schematic for the construction of a death machine whose task cannot be interrupted once started. Capital is the unfriendly optimiser, the nightmare of every society. Once it arrives on the scene, it strips everything of its meaning and purpose, chews it up, spits it back out as capital; all that is solid melts into air, everything becomes capital = shit. As capital burns through every possible market, absorbing resources, obliterating its basis for existence (i.e. living beings) it is supposed to create a proletarian subjectivity that rises up and smashes it. This is Marx at his most naive, his most embarrassingly humanist, and he himself fills his book with many examples of the abject failure with which every attempt to rebel against capital's dominion meets. Saying 'Well, one day, it'll be different! It has to happen!' is not scientific no matter how hard you try. There is no natural law of revolutionary consciousness. In fact, the opposite may well be true. Lyotard said it well enough in his Libidinal Economy—"they... enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them..." Deny the jouissance of being fucked by the capitalist all you like; if there is truly nothing to lose but our chains, we will cling to our chains all the tighter. You may be a liberty-loving outlier, but "thousands of years of authoritarian socialisation favour the jackboot." (Down with the Empire! Up with the Spring! [2003])

In the end, there is only one class: the Human Class. The capitalists, despite modern day resentful proclamations to the contrary, do not exploit you because they're greedy, mean, psychopathic, naughty sinners, cruel, etc. but because the laws of capitalist production compel ruthless competition between capitalists lest they be outcompeted and expropriated. A capitalist is not a human any more than you are. A capitalist is an avatar of capital, their soul is the soul of capital. Likewise you, as worker, reproduce not only capital but the antagonistic relations of capital. It isn't really appropriate to say you're parasitised by the capitalist. Rather, we all collaborate in the production of a system that will inevitably sterilise the planet. Welcome to desiring-production. Next stop: the Body without Organs. Snacks and drinks are available at the bar and a trolley will be coming through shortly. We only accept contactless payment methods at the moment: there's a virus going around and it's killing everybody.

Why read Capital then, if I'm such a pessimist? It's simple really: this text is truly a touchstone for modern thought, and if you want to engage with any political text that comments on our modern times with even a hint of intelligence and relevance, odds are it'll be participating in a conversation that Capital started. Certainly, if you'd like to prove the naysayers like myself wrong, save the world, reterritorialise the Earth, you will have to go through Marx. And as an example of the summit of brilliance a critical mind can reach, there are not many books that can stand with Capital.

Besides, don't you want to know how the story ends?

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The conqueror will occupy your lands and then sell your resources back to you on credit and tell you all the time it’s a good deal for you. Marx said that multiple times in this book and that’s a metaphor he used to describe the fate of the working person (labor) when at the mercy of capital.

Exploitation and alienation are features not bugs in the absence of a government for the people. The plight of the working class in Europe for the most part was pitiful and hopeless during the time of this book and Marx does a yeoman job of documenting it. Just as burning cats might have been au currant in 1667 Paris and forcing children as young as 8 years old or forcing overtime upon workers or providing them below subsistence wages with dangerous work conditions was the norm in 1860 England, nobody sane accepts those norms today. The world has changed today but this book makes a case that we are only as good as the government that we have when they act in the interest for the people and not the oligarchs.

The oligarchs and the powerful will always alienate and exploit to squeeze the other who is not them up to the limit that they can get away with. The status quo is the default given as ought, the naturalistic fallacy which assumes ‘is’ means ‘ought’. The status quo and the given during Marx’s time was that 16 hour day was in the best interest of the working person, and the factories and workhouses said they were doing the working class a favor, and Marx was forced to refute that and a whole host of other givens as ought. Today, those kinds of norms seem anachronistic and superfluous, but that’s only because society has changed. (Ultimately, nothing ever really changes, even somebody I’ve barely ever heard of before today, Kayne West, recently said that ‘slavery for the slaves was a choice’ in America since it lasted for 400 years. The ignorant will always be ignorant because they don’t know they don’t know and aren’t interested in learning).

You ever notice how even the reality based journalism makes a statement such as ‘there is a shortage of fast food workers’ (the NYT did that on 5/4/2018 with reference to the 3.9% unemployment numbers that came out)? That statement really irritates me. What they really are saying is at the wages the fast food companies are willing to pay there aren’t enough workers who want to be exploited at those low wages. Marx will show even in his time period that kind of wrongheaded formulation was prevalent.

The masters of suspicion: Freud, Nietzsche and Marx all had their take on truth. Freud thought truth existed but we are in denial about it, Nietzsche thought the greatest truth was that there was no knowable truth, and Marx thought truth was discoverable through class. Marx will try to develop his foundations through class and its exploitation and alienation with theory of money, currency, labor and capital, and through his story telling.

And what a story Marx tells. He is incredibly gifted in weaving philosophy and religion into his narrative. I can say that most of what I read now days about Hegel has gone through a lens of Marx which is unfortunate because Hegel clearly could have another more relevant interpretation than what is commonly thought. Marx expects his readers to be cognizant of philosophy and will make statements such as ‘that would lead to the sophistry of Protagoras or the relativism of the Eleatics’.


There is a reason why the ‘Great Books of the Western World’ included this book in the series. Not only is Marx an incredibly good writer (while not necessarily being a great economist), he has something to say that is relevant for our time period and definitely should be read today. This Ukemi production is a treasure and I would highly recommend it. (And no I’m not affiliated with Ukemi in any way even though I keep reviewing and raving about their products. They just seem to have the books I’ve been reading because I just love the old classics that they have recently made available).

[Krishna Avendaño · Rating 1 out of 5]

El problema con El Capital no es tanto lo pesada que puede resultar su lectura - que lo es -, sino el hecho de que la teoría marxista, a la luz de la realidad, y como lo demostraran varias generaciones de economistas austríacos, tales como Menger, Böhm-Bawerk y Mises, resulta un error teórico. No sólo su análisis sobre la dinámica capitalista es malo - partiendo del equívoco de una teoría del valor-trabajo que ha sido demostrada falsa -, sino que sus ideas conducen a un entendimiento pobre de lo que se vive.

[Marcel Santos · Rating 5 out of 5]

ENGLISH

Karl Marx’s Book I of “The Capital: Critique of Political Economy” is such an acclaimed, interpreted and reviewed book, object of so many controversies over the centuries, and has motivated so many revolutions around the world, that it is impossible to review it without feeling intimidated or thinking you are committing blasphemy.

The best strategy, in this case, is to be succinct, go straight to the point, avoid clichés and third-party interpretations, including analyzes of the author's philosophical background, and avoid controversy.

But is it feasible to deviate from polemics when it comes to Marx? It is definitely not the case. Marx's ideas, presented vigorously in this work, touch on feelings that go far beyond indifference or neutrality. Marx gives these sentiments a scientific guise; he conducts a rigorous investigation, relying on solid method (which does not mean immune to well-founded criticism), and exposes it in an amazingly and surprisingly clear way.

Living in a time of great development of the capitalist system in post-Industrial Revolution England, Marx observes the profound social transformations of society and presents an economic and social theory that seeks to take into account the great complexity of the new economic system and succeeds in giving it impressive cohesion and coherence — even though it has been considered superseded by many. The fact, however, that there are still followers of his theory around the world who consider it valid gives an idea of ​​the power of his ideas.

Book I of The Capital deals with three major themes, in a very tight summary: (1) commodity; (2) surplus value; and (3) social denunciation.

Marx sees the commodity as the fundamental unit of the capitalist phenomenon. It is the starting point of his investigation. It is responsible for the way capitalist society moves. The commodity plays a fundamental role in the structuring and stratification of this society, determines people's lives, and translates economic power relations in society.

For Marx, people's permanent search for commodities determines the movement of capitalist society. The commodity is the object of desire of all people; its idea represents the individual's ideal of ​​achievement and determines her/his social position. Commodity, for Marx, is the product of human labor, although human labor itself is also a commodity. The functioning of society is motivated, therefore, by the desire to have commodities. People see a characteristic in the commodity as if it were intrinsically present in it, but which in fact it is not as it is something socially constructed, which is its exchange value and the ability to express itself in money. People’s quest for commodities, motivated by a characteristic of value that in fact is not in it, is the “commodity fetishism”.

In capitalist society, money fetish is even greater than commodity fetish, due to the clearer and more present perception of the intrinsic exchange value that people have about money. Money is therefore the real, material expression of an abstraction, which is the perception of value about an apparently simple thing (a piece of paper or a unit of metal).

This is an idea that should be analyzed along with another concept previously developed by Marx. In his “Paris Manuscripts”, Marx had developed the idea of ​​“estrangement” or “alienation” of the worker. According to my review of this work (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), in capitalist societies, people live according to their work, which is an activity carried out to produce for others. The worker lives to work, which is an activity not necessarily in correspondence with her/his essence, and which produces something that is not for her/himself; an activity that is itself a commodity, and the worker does so to acquire commodities and thus realize this alienated essence.

Based on this idea, another fundamental concept in the work is that of “surplus value”. For Marx, the capitalist production system necessarily implies the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist. Marx notes that work transforms different commodities into other commodities, and it is this work that makes the new commodity have a value greater than the sum of the values ​​of the other commodities that entered into the composition of this new commodity. This is where “surplus value” comes in: in the incessant quest to increase the value of the commodities sold, the capitalist seeks to make the worker work more than the value of the salary paid for the work. The result is the appreciation of the commodity and the impoverishment of the worker.

This is an idea that is born directly from the observation of reality and especially the living conditions of workers in Europe at the time, particularly in England. Here comes the point of social denunciation, incessantly well illustrated especially after the first third of the book with reports of official investigations carried out at the time.

As I wrote in my review of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” by Marx and Engels (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), given the way society was developing at the time, it seemed inevitable that some intellectual would begin to look at reality from the perspective of the poor and the worker. The appalling living conditions of the poor and factory-working population in England seem unimaginable by today's standards in the developed world — although in many countries, notably in the so-called developing world, similar conditions still exist. Is the idea of ​​children between 4 and 12 years old working for 12 hours or more in filthy factories, very poorly fed and paid, often maimed by accidents at work and breathing toxic gases conceivable? This was the shocking reality of early capitalism, which Marx denounces in detail.

Near the end of the book, Marx resorts to the origins of capitalism to point out that what he calls the process of “primitive accumulation” already began to exist at the moment when some appropriated public lands, and on the other hand small landowners or even slaves became wage workers. Capitalist relations, thus, are necessarily based on the extraction of surplus value from the workers at its origins, which necessarily implies capital accumulation by capitalists by means of the exploitation and impoverishment of the worker.

Some authors defend that Marx is not properly a supporter or follower of the labor theory of value, like his predecessors Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In fact, according to these authors, the predecessors start from the premise that all value originates from work; while Marx analyzes every economic relation in the capitalist system to reach the conclusion that value originates from work. This difference in “method” would lead to a superior explanation in Marx's theory of the relationship between money and work, since money sometimes seems to multiply without any base on work. In my opinion, Marx nevertheless can still be considered an adept of the labor theory of value due to the centrality of the labor as the provider of value in his theory.

Although many criticisms have been made of Marx's economic theory, it seems indisputable that the book at least has great value in its social theory aspect. Whatever side of the political spectrum the reader is on, it is impossible to remain indifferent to “The Capital”. It also seems impossible to come out of this experience the same way you entered it.


PORTUGUÊS

O Livro I de “O Capital: Crítica da Economia Política” de Karl Marx é uma obra tão aclamada, interpretada e resenhada, objeto de tantas polêmicas ao longo dos séculos, e motivou tantas revoluções mundo afora, que é impossível resenha-la sem se sentir intimidado ou pensando se estar cometendo uma blasfêmia.

A melhor estratégia, nesse caso, é ser sucinto, ir direto ao ponto, evitar clichês e interpretações de terceiros, incluindo análises sobre o background filosófico do autor. E evitar polêmicas.

Mas é factível evitar polêmicas quando se trata de Marx? Definitivamente não é o caso. O ideário de Marx, apresentado de modo alentado nesta obra, toca em sentimentos que passam longe da indiferença ou neutralidade. Marx dá a esses sentimentos uma roupagem científica; realiza uma investigação rigorosa, embasando-se em método sólido (o que não significa imune a críticas fundamentadas) e exposta de uma maneira incrível e surpreendentemente clara.

Vivendo em uma época de grande desenvolvimento do sistema capitalista na Inglaterra, em sua fase pós-Revolução Industrial, Marx observa as transformações sociais profundas da sociedade e apresenta uma teoria econômica e social que procura levar em conta a grande complexidade do novo sistema econômico e consegue conferir a ela coesão e coerência impressionantes — ainda que considerada por muitos ultrapassada. O fato, porém, de existirem seguidores de sua teoria até hoje mundo afora, reputando-a como válida, dá a noção do poder de suas ideias.

O Livro I de O Capital trata, em apertada síntese, de três grandes temas: (1) mercadoria; (2) mais-valor; e (3) denúncia social.

Marx vê na mercadoria a unidade fundamental do fenômeno capitalista. É o ponto de partida de sua investigação. É responsável pelo modo como a sociedade capitalista se move. A mercadoria marca presença fundamental na estruturação e estratificação dessa sociedade, determina a vida das pessoas e traduz as relações de poder econômico.

Para Marx, a busca permanente das pessoas por mercadorias determina o movimento da sociedade capitalista. A mercadoria é o objeto de desejo de todas as pessoas; sua ideia representa o ideal de realização do indivíduo e determina sua posição social. Mercadoria, para Marx, é o produto do trabalho humano, embora o próprio trabalho humano também seja mercadoria. O funcionamento da sociedade é motivado, portanto, pelo desejo de se ter mercadorias. As pessoas veem na mercadoria uma característica como se estivesse presente intrinsecamente nela, mas que na verdade não está, mas é algo socialmente construído, que é o seu valor de troca e a capacidade de se expressar em dinheiro. Essa busca das pessoas por mercadorias, por enxergarem uma característica de valor que à rigor não está nela, portanto, é o “fetiche da mercadoria”.

Na sociedade capitalista, o fetiche do dinheiro é ainda maior do que o fetiche da mercadoria, pela percepção mais clara e presente de valor de troca intrínseco que as pessoas têm sobre o dinheiro. O dinheiro é, portanto, a expressão real, material. de uma abstração, que é a percepção de valor sobre uma coisa aparentemente simples (um pedaço de papel ou uma unidade de metal).

Essa é uma ideia que cabe ser analisada em conjunto com outro conceito desenvolvido anteriormente por Marx. Em seus “Manuscritos de Paris”, Marx havia desenvolvido a ideia de “estranhamento” ou “alienação” do trabalhador. Conforme minha resenha a essa obra (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), na sociedade capitalista, as pessoas vivem em função de seu trabalho, que é uma atividade realizada para produzir para outros. Assim, o trabalhador na sociedade capitalista vive para trabalhar, que é uma atividade não necessariamente em correspondência com sua essência humana, e que produz algo que não é para ele; atividade essa ela própria uma mercadoria, e o trabalhador a realiza para adquirir mercadorias e assim realizar essa essência alienada.

Partindo dessa ideia, outro conceito fundamental na obra é o de “mais-valia”, ou “mais-valor”. Para Marx, o sistema de produção capitalista necessariamente implica a exploração do trabalhador pelo capitalista. Marx nota que o trabalho transforma mercadorias diversas em outras mercadorias, e é esse trabalho que faz com que a nova mercadoria tenha um valor superior à soma dos valores das mercadorias que entraram na composição dessa nova mercadoria. É aí onde entra o “mais-valor”: na busca incessante por aumentar o valor das mercadorias vendidas, o capitalista procura fazer o trabalhador trabalhar mais do que o valor do salário pago pelo trabalho. O resultado é a valorização da mercadoria e o empobrecimento do trabalhador.

Essa é uma ideia que nasce diretamente da observação da realidade e especialmente das condições de vida dos trabalhadores da Europa à época, particularmente da Inglaterra. Aqui entra o ponto da denúncia social, incessantemente bem ilustrado especialmente após o primeiro terço do livro com relatórios de investigações oficiais realizados à época.

Como escrevi na minha resenha do “Manifesto do Partido Comunista” de Marx e Engels (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), do modo como a sociedade se desenvolvia na época, parecia inevitável que algum intelectual passasse a observar a realidade da perspectiva do pobre e do trabalhador. As condições chocantes de vida da população pobre e que trabalhava nas fábricas inglesas parecem inimagináveis para os padrões de hoje do mundo desenvolvido — embora em muitos países, notadamente do chamado mundo em desenvolvimento, ainda existam condições semelhantes. É concebível a ideia de crianças entre 4 e 12 anos de idade trabalhando por 12 horas ou mais em fábricas imundas, com alimentação paupérrima e mal pagas, frequentemente mutiladas por acidentes de trabalho e respirando gases tóxicos? Essa era a chocante realidade do capitalismo inicial, que Marx denuncia em detalhes.

Perto do final do livro, Marx recorre às origens do capitalismo para apontar que o que ele chama de processo de “acumulação primitiva” já começou a existir no momento em que alguns se apropriaram de terras públicas e, de outra parte, pequenos proprietários ou mesmo escravos se tornaram trabalhadores assalariados. As relações capitalistas, portanto, são necessariamente baseadas na extração de mais-valia dos trabalhadores desde suas origens, o que implica necessariamente a acumulação de capital pelos capitalistas por meio da exploração e empobrecimento do trabalhador.

Alguns autores defendem que Marx não é propriamente um adepto da teoria do valor-trabalho, como seus predecessores Adam Smith e David Ricardo. Na verdade, segundo tais autores, os predecessores partem da premissa de que todo valor origina-se do trabalho; enquanto Marx analisa cada relação econômica no sistema capitalista para chegar na conclusão de que o valor se origina do trabalho. Essa diferença de “método” levaria a uma explicação superior na teoria de Marx da relação entre dinheiro e trabalho, já que o dinheiro às vezes parece se multiplicar sem lastro no trabalho. Na minha opinião, devido à centralidade do trabalho como provedor de valor na teoria de Marx, ele ainda pode ser considerado como um adepto da teoria do valor trabalho.

Ainda que muitas críticas tenham sido feitas à teoria econômica de Marx, parece indiscutível que o livro ao menos tem grande valor em seu aspecto de teoria social. Seja de que lado do espectro político o leitor for, é impossível permanecer indiferente a “O Capital”. Parece impossível também se sair dessa experiência igual a como se entrou.