Capital, Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- Samuel Moore i Edward Aveling
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~190,000 words · 921 passages
Cite this work
- APAKarl Marx. (n.d.). Capital, Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/capital-vol-i-a-critical-analysis-of-capitalist-production
- MLAKarl Marx. "Capital, Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/capital-vol-i-a-critical-analysis-of-capitalist-production.
- ChicagoKarl Marx. Capital, Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/capital-vol-i-a-critical-analysis-of-capitalist-production.
What it is about
The first volume of Capital: the commodity and value, the working day, surplus value, machinery, and the chapter on so-called primitive accumulation.
Context and history
It is the only one of the three volumes Marx published himself, in 1867; the other two Engels assembled from manuscripts. One editorial detail counts: Marx personally revised the French translation of 1872-75 and introduced changes into it, writing that that version had 'a scientific value independent of the original'. The chapters on the working day and the factories are packed with quotations from the British factory inspectors' reports, and read on their own they are already a document of the nineteenth century.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
THE work, the first volume of wbicli I now submit to the public, forms the continuation of my '' Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie " (A contribution to the criticism of Political Economy) published in 1859. The long pause between the first part and the continuation is due to an illness of many years' duration that again and again interrupted my work. The substance of that earlier work is summarised in the first three chapters of this volume. This is done not merely for the sake of connection and completeness. The presentation of the subject-matter is improved. As far as circumstances in any way permit, many points only hinted at in the earlier book are here worked out more fully, whilst, conversely, points worked out fully there are only touched upon in this volume. The sections on the history of the theories of value and of money are now, of course, left out altogether. The reader of the earlier work will find, however, in the notes to the first chapter additional sources of reference relative to the history of those theories. Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty. That which concerns more xvi Authors Prefaces. especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised/ The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of