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:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~190,000 words · 921 passages
Cite this work
- APAKarl Marx. (n.d.). Capital, Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (Samuel Moore i Edward Aveling, Trans.). Digital reproduction: 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. Translated by Samuel Moore i Edward Aveling. Digital reproduction, 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. Translated by Samuel Moore i Edward Aveling. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/capital-vol-i-a-critical-analysis-of-capitalist-production.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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.
Under these circumstances its professors fell into two groups. The one set, prudent, practical business folk, flocked to the banner of Bastiat, the most superficial and therefore the most adequate representative of the apologetic of vulgar economy ; the other, proud of the professorial dignity of their science, followed John Stuart Mill in his attempt to reconcile irreconcilables. Just as in the classical time of bourgeois economy, so Author's Prefaces. xxv also in the time of its decline, the Germans remained mere schoolboys, imitators and followers, petty retailers and hawkers in the service of the great foreign wholesale concern. The peculiar historic development of German society therefore forbids, in that country, all original work in bourgeois economy ; but not the criticism of that economy. So far as such criticism represents a class, it can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes — the proletariat. The learned and unlearned spokesmen of the German bourgeoisie tried at first to kill "Das Kapital " by silence, as they had managed to do with my earlier writings. As soon as they found that these tactics no longer fited in with the conditions of the time, they wrote, under pretence of criticising my book, prescriptions '' for the tranquillisation of the bourgeois mind." But they found in the workers' press — see, e.g,^ Joseph Dietzgen's articles in the " Volksstaat " — antagonists stronger than themselves, Ko whom (down to this very day) they owe a reply. ^ An excellent Eussian translation of " Das Kapital " ap-