Capital: A Critique of Political Ecomony, Vol. 1: The Process of… (1867)

Book Description: Foreign Languages Publishing Moscow 1961. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engles. Very light shelf wear outside. Fine white tape used to repair forward edge of spine. xii & 807pp.

Two years after the American Civil War ended and nearly two decades after revolutions ravaged the European continent, Karl Marx, a secular Jew living in exile in Great Britain, published the first volume of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Two more volumes would follow. The plan involved an outline for six volumes, a monumental undertaking even to someone as prolific as Marx was. Friedrich Engels would go on to edit and compile the second and third volumes in addition to editing future editions of Volume 1.

Volume 1 of Capital can be seen bookending Marx’s fecund writing career. He began his career writing about German philosophers, became involved in politics and worker emancipation, and eventually penned The Communist Manifesto in 1848 with Friedrich Engels. The revolutionary fires were quashed and Marx ended up in Great Britain.

Capital analyses the economic system known as capitalism beginning with the commodity, the cellular unit of the structure. One can see the analysis in both biological and architectural terms. From the commodity – the thing one sells to a buyer – to labor to the working day to the factory and finally to mass production, Marx builds an analytical critique of the entire system. The critique is emblematic of Marx’s overall philosophy and the Victorian zeitgeist. Marx’s revolutionary communism represented part of an overall historical continuity in the progress of human relations. He defends capitalism in its removing the shackles of feudalism. It was his hypothesis that the communism would emerge as the next stage of mankind’s economic development. (I use the word “hypothesis,” since Marx’s critique is heavily indebted to economics as a science, in addition to the discipline functioning as a philosophy.)

Volume 1 builds a foundation for this critique. Marx weaves a tapestry of economic theory, historical evidence, and polemical rhetoric. The early sections are dry and slow going, although he leavens the abstract concepts with real-life examples. The sections on the working day, the factory, and the rise of mass production use historical evidence to forward his assertions. Finally, the last chapters focus on “primitive accumulation” (i.e. the economic relationships prior to capitalism proper) and the genesis of specific social classes. Through this long, methodical analysis, Marx asserts that capitalism extracts surplus labor from the worker.

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