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Das Kapital

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Economics

   Das Kapital (Capital, in the English translation) is an extensive
   treatise on political economy written by Karl Marx in German. The book
   is a critical analysis of capitalism, its economic practices, and the
   theories which economists made about it.

Themes

   The central injustice of capitalism, according to Marx, was in the
   exploitation and alienation of labor, a condition which a later Marxist
   thinker, Harry Braverman, in his work Labour and Monopoly Capital: the
   degradation of work in the 20th Century, called "the degradation of
   labour". The ultimate source of the new profits and value-added was
   that employers paid workers the market value of their labour-capacity,
   but the value of the commodities workers produced exceeded that market
   value. Employers were entitled to appropriate the new output value
   because of their ownership of the productive capital assets. By
   producing output as capital for the employers, the workers constantly
   reproduced the condition of capitalism by their labour.

   However, though Marx is very concerned with the social aspects of
   commerce, his book is not an ethical treatise, but an (unfinished)
   attempt to explain the objective "laws of motion" of the capitalist
   system as a whole, its origins and future. He aims to reveal the causes
   and dynamics of the accumulation of capital, the growth of wage labour,
   the transformation of the workplace, the concentration of capital,
   competition, the banking and credit system, the tendency of the rate of
   profit to decline, land-rents and many other things.

   Marx viewed the commodity as the "cell-form" or building unit of
   capitalist society — it is an object useful to somebody else, but with
   a trading value for the owner. Because commercial transactions implied
   no particular morality beyond that required to settle transactions, the
   growth of markets caused the economic sphere and the moral-legal sphere
   to become separated in society: subjective moral value becomes
   separated from objective economic value. Political economy, which was
   originally thought of as a "moral science" concerned with the just
   distribution of wealth, or as a "political arithmetick" for tax
   collection, gave way to the separate disciplines of economic science,
   law and ethics.

   Marx believed the political economists could study the scientific laws
   of capitalism in an "objective" way, because the expansion of markets
   had in reality objectified most economic relations: the cash nexus
   stripped away all previous religious and political illusions (only to
   replace them, however, with another kind of illusion -- commodity
   fetishism). Marx also says that he viewed "the economic formation of
   society as a process of natural history". The growth of commerce
   happened as a process which no individuals could control or direct,
   creating an enormously complex web of social interconnections globally.
   Thus a "society" was formed "economically" before people actually began
   to consciously master the enormous productive capacity and
   interconnections they had created, in order to put it collectively to
   the best use.

   Marx’s analysis in Capital, then, focuses primarily on the structural
   contradictions, rather than the class antagonisms, that characterize
   capitalist society -- the “contradictory movement [gegensätzliche
   Bewegung] [that] has its origin in the twofold character of labour,”
   rather than in the struggle between labor and capital, or rather
   between the owning and the working classes. These contradictions,
   moreover, operate (as Marx describes using a phrase borrowed from
   Hegel) “behind the backs” of the both capitalists and workers, that is,
   as a result of their activities, and yet irreducible to their conscious
   awareness either as individuals or as classes. As such, Capital, does
   not propose a theory of revolution (led by the working class and its
   representatives) but rather a theory of crises as the condition for a
   potential revolution, or what Marx refers to in the Communist Manifesto
   as a potential “weapon,” “forged” by the owners of capital, “turned
   against the bourgeoisie itself” by the working class. Such crises,
   according to Marx, are rooted in the contradictory character of the
   commodity, the most fundamental social form of capitalist society. In
   capitalism, improvements in technology and rising levels of
   productivity increase the amount of material wealth (or use values) in
   society while simultaneously diminishing the Value (economics) of this
   wealth, thereby lowering the rate of profit – a tendency that leads to
   the peculiar situation, characteristic of crises in capitalism, of
   “poverty in the midst of plenty,” or more precisely, crises of
   overproduction in the midst of underconsumption.

Publication

   Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867, but he died
   before he could finish the second and third ones which he had already
   drafted; these were edited by his friend and collaborator Friedrich
   Engels and published in 1885 and 1894; the fourth volume, called
   Theories of Surplus-Value, was first edited and published by Karl
   Kautsky in 1905-1910. Other preparatory manuscripts were published only
   decades later.

Influences

   Marx bases his work on that of the classical economists like Adam
   Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and even Benjamin Franklin.
   However, he reworks these authors' ideas critically and carefully, so
   his book is a critical and innovative synthesis that does not follow
   the lead of any one thinker. It also reflects the dialectical
   methodology applied by G.W.F. Hegel in his books The Science of Logic
   and The Phenomenology of Mind, and the influence of French socialists
   such as Charles Fourier, Comte de Saint-Simon, and Pierre-Joseph
   Proudhon.

   Marx said himself that his aim was "to bring a science [i.e. political
   economy] by criticism to the point where it can be dialectically
   represented", and in this way to "reveal the law of motion of modern
   society". By showing how capitalist development was the precursor of a
   new, socialist mode of production, he aimed to provide a scientific
   foundation for the modern labour movement. In preparation for his book,
   he studied the economic literature available in his time for a period
   of twelve years, mainly in the British Museum in London.

   Aristotle, and Greek philosophy in general, was another important
   (although often neglected) influence on Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
   Marx’s education at Bonn centered on Greek and Roman poets and
   philosophers. The dissertation he completed at the university was a
   comparison of the philosophy of nature in the works of Democritus and
   Epicurus. A number of scholars, moreover, have argued that basic
   architecture of Capital – including the categories of use and exchange
   value, as well as the “ syllogisms” for simple and expanded circulation
   (M-C-M and M-C-M’) – was derived from the Politics (Aristotle) and the
   Nicomachean Ethics. Moreover, Marx’s description of machinery under
   capitalist relations of production as “self-acting automata” is a
   direct reference to Aristotle’s speculations on inanimate instruments
   capable of following commands as the condition for the abolition of
   slavery.

Online editions

     * Capital, Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital
     * Capital, Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital
     * Capital, Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a
       Whole
     * Capital, Volume IV: Theories of Surplus Value

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