Economic and Philosophical Book: Das Kapital

Overview
Published in 1867, the first volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital dissects the capitalist mode of production by revealing the social relations hidden behind markets, prices, and profit. Its central aim is to explain how value is created and appropriated, why exploitation is intrinsic to wage labor, and how accumulation produces both unprecedented productivity and recurrent crisis. Marx marries a rigorous critique of classical political economy with a historical narrative that traces capitalism’s emergence and its tendencies of development.

Commodity and Value
Capitalist society is organized around commodities, goods produced for exchange. Each commodity has a dual character: use-value, the capacity to satisfy a need, and exchange-value, its quantitative relation to other commodities. Marx grounds exchange-value in socially necessary labor time, the average time required to make a commodity with prevailing techniques and intensity. This abstraction from specific, concrete labors to “abstract labor” allows disparate products to be compared.

Money arises as the universal equivalent that expresses the value of all commodities, enabling general exchange and obscuring the labor relations underneath. In the famous analysis of commodity fetishism, social relations between producers appear as relations between things; price movements and market forces seem to possess an autonomous power that, in reality, derives from human labor and social organization.

From Money to Capital
Marx distinguishes simple exchange (C–M–C, selling to buy use-values) from the capitalist circuit (M–C–M′), where money is advanced to return more money. The puzzle is the origin of the increment M′ − M. It cannot arise from exchange among equivalent values; it must come from a commodity whose use yields more value than it costs. That commodity is labor-power, the worker’s capacity to work, which the capitalist buys at its value (the means of subsistence) but uses to produce a greater value during the working day.

Surplus Value and Exploitation
Once labor-power is purchased, the working day divides into necessary labor time, in which the worker reproduces the value of wages, and surplus labor time, in which additional value is created for the capitalist. Surplus value is extracted by extending the working day (absolute surplus value) or by raising productivity through cooperation, division of labor, and machinery so that necessary labor shrinks within a given day (relative surplus value). Marx decomposes capital into constant capital (means of production) and variable capital (wage-labor), arguing that only the latter adds new value; the rate of surplus value (s/v) measures the degree of exploitation masked by wage forms.

Accumulation, Machinery, and Crisis
Competition compels capitalists to reinvest surplus, continually revolutionizing production. This accumulative dynamic concentrates and centralizes capital, increases the “organic composition” of capital (more machinery relative to labor), and generates a “reserve army” of labor, unemployed or precariously employed workers that discipline wages and working conditions. Technical progress raises output but deepens antagonisms: overproduction, falling profitability pressures, and chaotic cycles arise from private decisions taken within a social system that requires continuous valorization. The factory system, time-discipline, and mechanization amplify exploitation while also socializing labor at unprecedented scales.

Primitive Accumulation and Class
Capitalist production presupposes a prior separation of producers from the means of production. Marx recounts “so-called primitive accumulation”: enclosures of common lands, colonial plunder, slavery, and state-backed expropriation that created a mass of propertyless workers and concentrated wealth. Once established, the “general law of capitalist accumulation” tends to polarize society, expanding wealth and capital at one pole and precariousness at the other, while class struggle over the working day, wages, and organization becomes a permanent feature of economic life.

Method and Legacy
Das Kapital employs a dialectical method to move from the simple form of the commodity to the complex dynamics of capital, interweaving abstract categories with empirical detail. It presents capitalism as a historically specific, self-expanding value relation that both unleashes human productive powers and subjects them to domination by the imperatives of profit. The book’s analysis of value, exploitation, and crisis remains a foundational critique of modern political economy.