Capital: Volumes One and Two

by Karl Marx

Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the development of the modern world than has Karl Marx (1818-1883). Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818, by the time of his death in London in 1883, Marx claimed a growing international reputation.

Of central importance then and later was his book Das Kapital, or, as it is known to English readers, simply Capital. Volume One of Capital was published in Paris in 1867. This was the only volume published during Marx's lifetime and the only to have come directly from his pen. Volume Two, published in 1884, was based on notes Marx left, but written by his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).

Readers from the nineteenth century to the present have been captivated by the unmistakable power and urgency of this classic of world literature. Marx's critique of the capitalist system is rife with big themes: his theory of 'surplus value', his discussion of the exploitation of the working class, and his forecast of class conflict on a grand scale. Marx wrote with purpose. As he famously put it, 'Philosophers have previously tried to explain the world, our task is to change it.'

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Classics, History, Theory

1006 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2013

About the author

With the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.

German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.

Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).

The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.

Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.

Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.

Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.

Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .

People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.

Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wordsworth Editions combines volumes 1 and 2 together in one handy pocket. I re-read the first for a reading group, and took on the second back-to-back. The transition ... jars.

Volume 1 is a carefully crafted manual to political emancipation. It paedagogically guides the reader between the machines and pulleys powering capitalist societies, acquaints with the men and women toiling in their shadows, demonstrates the falsity of bourgeois political economy seeking to justify this state of affairs, and prepares the ground for a civilization based on the dignity of work and freedom from need. There are literary references aplenty, historical anecdotes, archival corroboration of hypotheses and, most important of all, clear circumscriptions of the concrete circumstances that are presupposed for the capitalist laws of motion to develop themselves.

Volume 2 skips the niceties and dumps you in a mountain of capitalist blueprints. What does the cycle which value must go through to realize itself look like at every discrete moment? Volume 2 answers this exhaustively.

The framing tapestry that makes Volume 1 so rich to read is almost wholly absent here; the only background with which to contrast Marx's critique of political economy are the segments on Smith and Ricardo's (misconceived) notions of fixed and circulating capital. But to a 21st-century reader, the relative relevance of each argument is near impossible to gauge. You're left with a printer pumping out kilometres of economic thought experiments, recalibrating the handful of parameters to silly degrees and re-running the simulation every time. It really tests the motivations of the reader; is your goal to learn a method of social analysis, or do you want to remember by rote every possible iteration in a sandbox?

I'm convinced Volume 2 could be cut down by 75% without losing any substance. The most important developments are, 1. the phases of circulation and its hidden cost, which ease the reader into a later expansion of the broader (re)production of capitalist society, with all its non-productive appendages; 2. the reproduction schemes in the end, which have been of historic importance in debates on wage elevation and imperialist expansion; 3. the general framework taking together the different phases of different capitals circulating, instead of the simple abstractions from Capital 1.

If anything Volume 2 is a very good wake-up call to procrastinators; better get your shit in order while you're alive so you can edit the final product properly and leave a neat legacy, instead of putting the burden on your best friend to eidetically save every iota you ever wrote. Time is money! Kill your darlings!

[Tihomir Babić · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capital by Karl Marx, or its first two volumes, is absolutely brilliant!

Yes, it's a difficult read. However, unlike many, I'm not willing to blame (only) Marx's style for that. In the introduction to this edition, Isaiah Berlin is quoted as saying, 'Marx is not the clearest of writers.' I was often thinking about this quote when I had to read several sentences multiple times to understand what Marx read, sometimes re-reading the whole paragraphs several times until I understood it. However, one shouldn't forget that the full title is "Capital. A Critique of Political Economy". I get the impression that many people start reading Capital expecting to find several aphorisms Marx's thought has been reduced to. You won't get that. Also, don't expect it to be some self-help book or communist user manual on how to start a revolution. This is Marx's critique of the 'vulgar economists' showing complete ineptitude to understand and explain capitalism. And he mainly succeeds in that. So what makes this book difficult to read is not (only) Marx's style. It could easily be: English being my second language, archaic way of laying out thoughts which has nothing to do with the particular style but with the time when it was written, and Marx' extensive knowledge of the political economy thoughts that preceded him.

However, giving yourself time to immerse yourself in Marx's explanations is really rewarding. I can't count times when I struggled with some paragraphs, re-read them, almost giving up, then finally understanding the point, and feeling like it blew my mind. At the same time, Capital is straightforward to read. What makes it seem difficult is Marx's attempt to explain his thoughts scientifically. Still, when you adapt to this microscopic point-of-view that tries to go into most minute and specific details, it becomes easy to follow. It's like Marx considered his readers extremely stupid (couldn't blame him), so he decided to draw, sometimes even literally, every detail of the capitalist mechanism. But when the reader is somewhat familiar with the concepts Marx is trying to explain, they can jump to conclusions before Marx actually completes all the steps in coming to the same conclusion. That's when you usually get lost and learn you should not rush it, and dedicate yourself to understanding each sentence, re-read it, re-think it, and let Marx lead you without assuming anything.

One wouldn't expect it, but I had a really good laugh reading Capital. Marx can get very cynical, sarcastic, and condescending when arguing with other political economists. Those arguments are brilliantly written, with wit, humor, and rage at the obvious logical fallacies of many economists that are celebrated as great thinkers even today. It's not only the humor but the ease with which he proves them to be wrong.

Regarding the topic, I would say that Marx brilliantly tackles it. It's gratifying to read how he scientifically explains the nature of capitalism, its' fallacies, and mechanisms. I could say that by reading Capital, you'll learn nothing and everything at the same time. Nothing, because you won't learn anything new about capitalism what you (probably) didn't already know by using observing it by yourself and using common sense. You'll learn everything because, unlike using common sense, which usually allows you to see WHAT happens, reading Capital will open doors in finding answers WHY something happens.

[Awaldemar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is so boring it's better to just allow communism to rise than to actually read it.

[James Steele · Rating 4 out of 5]

(review of Volume one. Trimmed to fit Goodreads' character limit. Full review is on my blog: https://daydreamingintext.blogspot.co...)

[TL;DR: Marx’s Capital (Das Kapital) has nothing to do with people wanting free stuff. It’s about how our definition of Capitalism is wrong. Marx writes that the people once had their own land and were masters of their own professions, which allowed them to lead independent lives working for their own benefit. All of that has been taken away from them to force them to work in factories for someone else’s profit. Capitalism is not people starting their own businesses using their own skills and labor to earn money for themselves. That’s the system Europe and the UK had before. Capitalism, Marx writes, describes how people with financial means have taken entire communities’ professions and consolidated them under a factory-owner’s control, forcing thousands of people out of self-sufficient crafts and professions and converting them into unskilled labor for poverty wages. The factory itself has driven entire communities out of their independent livelihoods so they have no choice but to work for someone else now. Marx shows how this behavior is deliberate, and how it is increasing poverty worldwide, changing society itself from towns of skilled craftspeople who sold their talents at personal value into cities of unskilled workers who toil in poverty without ever seeing the fruits of their labor. Marx proposes this arrangement is not how society should function, and it is not sustainable.]


Previous writers of political economy (Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, etc.) described the benefits of the factory system of manufacture over the old system of master craftsmen and their apprentices: the factory will crank out lots and lots of products that can be sold on the international market. Karl Marx was perhaps the first person to point out that, yeah, that’s well and good, but look at what it’s doing to the people who have to work in such factories.

Marx published this book in 1867, and the factories Marx saw in Europe and the UK looked like this: Factory-owners pleading with parliament not to restrict the workday to 10 hours, as anything less than 12 hours a day would mean the business could never turn a profit; business-owners balking at the idea of not being allowed to hire children for 12 hours a day because grown men simply cost too much for such work; entire communities living in poverty while they toiled for 12—14 hours a day at machines that cranked out goods faster and faster; people exposed to toxic chemicals and too sick to work by age 30; generation after generation being raised in factory work, never having time to learn to read or write, never able to learn a skill apart from a single task on the assembly line; thousands of people thrown out of work on a factory-owner’s whim when the market for their product is saturated, only to be recalled to work when demand rises again; entire countrysides both colonial and domestic converted from self-sufficient farmers and master craftspeople into impoverished workers for this factory system in the never-ending quest to reduce costs and make more profit.

This was the world Marx saw. Society itself being converted seemingly by force through this juggernaut of a manufacturing system. He cites numerous government reports and newspaper articles, none of which would have been widely read at the time, to understand what was happening to the people. The mass poverty and crime in the UK and Europe did not simply happen on its own.

Under the previous economic system, Marx writes in the early chapters, each household produced some sort of good. Wool, wine, meat, bread, each household labored to produce something, and then they took those goods to market, and each party agreed what quantity of something was equal for this other quantity of something else. Households exchanged equal values of different goods, and thus society functioned with each person working for their own benefit.

People mastered a craft and sold their skills and talents on their own terms. Masters of professions had apprentices, but the size of these establishments was limited either by law or by the size of the town. Apprentices moved on to work for other places, or moved to other towns and cities to found their own workshops, hiring only enough people needed to produce enough to pay for the establishment itself, the master laboring alongside the apprentices.

And then, Marx writes, this model of production began to grow in scale. With enough employees, it was possible to produce enough to sell for profit great enough for the master to live off of without having to do any of the actual work himself.

Marx proposes that it is impossible to get rich simply by marking up goods and reselling them, as everyone else is doing the same thing so any profit gained in sale will be lost when making a purchase. True profit comes only at the production phase, by underpaying the people who produce those goods. The profit motive, Marx writes, is the underlying cause of problems in society, disrupting the concept of economy as fair treatment between persons.

Little more than a master craftsman’s workshop scaled up, enough employees could now be employed so the shopmaster can live off his apprentices’ work. This couldn’t happen without machinery connected to a reliable power source nobody else had access to (meaning not a natural river, or wind). The steam engine made it possible to automate so many systems that had once been in the hands of individual craftspeople, and by collecting all these different skilled crafts together in one place (either deliberately or by necessity to meet demand for a particular product), it became possible for the tools to be held in common within the workshop. This streamlines the process and by default makes the good cheaper.

Marx writes that the method takes away from individual people their skilled crafts and converts them into mindless tasks on an assembly line. It strips entire professions of their worth and makes them cogs in a machine. When scaled up to the size of cities and even nations, it takes entire communities of skilled professions and converts them into ignorant wage-laborers who now depend on the factory-owner for their livelihoods.

Small workshops owned by masters of crafts cannot compete on the market with cheap factory goods. Those fall to the factory system, and in this manner the factory method of production strips entire regions of identity and skilled workers and changes them into beggars who now must work for the factory-owner 12 hours a day for a wage.

In every case, the factory-owner underpays the worker. It is the only way to produce these goods and have any profit at all, given the cost of the machines and the cost of materials. Marx even goes as far as to say the whole purpose of the machines is to force the laborer to toil longer and longer, because the longer a worker operates at the machine, the more he produces for the factory-owner rather than for his own benefit.

Marx does not mince words regarding what he sees the factory-owner doing, and some chapters are so direct it’s a wonder they didn’t make it into the Communist Manifesto verbatim. Marx argues that the whole point of economics is for people to exchange equal values of different goods. To do something for the sake of profit is to defy the very concept of economics.

Marx writes in chapter 23 that during the American Civil War cotton factories in Britain suffered, and the mass of unemployed people called out to be allowed to migrate to somewhere there was more work. The factory-owners pleaded with Parliament not to allow them to leave, for the factory-owners might need them; instead let the government support the unemployed until the market recovers. That is exactly what happened.

The people have little choice in the matter, as they own no land, and now the factory has become generational in the absence of the skilled crafts the factory has converted into assembly line work. Children grow up in the system, so this is what they learn, and they have no education beyond it because they do not have time to learn anything else. It has produced entire communities of uneducated, uncultured “savages.”

Marx writes this is the inevitable result of letting businessmen take away the tools that allowed a nation’s citizens to lead independent lives as masters of individual crafts, stick those tools on a machine, and then make these once skilled craftspeople use those tools in some repetitive task for a daily wage that is calculated to be barely adequate to afford food and shelter.

Sure, the State benefits by having mass quantities of goods to sell internationally, but this is what it’s doing to the people. Poverty is the result of this very system of production—the workers aren’t squandering their money; their bosses must underpay them for the products they produce to be profitable at all. This explains why every factory in Europe and in the UK operated this way—why there simply were no better places for employees to go—why factories didn’t seem to be raising wages in order to keep the best workers. Marx explains the quest for profit means employees must be kept poor and dependent on wage labor in order for the system to work.

Previous writers of economic theory actually wrote that any loss in wages an employee might suffer is earned as a return on investment by way of the vast quantities of goods produced which benefits society as a whole, but Marx writes that it is not progress when all the gains go to the top and the employees see only poverty as a result. (In a later chapter, he points out the price of bread and other basics has increased as consolidation of production takes place.) Marx draws many parallels between this relationship, codified by economics, and feudalism, codified by law: they have produced a population of serfs bound to the land and the people who own it.

Marx cites previous writers who acknowledged the class of men who live off the work of others and if not for these impoverished masses the rich man would have to work for himself, therefore poverty is not a problem to be solved, and the people should be kept poor and busy to keep them out of trouble and so the rich man can devote his time to other things. These aren’t Marx’s words; other people before Marx wrote these things.

Marx may have been the first to declare these observations are laws regarding how this system of production operates. It’s the same system seen the world over, but scaled up beyond its local limits. Indeed, Marx asserts the whole point of machines and factories is to drive more and more people into poverty so they become part of the factory system and dependent on a wage. The more people the factory pushes out of self-sufficient professions within local communities, the more profit the factory-owner can extract from them. Oh yeah, this ruffled feathers then, and it still does now.

Das Kapital is the scholarly condemnation of this system—the logic proof that the very system itself has to cause suffering and misery among the workers because if profit is the goal, it is the only way the businessowner can behave to achieve it. It does no good to try to regulate it because the owners have to work within this system so they will always default to squeezing the workers harder and harder. The results are all around you.

The Communist Manifesto is the digest intended for the non-academic. But it’s only by reading Capital that I come to appreciate exactly what Marx favored workers return to—what Marx was trying to inform people they had lost and needed to take back. I think Marx very much wanted production to return to the prior system, where masters of crafts hired apprentices at small workshops, and each person learned a craft or a trade and became a master in turn.

Failing that, then Marx wanted people to know this system of production need not be in the hands of greedy owners for the purpose of extracting profits; rather the machines could be used to shorten the working day, to reduce the labor each person needed to exert in order to make these products. Marx showed it was possible, and that only a certain portion of the working day need be required to produce the goods. Everything else was purely for the benefit of the owner’s luxurious lifestyle and the expansion of the factory system itself (read: the expansion of profit).

Even previous writers of political economy suggested it should be happening—that as technology got better, people should be working less and less. Marx showed that in the hands of these factory-owners, the exact opposite was happening because the machines were not intended to reduce the burden of labor on mankind, but to force people to labor harder and harder so the people at the top can make more and more money, and this quest for profit is the reason business expands and poverty follows in its wake. It is the only way the system can work so long as profit is the goal.

The final chapters close the loop by taking us back to the origins of this factory system, before the era of manufacturing, and its underlying goal: the deliberate creation of a mass of desperate people who need to work for a wage to survive. He touches on how peasants were legally entitled to live on feudal lands. People had enough land to grow their own food and produce some goods for sale on the market, and have enough money to buy what they themselves could not produce. Gradually Lords and landlords forced people off their land and consolidated it for their own purposes (usually to produce wool or some other cash crop), now hiring the people to work it for a wage and charging them rent to live there.

Marx shows that the factory system of production cannot work if the people have their own tools, their own land, and their own crops to make their own goods for sale at the markets. Taking these things away from people was the first step to forcing them to work for a wage, and its history is one of bloodshed and theft, not to mention cooperation by the State.

Things certainly weren’t rosy and happy prior to the factory. Marx mentions this method of profiting off the work of others has been happening for thousands of years, and even when workshops were small, some masters treated their apprentices like slave labor. The difference is scale, and how this factory system has transformed what used to be Europe’s skilled, independent professionals into serfs.

Marx shows that even in the 1800s, the poor were working harder than ever, and the factory system itself was designed to push them into poverty as a result—the people once had land and were masters of their own professions, but all of that has been taken away from them to force them to work in factories for someone else’s profit. That’s Capital in a nutshell.

Marx presents this as more than just a consequence of the quest for profit. It’s also the cause. Without poverty, the people would have no incentive to work. If the people possessed their own land and tools, they would never work for someone else, and the economy would have very little to trade on the world market, since each person would only produce enough for their own needs. Self-sufficiency is the enemy not just of the factory, but of profit itself.

In chapter 25, section 5, Marx cites official statistics to show the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer as the factories operate and expand year after year; that the factories were not raising all boats but were in fact pushing more and more people deeper into poverty while lifting the rich up. Das Kapital connects the dots and dares to present evidence that this is deliberate.

Marx despised the idea that thousands of people should be forced to toil so one person did not have to. After reading his descriptions of the factory system in the 1800s and what it did to people, especially children (sooo much child labor described in the early chapters), I have a hard time imagining how anyone would be in favor of it, and yet it is still happening today.

Maybe someday I’ll tackle the other two volumes, but this is the one Marx published in his lifetime, so for quite some time, this was Das Kapital, and it said all that needed to be said.

[Radu · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book with the intent of giving it a fair hearing, but I ended up coming to the conclusion that it was easily one of the worst books I've ever read.

Hegel's philosophical influence in Marx's writings are easy to spot though it is clear to see in retrospect that Marx's idea of applying Hegelian dialectics to economics was an interesting idea at first but effectively like trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole when put into practice.

History proved in dramatically bloody fashion the inherent flaws of the Marxist Labour Theory of Value (for which Marx provided minimal guidance in) and the dangerous inefficiencies present in a completely centralised economy that treats workers as economic units for the state.

Marx's incendiary diatribes throughout the treatise take on an almost comically exaggerated tone at times, perhaps due to the original impact poorly translating into English or at the idea of them even being intended as an insult to begin with (eg: referring to capitalists as "uncircumcised Jews.")

The only insight that stood the test of time from Das Kapital was the fact that capitalism has a monotonic nature to it, is constantly on the rise, and has as much power to cripple society if poorly practised... or elevate it into an entire new epoch.

Besides this insight, Das Kapital is an extremely messy read and one best reserved for someone with time and patience.

[Jet R · Rating 4 out of 5]

This requires a reread 😋

[Gastjäle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This review is only for the first part. Upon weighing the matter by and large, I deemed it best to leave off Marx for now and perhaps slog through the second volume in the distant future.

The score was given solely by reason of Marx's exposition of his ideas in the book and the overall readability - I do not see the need to assess the impact of the book, since a simple reading isn't sufficient for such an evaluation. No doubt, Marx is a giant, yet that needn't consider me right here.

First of all, I read the first English translation of Das Kapital, and whatever Mark G. Spencer said in his introduction about it being a veritable piece of art, the quality of the text was arse. The sentences were really unwieldy and foreignised and there were lots and lots of typos - shame on you, Moore and Aveling.

Secondly, when it comes to Marx's own style, which I cannot criticise with absolute confidence, I can only imagine that he was a turgid writer who would've been better off composing causeries and literary reviews instead of writing reams of omni-"scientific" prose. How is this supposed to qualify for art, I ask you! Caustic invective at the expense of capitalists, occasional literary references and meandering narrative do not make art, one needs a lot more than that. In addition, the footnotes were a shambles: had I read them all, I couldn't have gleaned any idea of the work at all, because they seriously interrupted the flow of the original text. Bloody hell, it was almost impossible to even see their relevance.

Thirdly, as I already gently pointed out, this book's structure is bonkers. It starts off pretty sensibly by outlining Marx's general theory on value and capital, and suddenly we're off to copious detours to historical data and the world of numbers. Sometimes we find the highway and manage to stroll along fairly amicably, yet soon a postilion chases us back into the murky woods of the darkness of history. Some of these detours could be excused, since even though not exactly interesting or relevant, it was necessary for Marx to adduce some concrete data for his theories. Yet for a work of this scope - a work which I hoped would explain a lot more about Marx's philosophy and ideas - such bits feel simply superfluous. I even skipped whole chapters towards the end, since I couldn't keep the strings together anymore.

Now, about the ideas themselves. It doesn't require much for the modern man to figure out that Marx's labour theory of value is rather flawed. How could one even calculate such a thing? Not temporally, for even Marx didn't resort to that. By the application of force? By the loss of brain cells? By physical and mental fatigue? Labour should not be treated as homogeneously as Marx here did, even though I must see there is idealistic allure in the theorem.

From thereon, we're introduced to a heavy accumulation of ideas that already totter on a slipshod base. The capitalists are exploiting the proletariat based on the very postulate that the employers know the true value of labour. Everything acts in cycles that are based on more and more capital accumulation, jostling the industrial reserve army to and fro employment-wise, and people need less and less skill to perform their part as cogs in the Infernal Juggernaut. What about the people who need to take care of the machines? And why aren't the diminishing returns taken into the picture - surely it would change the overall calculations? What about different sectors of manufacture - wouldn't that affect centralisation?

Yes, the overall problem with this work is that everything is presented too theoretically. Despite the data adduced! Marx is constantly assuming theoretical figures to account for the actual value of commodities (how does that differ from its price? Is supply/demand just a scam for Marx or nonexistent or what? What am I going to wear on my feet next Wednesday?) and thus sidestepping the real stumbling block of his work.

Yet he did provide us with frightfully lucid insights, even if they may have come about erroneously. Like the fact that capitalism feeds itself, that it is indulgent and ever on the rise, that it can have an absolutely crippling effect if wrongly employed. If one has read Engels' account of the English working Joes, or managed to digest Marx's own account of the circumstances, it's no wonder why both of them picked up arms and began to clamour for change. Marx also showed great bravery and bravado in burning bridges left and right - he was absolutely certain he had detected this red river of blood running through the whole history of the human race, and he by no means was going to be mealy-mouthed about it. Too bad most of it seems to be cack.

Then again, what do I know about economics...

[k.]

[re-review in the works]

[Val Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The worst thing Althusser ever did was telling people to skip part 1 of Capital. Now we have hundreds of thousands of “Marxists” running around who have no clue what the value form is.

Part 1 of vol 1 is a total fucking nightmare to get through; not because it’s difficult (the language can be opaque sometimes but it’s really not that bad), but because of how many times he repeats himself and how many of his observations feel either 1) incredibly obvious or 2) incredibly vague. He finds the most winding way possible to say something so unbelievably basic. If you can get past part 1, you can make it through the book, and you can read any Marx. You also *have* to get past part 1 because understanding value/money forms and commodity production is so, so important to understanding capitalism (and because if I have to hear one more person say “commodity fetishism” like it means “really liking things” I’m going to go insane).

As for the rest of the vol 1, well, I dunno, it’s good. Obviously it’s good. Obviously it’s not perfect because it’s going on 150 years old, but so many of the fundamental criticisms hold up astonishingly well. Everyone knows that surplus value is a thing (though, again, he finds a way to make that intuitive concept incredibly convoluted, though he does so out of thoroughness), and the obscurity of wages poses one of the great riddles of Marxism, that is, how is labor-time both valued and the standard of value?

Vol 2 is maybe even drier and has a lot of stuff that feels even less relevant for the current day (the part on Smith, god). That said, the stuff on circulation is vital, and his exposition on money as a universal equivalent of labor-time is some of my favorite stuff he ever wrote purely for how illuminating it is in stating the obvious. I’d say it’s less vital but I still think it’s worth the trudge.

Marx isn’t just well-regarded out of some dogmatism, like some would have you believe, or even just because he’s had such an outsized impact on just about every field and on the history of the world, but also because he named things in ways that theorists in 2025 still can’t really improve on. He doesn’t just say the obvious, he proves the obvious, which takes a lot more than you might think — may I remind you how many pages it took to prove 1+1=2?

If I can give one piece of advice, it’s that you read this not as Marx trying to explain a system that makes sense, but as someone pointing out that it *doesn’t* make sense. There are lots of contradictions in this work, some he points out directly, some he leaves implicit. They are, without fail, all known and intended by Marx. He’s not being hyperbolic when he says that capitalism is rife with internal tensions. He means nothing about this system makes sense, and he shows it.

[Jack Goodwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

No issues with the content itself. The translation on the other hand was awful, some parts of it I was only able to understand by translating it back into the original German. Too much direct translation.

[Mohammad Rezaei Niya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here, we deal with not a one, but a group of authors:
• Marx-the-positivist: Marx is a positivist, a disgustingly positivist! From his view, everything has an irrefutable and always-correct natural “law”; also, if you can present something with numbers, then you have proved it! He is, in fact, proud of himself more than anything else, because of being positivist and squeezing every aspect of life in numbers!
• Marx-the-scientist: He obsessively identifies himself a scientist. At the same time, he has a pretty shallow understanding and knowledge of science of his time! Just knowing and understanding exponential functions could have helped him quite a lot! All his presented “laws” and correlations are simple-structured without any further expansion, any limitations or exception. He has an always-correct, always-applicable, always-accurate belief in science; by science he mostly thinks of numbers and quite simple sum/product formulations! In some parts, specifically in Volume II, he is more an accountant than a scientist!
• Marx-the-literature-reviewer: He has presented an extensive review of the literature, which is quite valuable, although sometimes he is biased.
• Marx-the-bully: He always presents an aggressive discourse, and judgemental and self-righteous approach! He specifically has a big beef with Adam Smith!
• Marx-the-socialist: He certainly has not contributed much to the socialist literature with this book, at least based on Vols. I & II! Just read Engels’s introduction to Vol. II (as his best defender)! He certainly was not the first socialist (just read Sismundi, or Robert Owen, or even Gerrard Winstanley!). A significant body of literature, social experimentation, and philosophical discourse were available before him (and certainly after him).
• Marx-the-Marxist: He is bold, ambitious, fame seeker, and harsh if needed. His “brand” is quite important for him, boasting that he is right and everyone else was wrong before him!
• Marx-the-angry-guy: He is always right and righteous (according to himself), and is always angry, and has no doubt and no philosophical skepticism!
• Marx-the-philosopher: He has a sharp eye for concepts and discussions.
• Marx-the-distracted-guy: Oh boy, he is distracted! He is in an urgent need of an editor, specifically a harsh one, to cut, cut, and cut from his text! He easily loses the objective of the discussion. Vol. I can be easily shortened to about 1/10th! The same or even harsher for Vol. II!
• Marx-the-demonizer: He completely demonizes capitalist without any interest on why capitalist thinks/acts that way? For him, capitalist is the evil, he is born evil, lives evil, seasons his lunch and dinner with workers’ blood and children’s tears, and is the source of all evil! It partly (or maybe mainly) comes from his positivist self-righteous approach!
• Marx-the-anti-democrat: There is no sign, no inclination, or no interest towards democracy in the book!

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

When reading something political, the rating that you end up giving is probably going to reflect the political views, so it's obvious I agree with Marx a lot. Although I prefer Kropotkin.

The main reason for the lower rating isn't based on political opinion though: Marx really struggled with his opening to the point that most people recommend skipping the first chapter until you've read a couple of the chapters to clarify his position, which I agree with.

Then again, the rest of the book is excellent at explaining how economics oppress the working class. I highly recommend it to my fellow socialists.

[Lukas Slavik · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s a book of many thoughts and influenced the world heavily.. but it’s too long, too detailed and too academic to be fun to read. I preferred Adam Smith’s wealth of nations that is often mentioned. Also it is difficult to judge it when one can now easily argue, that capitalism did much more for working class than communism.. i am not only referring to the collapse of soviet block, also if I had to, i would prefer to work in a factory in Detroit rather than Shenzhen, rather in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe..

[Deborah Flomenhoft · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always love. Marx. Forces me to think , to turn over and examine long held axiomatic (truths?) about what it means to be human, to be social, to find our essential humanity in the economic structure into which we are born.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Volume One 5/5
Volume Two 3/5

[Benjamin Warner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Volume one is worth reading

Volume two makes me want to cry