A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics) (Volume 2)

I wont talk about its content because im not Marxist and i dont want to oppose his ideas, neither support them.(If you want to know what is the purpose of the book, you can read the first 5 pages en googlebooks)I bought this book for my classical theory class and compared to the Communist Manifesto, Capital I is easiest to understand, and more interesting too. Youcan find better examples for his dialectical materialism. If you are very into Marx and his work, this book is a must for you

Capital Volume 1 is a masterpiece. However, this particular version is trash, it only includes HALF of capital volume one, AND the publishing quality is atrocious, all of the equations are jumbled up and illegible.

Intolerably dull book. I am an experienced reader of classics and was highly motivated to pursue reading this book so I could participate in a discussion group dedicated to reading this book; yet in the end I was defeated by its dryness. "The dismal science," economics, just isn't for me, I guess. My time being short, I didn't read the introductory material.

The Portable Karl Marx is proving to be almost as dry; but that, at least, has a bit of human interest in letters and such.

Although Marx's Capital remains a difficult read, it is essential for understanding the current economic mess, in particular the growth of unproductive speculative capital. With speculative debt reaching nearly ten times the level of the world's productive economy (GDP), it appears that the barons of capitalism have sealed their own fate. Find out why.

I bought this book so I could follow along through Professor David Harvey's 13-lecture series 'Reading Marx's Capital vol. 1' (free, on YouTube). But there are so many careless spelling and typographical errors that you just want to delete the book and find another version. You would think the f'ing publisher could have hit the spellcheck button once before publishing, if they just couldn't be bothered to do a read-through first. What a shame.

Buy a different version from another publisher. This version should be pulled from the store until they fix it (which shouldn't be tough...it's an electronic version.

Karl Marx definitley lived in a different world than today. "Capital" is based on a working environment for the average worker where exploitation was rife, and which I have not experienced in my life. Furthermore, his views on how the capitlist earn (or in his view, not earn) a living is simplistic and probably not relevant anymore. He also denies the possibility that money should earn interest because it has value to borrow money for investment. Perhaps from Marx's point of view I am trapped by capitalist thinking and as such I would be too deluded to follow his argument. Similarly the book is very long winded and explains the same point again and again, and some chapters even re-use previous arguments with very similar language, giving the reader occasional deja-vu experiences. Perhaps I am unconsciously comparing the book to the one by Friedrich Engels (on the working conditions of the English working class) which was excellent. Frankly, "Capital" by Karl Marx dissapointed me a little.

Capital I, this is not. Although, it's difficult being tough on this book, as Marx never finished it, and it's mostly a compilation of manuscripts in the order Engels thought most prudent. Overall, Vol II lacks the literary, political, and polemical flare of Vol I. Therefore, it's not as engaging as Vol I. But, there are still pockets of ingenuity, like Vol I, found within it. Although the book is 300 pages less than Vol I, it takes longer to read, and the algebra is frequent, repetitive, and seemingly unnecessary at times. But, Ernest Mandel in the introduction (which, like most Mandel's writing, is laudable), forewarns the reader that he/she must read Vol II to fully understand Vol III. But, the translator warns the reader that Vol II has little bits of oasis, in between lots of arid desert. Reading this book then proves difficult, as we need the oasis to grasp Vol III, but trekking through the arid desert, as I just did, leaves one seeing mirages, and gasping for a drink. I may have even killed a man along the way, but that's another story....

In Vol I, Marx left us with his famous formula M-C-M'. The Capitalist, as Capital personified, enters the world as M (money), buys a commodity, and sells it dearer (M'). We find out in Vol I, that for overall economic growth, this commodity must be labor power. In Vol II Marx expands upon the circulation of capital, and gives us a better definition of what Capital is. The Forumla now expands to:

MP
/
M-C......P....C'-M'
\
LP
(the store will not let me properly show this formula, so pretend the slashes connecting MP and LP to M are really connecting LP and MP to C).

The capitalist shows up with money, buys means of production and labor power, then the act of production occurs (P), and the "...." Represents the time between investment, and the time to get production going, along with the time to produce a commodity (a chair could take an hour, a car 3 months). Then the commodity contains the surplus value, but must be realized in its money form, to renter the production process, reproduce the capitalist cycle, and allow for consumption and/or growth by the capitalist.

Engel's said that this book lacked substance for political Agitation. As did Rosa Luxemburg. They are both correct and incorrect. They're correct that there is no calling to arms, no limelight of the class conflict, and no typical Marx describing capital as bloody, painful, and obscene. But, as Marx goes over the production process, between the lines, it's clear he's pointing out just how tendentious capitalism is to breaking down, or at least frequently hiccupping. At any point in the longer formula there is a tenuous grasp between capital (value in motion), hitting a wall, or not being realized. The initial M must find LP and MP, which must stay in functioning order. P must proceed smoothly, but rarely does. P must also ensure C' and not C. C' must actually be realized in the money form, but as soon as time enters the equation C' has a harder time being realized. It must get from the factory to the store, but that's more investment, and time proceeds forward. As time proceeds, productivity rises, and C' could become C (thus as Marx points out, capitalist are more than willing to have the state intervene and invest in roads, trains, and mass transportation, if they pool their money together, they make a frugal investment to speed up capital, an investment no capitalist would make alone). Once C' becomes M', the capitalist must hope that M' can find its way back into LP and MP, without a strike, or parts breaking down. Thus capitalism is always problematic, irrational, and risky. What's interesting about this layout though is that Marx has a more dynamic definition of capital, than the bourgeois economist (goods used to produce goods). With value in motion, we see capital in its money form, productive form, commodity form, etc. It does not stand still, it's always moving. And it needs to move outwards, at a faster and faster rate, hence globalization. We can quickly see why the definition of goods to produce more goods is a facile definition. If the new goods aren't sold (or as Marx would say, if the value isn't realized), then capital is dead in a warehouse somewhere.

There's a lot more in Vol II about the turnover rate, turnover time, the production of total social capital, fixed capital, etc. There's even a brief discussion about why wage increases for labor unions really is a threat to capitalist, and capitalist cannot just set any arbitrary price to their commodities (there are thresh holds). All interesting concepts, and I can see why all of them are necessary for Vol III. Marx is moving from the constant backdrop of all capital - production - to a larger process of capitalism as a whole. Interestingly enough Marx never uses the word capitalism in Vol I, but he does several times in Vol II, because his views are expanding outward. We began with the commodity in Vol I, and we end Vol II with the reproduction of total social capital.

As far as reading goes, this book is a one, maybe two stars, but because it has ingenuity, was a compilation of drafts, and is a necessary segue into Vol III, I give it four stars. It's the ideas in the book that matter most, and less their presentation, albeit a good presentation always helps. Just make sure to read Mandel's introduction, to really swim in the oasis.

Fair warning, I'm writing this hung over.

The first time I read this, I gave the book 4 stars, knowing it was a 5 star work, but with 4 star writing. I was wrong. Oh-so wrong. Marx's writing merely reflects his dialectical and masterly way of contemplating, and few of us can dare to grow wings and fly up to such lofty heights of his genius and acumen! Read, reflect, and re-read. Wait, then read again! Perhaps every January, a fine way to start the new year! As Marx forewarns us: "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

In order to fully understand capitalism, critically, one must dive into the dialectical water of Herr Doctor Marx. All subsequent critiques of capitalism, since the publication of Das Kapital, stand atop his lofty and rounded shoulders. All apologetic attempts in favor of capitalism stand under his heel!

In order to come to grips with the capitalist mode of production, Marx lets us in on a little secret; the secret of the holy trinity/commodity. What is at once, father, son and Holy Spirit, is in fact use vale, exchange value, and value! Value is the holy spirit of capitalism, where man's social relations are reified into a congealed and objective measurement of human labor in the abstract! At heart in Marx's ontology is man as a social being, but on an appearance level, a sensory level, it is one of perennial and staggering exchanges.
Marx is no vulgar materialist as most presume, but heavily invested in the tensions between idealism and materialism, and there anti-matter/matter explosions.

After the commodity is understand in all its mystical and metaphysical glory, Marx guides the reader by the hand - be careful his grip is very callused and bloody - and shows us where profit or surplus value comes from. He takes Say, Smith, and Ricardo to task, it is not from prudence, or spending abstinence, or merely some ripple in supply and demand, nor is it from labor in general, but a very rare and historically necessary commodity, unfathomed by all those who tread before Herr Marx! It is the commodity of labor power.

Humankind's ability to labor, and reproduce that labor, in an intertwined market, has its own value - initially a subsistence value, capable of being raised through moral struggle - the value of the reproduction of labor power itself. A good portion of the working day is spent merely meeting subsistence levels of nourishment and daily reproduction, but then there comes along that dastardly moment of working beyond the means of subsistence. This moment is no short period, it's no `final hour' as bourgeoisie economist frequently claim. No it's in fact many hours, which is how the capitalist extracts absolute surplus value. This is where the capitalist definitively EXPLOITS the worker. The worker has no right to raise contention, he's sold his labor power, to the highest (of low) bidders, and the law ensures he honor this social document. Maybe the worker can go on strike, lower the working day, and reduce some of that exploitation. But alas, relative surplus value - increased productivity in the means of production, lessening the time duration needed to provide for subsistence labor - would sneak up and clandestinely exploit the worker further, without the workers awareness.

Labor theories of value, in Locke's, and Smith's time, believed and argued that the worker had a right to what he labored over and on. His product was his. This right was rational, it was divine, and it was human. Alas, what really ended up happening is the capitalist garnered the right to expropriate the labor of someone else, via the immaterial contract he generated, with the violence of the state enforcing it, in a manner that appropriates the value of the laborers product into the capitalist own coffers. One no longer has a right to their product; one is now `free' and right-less, under capitalism!

What is the capitalist to do with this surplus? Try as he might, he cannot spend it all on his own luxury without imploding the capitalist structure. No, he must reinvest: "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ... Reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie."

Thus we are left, beholden to an irrational market order, where rational agents withdraw their rationality to the invisible hand of the market. Another abstract and reified notion that mask real material and social relations, contingent upon the exploitation of the many by the few!

Now it's time to read Volume II!

The first volume of Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Modern Library Giant G-26 was published in 1867. Volume II remained unfinished at his death in 1888, and his benefactor and collaborator, Frederick Engels, edited it and published it posthumously in 1893. (Engels begins his Preface by noting, "It was no easy task to put the second book of 'Capital' in shape for publication...")

Subtitled, "The Process of Circulation of Capital," the book contains more purely abstract reasoning, mathematical calculations (although Engels notes that Marx "did not get the knack of handling figures, particularly commercial arithmetic"; pg. 284), etc., and is much less "lively" than the first volume was.

Marx asserts that "Whatever his pay, as a wage-labourer he works part of his time for nothing. He may receive daily the value of the product of eight working-hours, yet functions ten." (Pg. 132) He says that the working day consists of two parts: necessary labour, and surplus-labour. (Pg. 426) He rejects an argument about the cost and demand for luxuries, because "The entire objection is a bugbear set up by the capitalists and their economic sycophants." (Pg. 341)

He rejects as "absurd" that question of whether capitalist production in its present volume would be possible without the credit system; but he adds, significantly, "one must not entertain any fantastic illusions on the productive power of the credit system, so far as it supplies or sets in motion money-capital." (Pg. 346)

He strongly criticizes Adam Smith's "ridiculous blunder" that exchange value consists of wages, profits, and rent. (Pg. 372)

Not one of Marx's "essential reading" texts, this book is nevertheless important for someone studying Marx's economic theories.

To many people Marxism is a dirty word because of its association with the bureaucratic tyranny of the Stalinist regimes of Russia, Eastern Europe, China etc. But these regimes had/have nothing to do with genuine Marxism, as anyone who reads this book will see. The so-called "communist" states were actually state capitalist systems controlled by a ruling class of bureaucrats who betrayed the aims of the 1917 Russian Revolution and turned on its head Marx's aim of a democratic workers' state and classless society.

Marx's humanism and democratic instincts shine out throughout this book. There are marvellous indictments of the alienating, exploitive and undemocratic nature of the capitalist system, as well as some remarkably vivid historical sections. But Marx's main aim in this book is not to set out a blueprint for a future socialist society, it is to lay bare the "law of motion" of the capitalist society we live in.

Marx shows that there are two key features of the capitalist system. Firstly, there is the fact that the capitalists make their profits by exploiting the working class. (The working class today includes ordinary white collar workers as well as manual workers.) As Marx writes, "Capital...vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour..."

Secondly, there is the competition between rival capitalists which drives on the exploitation and which leads to the anarchy of the market system, with its booms, slumps and crises, as we are seeing today.

I particularly like how Marx shows that people are alienated under capitalism, in the sense of their work being turned into soulless degradation, and also in the sense of having lost control of their lives to something they themselves have created - capital. "As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand."

"Capital" is not an easy read, and it is best tackled after reading a modern introduction to Marxism. On Marxist economics, I would recommend either Joseph Choonara's "Unravelling Capitalism" or Chris Harman's "Zombie Capitalism". On Marxism as a whole, Alex Callinicos's "The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx" is a brilliant starting point.

As for this particular edition of "Capital", well I actually prefer the Oxford World's Classics edition, which contains the original English translation of Volume One, a much better translation as far as I am concerned. But I'm still giving it five stars - for Marx, not for the edition!

Phil Webster.
(England)

The Capital, written in three volumes by Karl Marx himself and, after his death, by his friend Friedrich Engels, and totalling some 3.000 pages, is the work of a man who surpassed all established standards of his time in what regards the multifaceted knowledge he acquired in many fields and, more important, trough the influence it had over millions of peoples troughout the world, whatever their position in the social spectrum. Of the monumental book and of its author it could be said that not a single human being in the years to come, wherever he/she lived, would escape (for better or for worse) unscathed from what is written in the book.
For it inaugurated a new era in the relationship between men of all social conditions in the whole world and in years to come. It is the book where all the reasons for the downfall of capitalism in the end of the XIX century are pinpointed with a precise and polemical style, trademarks of the German author, and where, for the very first time in the story of History, historical movements are treated coherently as the necessary (deterministic) events of the social movements of humankind since the beginning of civilization, something called historical or dialectical determinism by the author, who borrowed and inverted many concepts from the German philosopher Hegel.
Notwhitdstanding the importance of the book to West and East culture, this is not an easy book to read, given the intricacy of the subjects treated and also its lenght. For me the most attractive feature of the book is the disdain Marx had for anyone who did not agree with him, unabashedly fighting against Political Economists and Historians of all ideological collors. Despite all the rabid polemic, what remains after almost 150 years of the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital is the collapse of the communist world and the strenght of Capitalism, who learned the lessons of survival better than its ideological counterpart.

I think one of the great misconceptions about Capital is that it is dry and difficult. Many people seem to think that reading it would be a chore. Not true. If you were to read it on your own or in a study group, you'd find it funny, engaging and not all that hard. It assumes perhaps a small amount of understanding of classical political economy (Malthus, Smith, Ricardo, etc) but not much. I'd say if you're going to read it, read it in a group, because some of the ideas need to be worked out, but four friends of average intelligence can understand this book with a minimal level of effort.

That said, is it worth it for you to take the time? I'd say so. While I may think a number of Marx's ideas are just plain wrong and the ideas of many of those who followed in his footsteps to be even more misguided and destructive, I still think this is worth the time. Besides being a book by the man who has influenced world events more than anyone else in the last two hundred years, it is also just very well written and a goddamn good, and important, read.

A friend of mine once described Capital by saying ,"this is literature". It definitely is, with all the complications that come with that classification. This book does not explain the workings of a capitalist economy. It is not a science textbook. It is a brilliant work that is part flawed history, part political theory and part a discussion of classical political economy. Everyone should read it, but no one should take it all at face value.

Marx's CAPITAL is frequently condemned by people who've never read it, and lauded by other people who don't fully understand it. I've read it and I don't think I fully understand it, but the main points of the text are pretty clear; Marx drills them into the reader as he unfolds his theory of the basis of capitalism.
First, a note on what CAPITAL is not. It is not a "communist" tract, though it is a foundation for communist thought. Marx follows two main trains of thought -- the first is observational, the second diagnostic. He explains how capitalism works, and why it works that way. Disagreeable as some of his ideas may be, they cannot be brushed away by citing the examples of Stalin and Pol Pot to discredit them. Unlike the typical Communist dictator, Marx was a hard-working scholar, a clear thinker, a fundamentally honest writer. His familiarity with the whole spectrum of economic and philosophical writings that preceded him is unquestionable, and CAPITAL is probably more impressive to a reader who's read THE WEALTH OF NATIONS (Adam Smith), if nothing else.
The capitalism of Marx's time (mid-19th century) had dismal effects on the "proletariat" or working-class, and CAPITAL cannot be fully appreciated without some knowledge of how England, the most industrialized nation in the world, looked at that period of history. Charles Dickens is one writer who "exposed" the condition of the poor, in a more acceptable (though no less wordy) fashion it seems.
CAPITAL is certainly an important book and it is not the unreadable monstrosity it's reputed to be. It is repetitious, but usually the repetition includes some new twist as Marx proceeds from one aspect of his theory to the next. The purpose of the book was to establish a scientific basis for his understanding of capitalism, so Marx employs numerous algebraic equations that might scare readers away at first. They are not complicated, however, nor are they really "mathematical" so much as illustrative of abstract economic processes. One quickly grows accustomed to them; I personally find them amusing.
Marx's book is also a polemical text, and he injects some bitter wit and just plain nastiness into his analysis. Either he couldn't restrain himself, or it's a rhetorical device, but whatever the case, CAPITAL contains some very interesting screeds and some very memorable caricatures of capitalists. Overall a powerful book and one that promotes greater understanding of the forces that shape our world even today.

In the first volume of this series, Marx makes probably his most famous observation, when he talks about the alienation of the worker : ".. the worker exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the worker." Therefore, capitalism needed fragmenting the production process in small tasks, that all can be performed by relatively unqualified workers. That is how capitalism differentiates itself from artisanal production, requiring highly skilled persons. Within capitalist production, the worker is not longer selling a finished product, but only his labor time. Thus he becomes a wage-slave.

Well, many others have already explained in detail the specifics of the book, so I'll only touch on those a little. This book is a critique of the *science* of political economy and a thorough investigation of the capitalist mode of production. Marx does those two things brilliantly...offering up many ideas that still stand today and making predictions that have been eerily accurate.
The first two chapters are a bit hard to digest....they force the reader to learn the terminology of neo-classical economics (Marx was shortly post-Smith and post-Ricardo). After that, however, the book flows quite well.
On the down side, I believe a more straighforward presentation would have been better. I think Marx delves too deeply into personal examples from industrial England...though a few of them add to the personality of the book. I'm eagerly awaiting to read the 2nd and 3rd volumes of Capital.

I could write 10 pages on my specific agreements and disagreements with Marx's economics analysis, but this isn't the place for that. I guess more than anything else I've got two lingering reactions. First, I wanna grab Karl Marx by the shoulders, shake him, and tell him that, however much physics envy he's got ("the rate and mass of surplus value"), he cannot make economics into a science, and that even if he could he wouldn't be able to write the authoritative foundational text for that science by just theorizing abstractly without doing any experiments. Second, I want to thank and congratulate him for his automatic, human and above all honest identification with the struggle of the working against the capitalist classes, which I found indescribably refreshing after earning an econ degree from a neoliberal department where the norm was to take the opposite orientation and then clothe it in depoliticizing claims of objectivity.

I was surprised by how often the great anti-capitalist agreed completely with capitalist orthodoxy, for example on the production benefits and human costs of the division of labor or on the need for money as a medium of exchange. I thought Marx was at his best when he was most empirical: detailing the horrors of industrial wage slavery in Dickensian Britain and then tracing the contours of the debates on the Factory Acts, especially when he was righteously lacerating the apologists of the factory owners. And now, just for you, I'm gonna type out the full text of all the parts of this book that deal with Marx's vision for a post-capitalist society, all both of 'em:

p. 515fn33: "The field of application for machinery would therefore be entirely different in a communist society from what it is in a bourgeois society."

p. 739: "In this way he spurs on the development of society's productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle."

And that's it, two sentences in 1,100 pages. So anyone who wants to blame Marx for Stalin must seek their evidence elsewhere, possibly in Bakunin.

Believing this to be a place for book reviews, not a political blog; noting that this is one of the most influential books ever written and very well written at that; admiring the brilliant translation by Ben Fowkes; and finding the 70-page introduction by the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel a tour de force in itself; I happily give this book the highest possible rating and recommendation.

Vol II is Marx analysis of the circulation of money in Capitalist Production and the causes of a financial crisis within it. Vol II is extremely dense, but after recently experiencing the 2008 financial crisis, Vol II remains extremely relevant and a must read.

One thing often overlooked about Karl Marx is that he is an accomplished prose stylist and remarkable rhetorician. Many of his phrases and formulations are well known and frequently employed even now, and reading Marx continues to be a pleasurable experience. Philosophically, Marx remains one of the most original and arresting of nineteenth century thinkers. An assessment of Marx, however, should not focus on the content of particular pronouncements or "predictions" (there are in fact precious few of these last in his corpus) but should, rather, engage with the movement of his thought and with the conceptual revolution he initiated. If you want to make that engagement, then Capital is as good a place as any to start. But it entails commitment and risk.

It is a platitude, of course, that Marx's "vision" of how capitalism would develop has been refuted by history. Of course, this right wing mantra bears little scrutiny. Again, Marx is valuable not as a body of proposals and concrete prognoses. He provides us, rather, with an ever elastic and dynamic conceptual apparatus; a horizon of understanding that has scarcely been surpassed. In any case, the clichés used to discredit Marx's "predictions" are usually underwritten by a complete misunderstanding of how capitalism now works. Take for example the notion (it is scarcely even that) of the "disappearing working class". If one lives in a First World country the "working class" may indeed APPEAR to have diminished. Marx, however, would have us go beyond the (ideological) appearance. The pseudo-theorists in the West can afford to babble about the "disappearing working class" only because of the very "invisibility" of millions of anonymous workers sweating in Third World factories (take a look at your designer labels - the traces are readily discernible). The USA is turning into a country of managerial planning, banking, servicing and so on, while its "disappearing working class" is reappearing in places like China, where a large proportion of US products is manufactured in conditions that are ideal for capitalist exploitation. Marx would have understood only too well both this international division of labour AND its ideological masking. If you want to understand (really understand, not just pragmatically from the inside) the dominant economic and political system, then Marx's Capital is simply - and one does not use the word lightly - indispensable.

I was greatly surprised to find that the words "Communism" and "Socialism" are not even mentioned in Capital, volume 1. This leads me to believe that the most vehement criticisms of this book are by people who haven't read it. I am not by any means a communist, but I found this book to be an excellent description of capitalism. Since we are still living in a capitalist system, much of what Marx says is still relevant today, for example, his analysis on how capitalism exerts continuous pressure to lengthen the work day. I regularly read the Economist and found Marx's criticism of the magazine entertaining. It is worth knowing, for example, that the Economist opposed shortening the work day of children to 10 hours. In another fascinating section, Marx uses the depopulation of Ireland based on the Potato Famine and the resulting land grab by the rich to disprove Malthus' theory on population. He proved how, contrary to what Malthus predicted, despite losing half of its population to famine and emigration, poverty continued to rise, and the rich continued to get richer. He ends the chapter on this prophetic note: "The accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace with the accumulation of rents in Ireland. The Irishman, banished by the sheep and the ox, reappears on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian. And there a young but gigantic republic rises, more and more threateningly, to face the old queen of the waves."

From the man who wrote the manifesto of the reds, this three-volume masterpiece seeks to explain the influence of capital to the societal hierarchy and how it reduced the classes in conflict into two antagonistic parties. One of the most influential books of all time!

I don't understand why the latter reviews about this book mention that this book did not contribute to economic theory. A critique IS a contribution to economic theory simply because it lets us see the other side of the picture whether it is right or wrong. Adam Smith never got to see the explotation of children and the working factory conditions when he wrote Wealth of Nations. He also never got to see it. Marx, on the other hand, never himself set foot on a factory. Marx should be required reading for any economist. For someone to say Marxist theory are wrong one must FIRST read his book. The same goes for Adam Smith or any philosopher whatsoever.

In this first volume, the only one the publication of which Marx himself supervised, the structurally contradictory, and hence dynamic and directional, "deep structure" of capitalist society is rigorously explored. Beginning with the commodity form, he unfolds categorially the historical logic of capitalism. In so doing, he criticizes excogitate philosophy by immanently encompassing and incorporating his own would-be excogitate exposition of the commodity form itself in the famous first chapter. He handles Hegel likewise by translating Hegelian historical dynamism within the logic of capitalism. And, of course, there are the truly brilliant sustained engagements, accountings for, and critiques of Adam Smith and David Ricordo which are the sites for the most impressive display of Marx's method. For therein he accounts for ideology as a structural feature of the system. The commodity form "projects" a mode of appearance determinately that is itself deceiving- for instance, that one confuse the labor of the flesh and blood laborer with the commodity generative of surplus value, labor power, etc. This is no functionalist class-based fact, a point often obscured by the unfortunate label Marx uses, "bourgeois economy." Briefly, just to pick up some typically conventional remarks made about Marx. This is Marx's masterpiece, his life's work, the only work that displays fully his delightfully caustic wit, profoundly penetrating analytical powers, and stylistic genius. Forget the utterly bogus crap that still floats in the American atmosphere like a miasmic stench arising from a McCarthyism that never really got flushed. Beuracratic collectivism, the agglutination of the individual into a mass heap, celebrations of industrial worker heroes, and all the rest of the distortions that have arisen out of Soviet-style or Western "democratic" advanced industrial states should be checked at the gate. Indeed, it is one of the few advantages of this brave new world that we can at least read Marx in peace and good conscience again (especially now that it seems that the system fears no enemies- we are free to pursue every vice and feed our fantasies out whatever utopia just so long as we make into work on time on Monday morning). Finally, this translation, though unfortunate at times, offers the advantage of including at the end an extremely worthwhile appendix of some 150 pages entitled something like "Results of the Immediate Process of Production", which alone would make it worth the price of the book. Of course, like everything else in Capital it cannot be read out of context. In fact, it would I think be worthwhile to read it in the position where it was originally intended to be, after chapter 5, I believe, instead of at the end. Regardless, it is crucial that one read the work as a whole. It simply cannot be understood from the first section. After having done so, should one seek some insightful commentary to unravel some of the many thorny problems of interpretation one cannot do better than to consult Marx's own notebooks, the Grundrisse, also available in an affordable Penguin paperback edition. The point is, all facile declarations of the "objective refutation" of Marx sloganizing aside (see Fukuyama's tendentious and second-rate piece of state propoganda, End of History and the Last Man), all serious criticism of the pathologies of modernity begin with Marx and even the best of the twentieth century often falls short of him.

The most important point made in this volume is : "The production process appears simply as an unavoidable middle term, a necessary evil for the purpose of money-making." In his time, Marx could not have foreseen how this reality would transform our world beyond all imagination, once the current phase of mass consumption on a global scale was reached. Most objects capitalism offer today are objects with little usefulness, but are so thoroughly pushed by publicity and social conformism that they seem to fulfill vital necessities of life.

This is the best English translation, but it ignores Marx's final thoughts embodied in the French edition of Capital. The French translation was a hack job which required extensive correction, in the course of which Marx made significant additions. For these, you'll either have to learn French or go to a research library for the old Dona Torr translation. Too bad.

The introduction by Trotskyist theoretician Ernest Mandel is recommended to insomniacs.

It is annoying to see how other customers denigrate a classical and well-thought book only with untruthful reasons; the book is a jewel of economic and social thought and very heavy on its arguments. It is well introduced by Ernest Mandel and magisterially translated for David Fernbach. It is well laid out and thought-provoking and it should be read after the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics) and the Early Writings (Penguin Classics) and may be accompanied by a guide or companion of Marxist thought. A classic that will get over the bad facts mistakenly attached to it and that will be a cornerstone in Economic Theories. Remember, in it what is exposed is the weaknesses of capitalism, not a blueprint of bloody revolution and tragic tyranny, as it was made by the betrayers and corrupters that manage to make it happen like that.

This edition contains only half of Volume I. The text is also filled with strange typos- many pages have a mysterious small "p" at the beginning of each paragraph and some paragraphs have random "g"s where spaces should go. Finally, compared to other versions both in print and online, the translation is atrocious and very difficult to read.

CONTENT; Marx's book Capital is not about Communist revolution, it is an analysis of the function of Capitalism and its development. Marx believes that Capitalism derived from the mass-scale production of commodities, which can be any manufactured item of value. In a capitalist economy, the bourgeoisie (the factory owners, upper classes) own the means of production, and the proletariat (the working classes) are mercilessly dependent upon the factory owners. In a prior age, man owned how own labor, tools, and the profits of his labors entirely, but in the factory age man has become "alienated" from the tools, the means of production, and most importantly the profits of labor (which he calls unpaid labor or "surplus value"), so that his own work becomes just another cheap commodity on the market; and for capitalism, the cheaper the labor, the better. The end result is a system of antagonism, capitalists getting ever richer and seeking more labor markets to exploit, and the proletariat getting all the more exploited and impoverished. Marx does not vividly describe the apocalyptic downfall of capitalism in this book, but he does directly infer it from his analysis of capital formation, and its flaws. In sum, Marx thinks capitalism thrives in the machine age by sucking profits, "vampire-like" from the proletariat, and the only solution will be to put a stake through the heart of the capitalist system. While I do not agree with his full analysis and would not abandon capitalism for communism, I find in it much valid commentary on disturbing aspects of capitalism.
Marx does not comment much on religion in this book. For that read "On Religion" On Religion

ANALYSIS: Why should one read Marx in an era in which Marxism has been disproven by the facts of history? Given the sobering and failed examples of Soviet Russia and Communist China, one cannot read Marx (in my view) in the hope of adopting the system. Marxist-Communist systems are flawed, and democratic, free-market systems, which are soberly and appropriately regulated for social-welfare spending are of course superior. Yet the reading of Marx will not show a man whose mind and thought has been rendered totally obsolete, for there are many insights which Marx has into capitalism and the capitalist processes that are still as informative today as they were then. In short, Marx reveals the shortcomings and flaws of the capitalist system, even if he has not produced the appropriate answer to those flaws. One should say Marx's own remedy is even more flawed than the system he hoped to replace. Yet, Marx lived and wrote Capital at a time during which the U.S. was emerging from the manacles of slavery, that was a burden to the principles of our Constitution almost as badly as it was a burden to black American slaves. Marx witnessed horrible labor oppression in England - awful factory conditions where people were working 12-16 hours a day, sometimes more; where factory laborers were living on starvation wages and often dying very young due to overwork. It is a small wonder he sought such a radical answer, and could not have foreseen the capacity of free-market economies to become more open, honest, and democratic - and to reform themselves without a Communist revolution and without a dictatorship of the proletariat. Again, in sum, democratic free-market economies can reform themselves, but they should be sobered by the appalling extremes of laissez-faire to which they may sink if left to the whims of a market with no social conscience or vision. Read this book if you are interested in political-economy, and the bulk of Marxist thought. Agree or disagree with Marx, it is at least incumbent to understand him. That said, Marx could have written this book in about half or a third of the length, in my opinion. Much is over-written and over-stated, but there are some priceless gems of thought and observation, amidst much that is repetitive or flawed. Marx does not show us the way, but he does show us the gristly guts of capitalism if it is not checked by any voice of moral and social conscience.

At the final of this extensive and tough read, the rewards are worth the effort. This third volume of Das Kapital concludes Marx attempt to describe how a Capitalist economic and society works. The most difficult part of it is to follow the concepts and ideas that compose the subject and how the different concepts are related to one another.The most impressive part of all is the scope of the work and how it formulates the inherent flaws and machinations of the capitalist system. Overall, a tough read, but a rewarding experience.

Marx, in one of the greatest works in the history of social science and philosophy, exposes the real basis for the capitalist class, other's labor! In a book that manages to put the capitalist era in its place, with mounds of empirical evidence, Marx also manages to outline a better future, a economically free, democratic society of producers, building a world more free from the kind of violence, exploitation, and destruction that marks this one. And to those that say this book is dated, or for those who have only read Marx "second-hand" through capitalist authors, read this book, investigate the world around you, and see that it hasn't come very far from the grim potrait presented here.

Overall, Das Kapital is an excellent analysis of the capitalist system. However, this edition is only okay at best, and has numerous typos and spelling errors. It's also unacceptable that there is no hardcover version of the book. Hardcover version please!

If :

- Your mum has taught you lots of valuable things (eat your vegetables, be nice to old people and little dogs, don't be late to school, keep a clean nose) but she was never really able to explain why you had to WORK for a living - instead of, you know, just living;

- Your teachers packed your head full with all kinds of useful knowledge (about prepositions and adverbs, mineralogy and astrophysics, the reproductive organs of plants, x+2-y=0) but they never told you how exactly PROFITS are made - and why anybody would want to make them anyway;

- Your friends and lovers can spend hours yakking about various interesting topics (the latest music machine, videogames, designer shoes, imitation leather sofas, blockbuster movies, pink underwear and cherry flavoured bubble-gum) but they call you a bore and a nitpick whenever you wonder why you're all surrounded by so many COMMODITIES and publicity ads promising you bigger, better and faster useless things.

- You often have the impression that some greater truth is lacking in your life (and you've tried all the legal/illegal drugs, exciting TV shows, gurus and psychoanalysts, help-yourself books and bestsellers about kid sorcerers)...

...Then the time may have come to have a long talk with good old Uncle Karl - the black sheep of the social sciences, the guy nobody likes to mention at social occasions (except in the form of a joke: "have you heard the one about Karl Marx in Las Vegas?"), the most misquoted and misinterpreted modern thinker.

In "Capital", he kindly invites you to break on through to the other side (that's how countercultural he was) and check out what's really happening behind the glitzy appearances of everyday life. You don't even have to be a genius to understand him (it will be enough if you can count to ten without choking). And you might be surprised about how obvious some things will seem after he explains to you about the cage you're sitting in.

Of course, mum will probably be broken-hearted and fear that you'll join the next anarcho-pinko-terrorist organization down the block. Your teachers might refer to a vast list of successful anti-Marx books and charity organizations. And your friends and lovers will find you an even greater bore than before.

This book is one of the most important treatises ever written - the logic contained in these volumes has justified the senseless slaughter of more than one hundred million living, breathing fellow human beings. Love it or hate it, "Capital" must be taken very seriously.

This book is essentially a conflation of Ricardian economics and Hegelian philosophy - two systems with obvious epistemological flaws which had been discovered before the book was ever conceived. Ricardo advanced a theory of value which was producer-driven, that is, the effort which the producer invests in the creation of a good (be it labor, money or other goods) determines the value of a good. This is inherently fallacious - the value of a good is clearly determined by the price someone is willing to pay for it, in other words, value is consumer-driven; an obvious truth to anyone who stops to reflect upon it - but so is the advantage of the wheel over the sledge, which took millenia to discover. Ricardo's original mistake (an unexamined one which he inherited and amplified) was the producer-driven or labor theory of value. Marx was unskilled in economic analysis and he accepted Ricardian theses unthinkingly - even though many other economists had been puzzling over their inconsistency for years. Four years after the first volume of Das Kapital was published, an Austrian named Menger solved the problem by formulating the theory of marginal utility. By the time Marx published the second volume in 1885 his economic principles were already in shambles. One of the reasons why so many of his "examples" are either fabricated or contain clear mathematical errors was Marx's need to invent foundations for his increasingly insupportable theories. Any reader of this book should track the golden thread of the labor theory of value which winds through it - this fundamental error colors and tinges every economic argument.

Very often modern-day Marxists, like Chris below, make the claim that Das Kapital is not at all crippled by the clear logical and economic flaws that pervade it - Marx did not set out to write a book about economics only, but a work of moral philosophy. Although this is misleading and disingenuous (Marx certainly thought of his book as a rigorous economic treatise) it contains an element of truth. Marx intended his economics to be a concrete realization of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel essentially believed that all History (to both Marx and Hegel history is not an academic discipline but a living force) is guided by a Spirit or Mind or Reason. The way History unfolds its purpose is by raising up (in Marx's version of Hegelianism) new classes to combat and destroy old ones. Thus Das Kapital sets out to show that the "proletariat" is a class created by History to destroy the "bourgeoisie" who in turn were created to defeat the "seigneurs". The flawed labor theory of value is adduced by Marx as proof that the "proletariat" is favored by History and must destroy the "bourgeoisie" to bring about Progress. Any argument made by anyone against the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is thus a dishonest "reaction" against the clear intentions of History. Such reaction is, in Marx's view, the ultimate in moral evil and, as Chris says in another review, it is perfectly acceptable to kill such reactionaries (as well as the infant children of such reactionaries).

Since Marx and Marxists believe themselves to be the chosen avatars of History, any disagreement with their arguments or methods can never be honest or logical. Instead of an intellectual engagement, the Marxist is more inclined to answer with a fist or a bullet. They have the final word, History whispers in their ears and their ears alone. This infantile insistence on the rightness of their cause at all costs resulted in the torture and murder of millions of Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, Poles and others who dared disagree with the outmoded ideas of this poorly argued mishmash of economics and transcendental German philosophy.

Read this book, and read it carefully - it is a lesson in how the power of a few fixed thoughts can wash a world in blood. Academic mistakes often carry far higher costs than the untalented student imagines.

How amazing there are still people arguing about Karl Marx's works. I am not a marxist myself but i still found Capital an intriguing book -- at least a serious social studies. I hate communism as a social reality for the last 100 years, but it doesnt mean Marx' writing is in vain 100%. You can still pick up stuff from the books for good purposes.
Several more points i wanna address:
1) wilhempf: you needa seperate the doctrine from historical events. What happened in the last century may be some strong evidence of how flawed the materialization of classical marxism can be, but it never dismisses as a wholesale Marx' humanistic concern and his arguments about the internal contradiction of capitalism.
2) It is very easy to whip on a dead man; and it is equally handy to whip on marxism after the end of the cold war. Wilhempf demonstrated how we can do that perfectly. The terror of communism haunts those people in countries on the other hemisphere, not in the US, my friend. In what way u really show your care to those suffered and tortured? You can't really show me that. What you tried to do is just another subtle mocking of communisms to show off. Well, yeah show off, and distinguish yourself.... (from those commies) So many people tried to do that before you, and ponder how stupid they looked.
3) not all marxists are boneheaded. You did a survey before? seriously accusation must be backed up by evidences! (or someone can sue you!)
4) wilhempf had some points in his essay: theory of surplus value may be totally flawed, but still people in the next 200 years and rework the theories and improved on that. John Roemar, Erik Wright, Fredrick Jameson, to name a few, are working on this. They are a lot smarter than you thought.

I especially love the chapter on the Primitive Accumulation. It's filled with such great insight that one cannot turn his/her head away from it. How Capitalism came into being in this world through specific and cruel violence, backed by 'law' and 'governments'!