Political Philosophy

Capital: Critique of Political Economy

♡+

Karl Marx

1867

Capital — Das Kapital — is the defining work of Marxist political economy and one of the most consequential books of the nineteenth century. Volume I, the only volume Marx completed in his lifetime, begins with an analysis of the commodity form and the labour theory of value: how the exchange of goods conceals the social relations of production that underlie them. From there Marx unfolds his account of surplus value — the mechanism by which capitalists extract unpaid labour from workers — and traces the historical emergence of capitalism through the primitive accumulation of the commons and the enclosure of peasant land. The result is both a rigorous work of economic science and a sustained moral indictment: capitalism does not merely produce wealth but reproduces the conditions of its own exploitation, concealing domination beneath the apparently neutral categories of the market.