Normally I like to spend days fully explaining or annotating a text, but my own quest for Das Kapital (that is, money) leaves me with little time to put may labor power into writing a book review on Marx. All the books are relevant, but my main focus below is on Volume I (since it was published during Marx’s lifetime and contains almost all the themes covered in the other books). There was also a Book IV planned that would have included theories on surplus-value. His partner Engels completed books II and III from his Marx’s notes after his death. He did have other books AKA volumes planned and notes were written, however books II and III were never completed in his lifetime. READ IN FULL: Karl Marx Capital A Critique of Political Economy Volume I Book One: The Process of Production of Capital, Book II: The Process of Circulation of Capital, and Book III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole.įACT: Marx only wrote and published Das Kapital Book I. Here we are mostly dealing with Marx the historian and economist, and even the most staunch lover capitalist and free markets should be able to appreciate that Marx. If you step away from Marx as a boogeyman, and step away from Marx a purely political being, you are left with Marx the historian and Marx the economist. I’m not saying a theme of socialism didn’t run through all Marx’s works, or that it isn’t winking at you in the subtext of Das Kapital, I am just saying that his works are about a lot more than just socialism (and are rarely about Communism at all). The thing to note here, and which should be stressed, is that Marx’s arguably most famous Das Kapital has pretty much zero to do with Communism outside of helping on to better understand why workers would organize into a political party in response to capitalism.Īnd this makes sense, as Marx wasn’t “a Communist” as much as a philosopher, economist, and historian who co-wrote a short socialist text called “the Communist Manifesto” (a “Manifesto” for the already existing Communist party). From the purposes of commodities and money, to how they function in society as capital, to how this relates to wage labor, “Capital” is a detailed work on the philosophy, history, and mechanics of economics. Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” or just “Capital” explains the nature of capitalism.

Karl Marx’s Masterwork on Capital Explained

Das kapital book