CapitalKarl Marx

Marx's Capital is an anatomy of the capitalist mode of production. Volume I, the only volume Marx completed, begins with the commodity and works outward to reveal the structure of exploitation hidden within ordinary market exchange.

The argument starts from the distinction between use-value and exchange-value. A commodity's exchange-value, Marx argues, is determined by the socially necessary labor time required to produce it. Labor itself becomes a commodity when workers, owning no means of production, sell their labor-power to capitalists. The capitalist pays the worker enough to reproduce that labor-power but extracts labor for a longer working day. The difference, surplus value, is the source of profit. This is not theft in the ordinary sense; it operates within the rules of free exchange. That is precisely Marx's point: exploitation is structural, not personal.

The later chapters trace the historical process by which this structure came into being. "Primitive accumulation," the violent dispossession of peasants from common land, created the propertyless class that capitalism requires. Marx also analyzes the forces internal to the system: the drive to increase productivity through machinery, the tendency of capital to concentrate, the recurring crises produced by overproduction. The prose alternates between dense economic analysis and passages of savage historical narration. Capital gave the socialist movement its theoretical foundation and forced every subsequent account of modern economics to contend with the question of whose labor produces whose wealth.