Work · Marx
Capital, Volume I
1867 · Eight parts
A forensic anatomy of capitalism: the commodity, surplus value, and where profit really comes from.
1867
Volume I published
8
Parts
Surplus value
The engine it exposes
From a single commodity to capital
Marx builds the whole system one rung at a time, starting from the most ordinary thing imaginable, a single commodity, and climbing until the source of profit is exposed: not clever trading, but the unpaid labour locked inside every working day.
The shape of the argument
Parts I–II
The commodity, value, and money; then the transformation of money into capital (the M–C–M′ circuit, value that seeks to expand itself).
Part III
The production of absolute surplus value: labour-power as a special commodity, and the working day split into necessary and surplus labour.
Parts IV–VI
Relative surplus value: cooperation, machinery, and modern industry; and the form wages take that hides the unpaid labour.
Part VII
The accumulation of capital: how surplus value is reinvested, concentrating wealth at one pole and labour at the other.
Part VIII
So-called primitive accumulation: the conquest, enclosure, and plunder that gave capitalism its original stock.
The cast
Marx — spends decades in the British Museum writing the scientific anatomy of capitalism
The commodity — the cell-form he starts from, where use-value and exchange-value first split apart
Labour-power — the one commodity whose use creates more value than it costs: the secret of profit
The labour theory of value — the engine of the argument, and the part later economics most disputes
The famous bits
The commodityPart I
Every commodity has a use-value and an exchange-value, and prying those two apart starts the whole analysis.
Commodity fetishismPart I
Under capitalism the social relations between people take on the fantastic form of relations between things.
Surplus valuePart III
Profit comes from the unpaid hours of the working day, the labour the worker gives but is not paid for.
The working dayPart III
The documented horror of the factory: capital as dead labour that, vampire-like, lives by sucking living labour.
Primitive accumulationPart VIII
Capital comes into the world dripping, from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.