A critical study of Karl Marx's landmark work, Das Kapital, details the author's two-decade struggle to complete his work and its seminal influence on philosophers, writers, revolutionaries, and others, as well as its impact on the course of twentieth-century history. Reprint.
A critical study of Karl Marx's landmark work, Das Kapital, details the author's two-decade struggle to complete his work and its seminal influence on philosophers, writers, revolutionaries, and others, as well as its impact on the course ...
Marx’s 'Das Kapital' cannot be put into a box marked "economics." It is a work of politics, history, economics, philosophy and even in places, literature (yes Marx’s style is that rich and evocative). Marx’s 'Das Kapital' For Beginners is an introduction to the Marxist critique of capitalist production and its consequences for a whole range of social activities such as politics, media, education and religion. 'Das Kapital' is not a critique of a particular capitalist system in a particular country at a particular time. Rather, Marx's aim was to identify the essential features that define capitalism, in whatever country it develops and in whatever historical period. For this reason, 'Das Kapital' is necessarily a fairly general, abstract analysis. As a result, it can be fairly difficult to read and comprehend. At the same time, understanding 'Das Kapital' is crucial for mastering Marx's insights to capitalism. Marx's 'Das Kapital' For Beginners offers an accessible path through Marx's arguments and his key questions: What is commodity? Where does wealth come from? What is value? What happens to work under capitalism? Why is crisis part of capitalism's DNA? And what happens to our consciousness, our very perceptions of reality and our ways of thinking and feeling under capitalism? Understanding and learn from Marx's work has taken on a fresh urgency as questions about the sustainability of the capitalist system in today's global economy intensify.
Labor power that addsvalueis adifferent form of capital: On theother hand, that
partof capital represented by laborpower, does, inthe process of production,
undergo an alteration of value.It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value,
and also produces an excess, a surplus value, which may itself vary, may be
moreor less according to circumstances. —Marx, Das Kapital Marx calls
thatpartofcapital that buys livinglabor power, variable capital, because its
produces value that varies ...
Das Kapital, Karl Marx's seminal work, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth century. From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that at one time dominated half the earth and for nearly a century kept the world on the brink of war. Even today, more than one billion Chinese citizens live under a regime that proclaims fealty to Marxist ideology. Yet this important tome has been passed over by many readers frustrated by Marx’s difficult style and his preoccupation with nineteenth-century events of little relevance to today's reader. Here Serge Levitsky presents a revised version of Kapital, abridged to emphasize the political and philosophical core of Marx’s work while trimming away much that is now unimportant. Pointing out Marx’s many erroneous predictions about the development of capitalism, Levitsky's introduction nevertheless argues for Kapital's relevance as a prime example of a philosophy of economic determinism that "subordinates the problems of human freedom and human dignity to the issues of who should own the means of production and how wealth should be distributed." Here then is a fresh and highly readable version of a work whose ideas provided inspiration for communist regimes' ideological war against capitalism, a struggle that helped to shape the world today.
rowth of capital involves growth of its variable constituent or of the part invested in
labor-power. A part of the sur- plus-value turned into additional capital must
always be retransformed into variable capital, or additional labor-fund. If we
suppose that, all other circumstances remaining the same, the com- position of
capital also remains constant (i.e., that a definite mass of means of production
constantly needs the same mass of labor-power to set in motion), then the
demand for labor ...
