Title

Marx: ‘Das Kapital’

Authors

Files

Description

A brief commentary prepared by Alex Macleod, PhD, Lecturer, English, on the following work:

Karl Marx
Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy)
Hamburg, 1867; volume 1; first edition

Comments

Capital has made a comeback in recent years, working into the national conversation on the Great Recession, income inequality, the “1 percent,” and the minimum wage. Political economy, which economists once considered a dinosaur of a genre, has likewise made a surprise return, most notably with Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (2014).

Its premise is rather simple: that profit is only possible in a capitalist economy through the exploitation and impoverishment of workers. To be clear, according to Marx, exploitation is not a by-product or a regrettable consequence of profitmaking under capitalism, but rather its defining feature. Capitalism is able to generate surplus value precisely because it has produced a commodity (labor power) that, as it is used, creates more value than it costs.

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