Capital
A critique of political economy
By Karl Marx
An abridgement by Otto Ruhle |
The class struggle on the field of ideas conditions the class struggle as a whole. Bourgeois ideas help the bourgeoisie keep control of the working class. For example: the idea that capitalism is permanent, normal, in accord with basic human nature, works against consideration of possible or desirable alternative ways of organising our social and economic life. The idea that there can be such a thing as "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work" makes the employer-worker relationship seem to be at root a just one. The idea that socialism is an unrealisable ideal, impractical and utopian, works on people's minds in favour of making the best of capitalism. In Capital Karl Marx subjected capitalism to rigorous scientific analysis and cut the ground from under the key ideas on which the vast and labyrinthe edifices of bourgeois self-justification and self-exoneration have been erected. He showed how capitalism works; how its organic processes work towards more and more centralisation and socialisation of the capitalist economy; how these organic processes build the prerequisites of socialism and thus move capitalism, one of a number of socio-economic formations in history, on towards its natural end, the "expropriation of the expropriators" - the expropriation of the capitalists by the working class. Marx showed how exploitation occurs within the wage labour-capital relationship. Marx thus laid the scientific foundations of an all-round, conscious working class challenge to capitalism. Capitalism has changed enormously since Marx published Volume 1 of Capital in 1867 - the fundamental processes of capitalism, which Karl Marx uncovered and anatomised, have not changed at all. Today, the labour movement needs to rearm itself politically and ideologically. We must go back to Marx - back to the fundamental critique of root-capitalism - if socialism is to renew itself in the post-Stalinist world. This abridgement of Volume 1 of Capital is by Otto Rühle, in collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The fundamentals of Marx's analysis are here presented in Marx's own words, stripped of outdated examples and contemporary polemics. |
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Part 1: Commodities and Money
Chapter One: Commodities
Section 1: The two factors of a commodity: use value and value
Section 2: The two-fold character of the labour embodied in commodities
Section 3: The form of value or exchange value
Section 4: The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof
Chapter Two: Exchange
Chapter Three: Money, or the Circulation of Commodities
Part 2: The Transformation of Money into Capital
Chapter Four: The General Formula for Capital
Part 3: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value
Chapter Five: The Labour-Process and the Process Of Producing Surplus-Value
Chapter Six: Constant Capital and Variable Capital
Chapter Seven: The Rate of Surplus Value
Chapter Eight: The Working Day
Section 1: The limits of the working day
Section 2: Greed for surplus labour
Section 3: Centuries of struggle
Section 4: Child labour
Chapter Nine: Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value
Part 4: Production of Relative Surplus-Value
Chapter Ten: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value
Chapter Eleven: Co-operation
Chapter Twelve: Division of Labour and Manufacture
Chapter Thirteen: Machinery and Modern Industry
Part 5: The Production of Absolute and of Relative Surplus-Value
Chapter Fourteen: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value
Chapter Fifteen Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value
Chapter Sixteen: Various Formulae for the Rate of Surplus-Value
Part 6: Wages
Chapter Seventeen: The Transformation of the Value (and respectively the Price) of Labour-Power into Wages
Chapter Eighteen: Time-Wages
Chapter Nineteen: Piece-Wages
Chapter Twenty: National Differences of Wages
Part 7: The Accumulation of Capital
Chapter Twenty-one: Simple Reproduction
Chapter Twenty-two: Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital
Chapter Twenty-Three: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
Part 8: So-called Primitive Accumulation
Chapter Twenty-Four: The So-called Primitive Accumulation
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