Promotional Information

A landmark work in the understanding of capitalism, bourgeois society and the economics of class conflict, Karl Marx's Capital is translated by Ben Fowkes with an introduction by Ernest Mandel in Penguin Classics.

Table of Contents

Capital Introduction by Ernest Mandel
Translator's Preface
Preface to the First Edition
Postface to the Second Edition
Preface to the French Edition
Postface to the French Edition
Preface to the Third Edition (by Engels)
Preface to the English Edition (by Engels)
Preface to the Fourth Edition (by Engels)
BOOK I: THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION OF CAPITAL

Part One: Commodities and Money

Chapter 1: The Commodity
1. The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value (Substance of VAlue, Magnitude of Value)
2. The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities
3. The Value-Form, or Exchange-Value
(a) The Simple, Isolated, or Accidental Form of Value
(1) The two poles of the expression of value: the relative form of value and the equivalent form
(2) The relative form of value
(i) The content of the relative form of value
(ii) The quantitative determinacy of the relative form of value
(iii) The equivalent form
(iv) The simple form of value considered as a whole
(b) The Total or Expanded Form of Value
(1) The expanded relative form of value
(2) The particular equivalent form
(3) Defects of the total or expanded form of value
(c) The General Form of Value
(1) The changed character of the form of value
(2) The development of the relative and equivalent forms of value: their interdependence
(3) The transition from the general form of value to the money form
(d) The Money Form
4. The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret

Chapter 2: The Process of Exchange

Chapter 3: Money, or the Circulation of Commodities
1. The Measure of Values
2. The Means of Circulation
(a) The Metamorphosis of Commodities
(b) The Circulation of Money
(c) Coin. The Symbol of Value

3. Money
(a) Hoarding
(b) Means of Payment
(c) World Money

PART TWO: THE TRANSFORMATION OF MONEY INTO CAPITAL

Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital

Chapter 5: Contradictions in the General Formula

Chapter 6: The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power

PART THREE: THE PRODUCTION OF ABSOLUTE SURPLUS-VALUE

Chapter 7: The Labour Process and the Valorization Process
1. The Labour Process
2. The Valorization Process

Chapter 8: Constant Capital and Variable Capital

Chapter 9: The Rate of Surplus-Value
1. The Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power
2. The Representation of the Value of the Product by Corresponding Proportional Parts of the Product
3. Senior's "Last Hour"
4. The Surplus Product

Chapter 10: The Working Day
1. The Limits of the Working Day
2. The Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour. Manufacturer and Boyar
3. Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation
4. Day Work and Night Work. The Shift System
5. The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Laws for the Compulsory Extension of the Working Day, from the Middle of the Fourteenth to the End of the Seventeenth Century
6. The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Laws for the Compulsory Limitation of Working Hours. The English Factory Legislation of 1833-64
7. The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Impact of the English Factory Legislation on Other Countries

Chapter 11: The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value

PART FOUR: THE PRODUCTION OF RELATIVE SURPLUS-VALUE

Chapter 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value

Chapter 13: Co-operation

Chapter 14: The Division of Labour and Manufacture
1. The Dual Origin of Manufacture
2. The Specialized Worker and His Tools
3. The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture - Heterogeneous and Organic
4. The Division of Labour in Manufacture, and the Division of Labour in Society
5. The Capitalist Character of Manufacture

Chapter 15: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry
1. The Development of Machinery
2. The Value Transferred by the Machinery to the Product
3. The Most Immediate Effects of Machine Production on the Worker
(a) Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-Power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children
(b) The Prolongation of the Working Day
(c) Intensification of Labour
4. The Factory
5. The Struggle between Worker and Machine
6. The Compensation Theory, with Regard to the Workers Displaced by Machinery
7. Repulsion and Attraction of Workers through the Development of Machine Production. Crises in the Cotton Industry
8. The Revolutionary Impact of Large-Scale Industry on Manufacture, Handicrafts and Domestic Industry
(a) Overthrow of Co-operation Based on Handicrafts and on the Division of Labour
(b) The Impact of the Factory System on Manufacture and Domestic Industries
(c) Modern Manufacture
(d) Modern Domestic Industry
(e) Transition from Modern Manufacture and Domestic Industry to Large-Scale Industry. The Hastening of this Revolution by the Application of the Factory Acts to those Industries
9. The Health and Education Clauses of the Factory Acts. The General Extension of Factory Legislation in England
10. Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture

PART FIVE: THE PRODUCTION OF ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE SURPLUS-VALUE

Chapter 16: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value

Chapter 17: Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value
1. The Length of the Working Day and the Intensity of Labour Constant; the Productivity of Labour Variable
2. The Length of the Working Day and the Productivity of Labour Constant; the Intensity of Labour Variable
3. The Productivity and Intensity of Labour Constant; the Length of the Working Day Variable
4. Simultaneous Variations in the Duration, Productivity and Intensity of Labour

Chapter 18: Different Formulae for the Rate of Surplus-Value

PART SIX: WAGES

Chapter 19: The Transformation of the Value (and Respectively the Price) of Labour-Power into Wages

Chapter 20: Time-Wages

Chapter 21: Piece-Wages

Chapter 22: National Differences in Wages

PART SEVEN: THE PROCESS OF ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL

Chapter 23: Simple Reproduction

Chapter 24: The Transformation of Surplus-Value into Capital
1. Capitalist Production on a Progressively Increasing Scale. The Inversion which Converts the Property Laws of Commodity Production into Laws of Capitalist Appropriation
2. The Political Economists' Erroneous Conception of Reproduction on an Increasing Scale
3. Division of Surplus-Value into Capital and Revenue. The Abstinence Theory
4. The Circumstances which, Independently of the Proportional Division of Surplus-Value into Capital and Revenue, Determine the Extent of Accumulation, namely, the Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power, the Productivity of Labour, the Growing Difference in Amount between Capital Employed and Capital Consumed, and the Magnitude of the Capital Advanced
5. The So-Called Labour Fund

Chapter 25: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
1. A Growing Demand for Labour-Power Accompanies Accumulation if the Composition of Capital Remains the Same
2. A Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Occurs in the Course of the Further Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration Accompanying It
3. The Progressive Reduction of a Relative Surpluse Population or Industrial Reserve Army
4. Different Forms of Existence of the Relative Surplus Population. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
5. Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
(a) England from 1846 to 1866
(b) The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial Working Class
(c) The Nomadic Population
(d) Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Section of the Working Class
(e) The British Agricultural Proletariat
(f) Ireland

PART EIGHT: SO-CALLED PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION

Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation

Chapter 27: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land

Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century. The Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament

Chapter 29: The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer

Chapter 30: Impact of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. The Creation of a Home Market for Industrial Capital

Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist

Chapter 32: The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonization

Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production
Introduction by Ernest Mandel
I. Commodities as the Product of Capital
II. Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus-Value
III. Capitalist Production is the Production and Reproduction of the Specifically Capitalist Relations of Production
IV. Isolated Fragments

Quotations in Languages Other than English and German
Index of Authorities Quoted
General Index
Note on Previous Editions of the Works of Marx and Engels
Chronology of Works by Marx and Engels

About the Author

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany and studied in Bonn and Berlin. Influenced by Hegel, he later reacted against idealist philosophy and began to develop his own theory of historical materialism. He related the state of society to its economic foundations and mode of production, and recommended armed revolution on the part of the proletariat. Together with Engels, who he met in Paris, he wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. He lived in England as a refugee until his death in 1888, after participating in an unsuccessful revolution in Germany. Ernst Mandel was a member of the Belgian TUV from 1954 to 1963 and was chosen for the annual Alfred Marshall Lectures by Cambridge University in 1978. He died in 1995 and the Guardian described him as 'one of the most creative and independent-minded revolutionary Marxist thinkers of the post-war world.'