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Capital

1867 · by Karl Marx

Commodity, surplus value, accumulation – the laws of motion of capitalist society.

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Introduction

The first volume appeared in Hamburg in 1867 with the subtitle “A Critique of Political Economy”; it was the only one Marx completed. Engels edited the second (1885) and third (1894) volumes from Marx’s manuscripts. Volume one moves from the analysis of the commodity – use value, exchange value and the “fetishism” that makes social relations appear as relations between things – to labour power, absolute and relative surplus value, the length of the working day and machinery, drawing heavily on reports of British factory inspectors. It ends with “so-called primitive accumulation”: enclosure, colonial plunder and the expropriation of peasants. In the afterword to the second edition (1873) Marx described his relationship to Hegel’s dialectic.

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