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| Author | Karl Marx |
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| Original title | Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie Erster Band. Buch I: Der Produktionsprocess des Kapitals |
| Translator |
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| Language | German |
| Subject | Political Economy |
Publication date | 1867 |
| Followed by | Das Kapital, Volume II |
| Text | Capital. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital at Wikisource |
Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital (German: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie Erster Band. Buch I: Der Produktionsprocess des Kapitals) is the first of three treatises that make up Das Kapital, a critique of political economy by the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. First published on 14 September 1867, Volume I was the product of a decade of research and redrafting and is the only part of Das Kapital to be completed during Marx's life. It focuses on the aspect of capitalism that Marx refers to as the capitalist mode of production or how capitalism organises society to produce goods and services.
The first two parts of the work deal with the fundamentals of classical economics, including the nature of value, money, and commodities. In these sections, Marx defends and expands upon the labour theory of value as advanced by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Starting with the next three parts, the focus of Volume I shifts to surplus value (the value of a finished commodity minus the cost of production), which he divides into absolute and relative forms. Marx argues that the relations of production specific to capitalism allow capital owners to accumulate more relative surplus value by material improvements to the means of production, thus driving the Industrial Revolution. However, for Marx, not only does the extraction of surplus value motivate economic growth, but it is also the source of class conflict between workers and the owners of capital. Parts Four, Five, and Six discuss how workers struggle with capital owners over control of the surplus value they produce, punctuated with examples of the horrors of wage slavery.
Moreover, Marx argues that the drive to accumulate more capital creates contradictions within capitalism, such as technological unemployment, various inefficiencies, and crises of overproduction. The penultimate part explains how capitalist systems sustain (or "reproduce") themselves once established. Throughout the work, Marx places capitalism in a historically specific context, considering it not as an abstract ideal but as the result of concrete historical developments. This is the special focus of the final part, which argues that capitalism initially develops not through the future capitalist class being more frugal and hard-working than the future working class (a process called primitive/previous/original accumulation by the pro-capitalist classical political economists, like Adam Smith), but through the violent expropriation of property by those that eventually (through that expropriation) become the capitalist class — hence the sarcastic title of the final part, "So-called Primitive Accumulation".
In Volume I of Kapital, Marx uses various logical, historical, literary, and other strategies to illustrate his points. His primary analytical tool is historical materialism, which applies the Hegelian method of immanent critique to the material basis of societies. As such, Volume I includes copious amounts of historical data and concrete examples from the industrial societies of the mid-nineteenth century, especially the United Kingdom.
Within Marx's lifetime, he completed three editions of Volume I: the first two in German, the last in French. A third German edition, which was still in progress at the time of his death, was finished and published by Friedrich Engels in 1883. It is disputed among scholars whether the French or third German edition should be considered authoritative, as Marx presented his theories slightly differently in each one.
- ^ Shapiro 2008, p. ix.
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