London: 25 July 1867

25 July 1867 is an important date in world labour history. The preface of the first volume of Karl Marx’s masterpiece, Das Kapital, was written in London on that day. Marx analyses the capitalistic process of production and elaborates the labour theory of value as well as his concept of surplus value and exploitation. Das Kapital shook the world and continues to attract the attention of those interested in understanding the history of economic development through an analysis of the capitalistic mode of production and labour relations. Das Kapital provides an extensive discourse on political economy and is an attempt to critically analyse capitalism, its economic practices, and the theories that economists formed about it.

Volume 1 of Das Kapital, as explained in its preface, is a continuation of Marx’s earlier work, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859. Accordingly, the first chapter of the volume is devoted to summarising the arguments of the earlier work and to elaborate some of the arguments in the earlier research. Marx also discusses the schematisation of the remaining volumes of the work. The second volume would deal with the process of circulation of capital and the various forms of the process of capital in their totality. The third volume was to discuss the history of the theory. However, Marx could not finish the second and third volumes beyond their drafts. Friedrich Engles, his friend and collaborator, edited these drafts, which were published in 1885 and 1894, respectively. The fourth volume of Das Kapital, called Theories of Surplus-Value, was first edited and published by Karl Kautsky. Besides these, Marx’s seminal writings include The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Civil War in France, and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.  

Of Life Struggle and Class Struggles

The long gap between Marx’s 1859 work and the completion of Volume 1 of Das Kapital was primarily due to a prolonged illness. During the early 1950s, Marx lived in great poverty, in a small flat in London. Only three of his six children survived. Marx’s sources of income were the financial help from his intimate friend, Friedrich Engles, and the supplementary income from earned as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.

Marx was born in Prussia (Germany) on 5 May 1818.  Marx first studied law and then became interested in philosophy and took a Ph.D. degree in 1841. Initially, Marx was influenced by the works of Hegel. However, Marx rejected Hegel and developed a more materialistic theory of history of economic development, ultimately predicting that the triumph of the working class was inevitable. Marx’s works explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces; these form the basis of all communist theory. They have had a profound influence on the social sciences.

Marx became a journalist for a short while. He moved to Paris in 1843, where he began his lifelong comradeship with Friedrich Engels. He established contact with organised groups of German workers and various sects of French socialists. Engels and he were expelled from Paris in 1844. They moved to Brussels where he remained for about three years. In 1847, Marx joined the Communist League and, with Engels, prepared the famous Communist Manifesto, which vividly proclaims his view of the class struggle. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” are famous words from this seminal work.

He moved back to Paris in 1848 and again engaged in journalism in radical democratic lines. However, as his paper was suppressed soon, he sought refuge in London in 1849 and remained there till his death.  Marx devoted the last decades of his life to working on Das Kapital, mostly in the British Museum. Marx was a most careful and hard-working scholar. He was a heavy smoker of pipes and cigars and his workroom was densely smoke-filled during his `creative hours’. “Das Kapital,” he said once, “will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it.”

The central focus of Marxian analysis in Das Kapital is labour, which is the ultimate source of profits and value-addition in the economy. The prime driving force of capitalism, to Marx, is the exploitation and alienation of labour; the employers could successfully exploit the workers due to their ownership of productive capital assets or means of production. Workers constantly reproduce the conditions of capitalism by their labour, by production of their output as capital for the employers and by receiving a lower market value for their labour power vis-à-vis the value of the commodities produced by them. Marx further explains the content and context of Das Kapital: “What I have to examine in this work is the capitalist mode of production, and the relations of production and forms of intercourse that correspond to it. Until now, their classic ground has been England. That is the reason why England is used as the main illustration of the theoretical developments I make.” Accordingly, he devoted a great deal of discussion in the work to the history, the details and the results of the English Factory Legislation.

Marx observes that the current problems of economic life are not only due to the development of capitalist production, but are also related to the incompleteness of that development. He adds: “Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.”

Influence of Marx

Marx concludes his preface by welcoming every opinion based on scientific criticism, with the following firm words: “Follow me, and let the people talk.” His words came true literally. He was fortunate enough to see his own ideas getting popular during his life. Nevertheless, the massive spread of Marxian philosophy only happened a few decades after his death in 1883. Marxian thoughts attracted wider attention since the victory of Russian Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917. During the twentieth century, barring a few parts, the entire world was significantly influenced by the Marxian Philosophy. The proliferation of interpretations of Marx’s original thinking, apparently confused the author himself, provoking him to declare, “The only thing I know is that I’m not a Marxist”. 

Marx’s Das Kapital can be read as a work of economics, sociology and history. He addresses myriad topics, but most often tries to present a systematic account of the nature, development, and future of the capitalist system.

Even 120 years after Marx’s death, Das Kapital remains one of the seminal contributions to understanding the capitalistic mode of production and development and the economics of class conflict. His work greatly influenced modern socialism, and he is considered one of the founders of economic history and sociology.

[Major Sources: Marx, Karl:  Capital Vol.1. Penguin Books, London – 1990 (Reprint); Karl Marx: Biography and Much More & Das Kapital: Information from Answers.com (http://answers.com)]