Das Kapital

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, widely known as Das Kapital, is Karl Marx's foundational work of Marxist theory and critical analysis of political economy. Only the first of its three volumes was published in Marx's lifetime, in 1867; the remaining two were assembled from his manuscripts and published by his collaborator Friedrich Engels in 1885 and 1894. Marx argues that the motivating force of capitalism is the exploitation of labor, whose unpaid portion is the ultimate source of surplus value and profit. Starting from an analysis of the commodity, he develops a labor theory of value holding that a commodity's economic value is set by the socially necessary labor time needed to produce it, and shows how a worker's capacity to labor is itself sold as a commodity whose use in production creates more value than its price as a wage, letting the capitalist keep the difference. Marx traces how this process drives capital accumulation and technological change, and argues it produces a long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall, generating recurring economic crises.