Karl Marx

Orignally written as a series of newspaper articles in 1847, Wage-Labour and Capital was intended to give a short overview, for popular consumption, of Marx’s central threories regarding the economic relationships between workers and capitalists. These theories outlined include the Marxian form of the Labour Theory of Value, which distinguishes “labour” from “labour-power”, and the Theory of Concentration of Capital, which states that capitalism tends towards the creation of monopolies and the disenfranchisement of the middle and working classes. The Theory of Alienation, which describes a dehumanising effect of capitalist production, in which an immediate social signifcance of labour to the worker is absent, is also touched upon. These theories were later elaborated in Volume 1 of Capital, published in 1867.

This edition of Wage-Labour and Capital, published in 1891, was edited and translated by Friedrich Engels, and remains one of the most widely read of Marx’s works.

(Description by Carl Manchester).

Capital, Volume I is the first of three volumes in Karl Marx’s monumental work, Das Kapital, and the only volume to be published during his lifetime, in 1867.

Marx’s aim in Capital, Volume I is to uncover and explain the laws specific to the capitalist mode of production and of the class struggles rooted in these capitalist social relations of production. Marx said himself that his aim was “to bring a science [i.e. political economy] by criticism to the point where it can be dialectically represented”, and in this way to “reveal the law of motion of modern society”. By showing how capitalist development was the precursor of a new, socialist mode of production, he aimed to provide a scientific foundation for the modern labour movement. In preparation for his book, he studied the economic literature available in his time for a period of twelve years, mainly in the British Museum in London.