Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Part 0
First Edition, 1867
A Quest for a
Secret:
Capital,
Volume 1
This week, on this forum, the
Communist University begins posting a ten-part course on Karl Marx’s
Capital, Volume 1.
The course on Capital, Volume 1 will be followed by a further ten-week
course on Capital Volumes 2 and 3. In other words, during the remainder of this
year, on this forum, we are about to cover the entire three volumes of Karl
Marx’s great work, “Capital”.
Karl Marx’s “Capital, Volume 1”, published in 1867, is the most outstanding product
of a long project that Marx begun in the 1840s, when he was still a young man
in his twenties.
Volume 2,
edited by Marx’s lifelong comrade and intellectual collaborator Frederick
Engels, was published two years after Marx’s death, in 1885. Volume 3 was published in 1894, one
year before Engels’ death.
The entire project is a quest
for a full explanation of what Marx called, at the end of Chapter 18 of Volume
1: “The
secret of the self-expansion of capital.”
This secret is what Marx
called Surplus-Value, gained by
purchasing the commodity Labour-Power
at its full value, and then putting it to work and expropriating the entire
product of the actual Labour
expended. This constantly-repeated process sustains the otherwise unstable
thing called Capital, rather as a table-tennis ball may be kept in the air by a
fountain of water or of air.
In studying this book, it
helps to be able to follow the development of Marx’s quest for “the secret of
the self-expansion of capital”, consciously.
Karl Marx’s thought did not
spring forth fully-elaborated in one moment. Especially in the early years,
Marx had to work very hard, and his quest was still work-in-progress when he
died. All this is apparent from works produced prior to 1867, as much as from
Volume 1 itself, and from the papers he left for Engels to put together for
publication, up to the very last page of the last chapter of Volume 3, which
ends: “[Here the manuscript breaks off.]”.
Reading it as a quest, which
it was, makes it more understandable.
The size of Capital, Volume 1
One challenge presented by
Volume 1 is its uneven shape and large size. The Communist University’s method,
strongly influenced by the teaching of Paulo Freire, relies on certain simple
principles and practices. We discuss original texts. We use extracts from books
to create “Short Texts” that can be used as Freirean “codifications”. The point
is not to learn the work as if for an examination, but rather to have a
discussion, and thereby to socialise our growing collective understanding of
it.
In the particular case of
“Capital”, this principle of discussion is no less crucial; but the huge size
of the project made the delineation of “Short Texts” problematic. Please note
that the source of all our texts for this series on Capital Volume 1 has been Marxists
Internet Archive. You can consult that text to fill in any omissions
you may find in the material presented.
The shape of Capital, Volume 1
Capital, Volume 1 contains 33
chapters. Most of them are short, but there are five long ones, starting with
Chapter 1 (Commodities). Chapter 3
(Money) is also long, as are Chapter 10 (The Working Day), Chapter 15
(Machinery and Modern Industry), and Chapter 25 (General Law of Capital
Accumulation).
The structure of the book is
deliberate, not accidental. Commodity (Chapter 1) is the right point of
departure, and together with the subsequent two chapters on Exchange, and
Money, it sets the scene for Chapters 4 and 5 which give the outline “General
Formula for Capital”.
The remaining 28 chapters are
a carefully-paced rolling out of the idea of Surplus-Value, with all its
implications, in short, easy, and sometimes repetitive steps. Exceptions are Chapters
10, 15 and 25, which are “books within the book”. Yet these inner books are
also part of the quest for “the secret of
the self-expansion of capital”.
Consequent design of the CU series on “Karl Marx’s
Capital, Volume 1”
The above considerations led
to the following decisions (which will be explained further in the
introductions to the individual texts):
·
The series begins
with Marx’s 1848 study-circle text called “Wage Labour and Capital”, and
specifically with Engels’ 1891 Introduction to the first publication of that
text, because it explains why Karl Marx worked for so many years on the
question of Surplus-Value, a question that had not been fully answered in 1848,
by anyone.
·
There are also
two other texts showing the development of Marx’s work in the two decades prior
to 1867. These help to get an overview of the main work, and should assist the
reader/student to get a grasp of Karl Marx’s overall intention. One of these
consists of parts from the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”. The other is extracts
from Marx’s 1865 talk to workers called “Value, Price and Profit”.
The above three instalments
constitute the first part of our
ten-part course.
Capital Volume 1 itself is
reduced, where necessary, in the following ways:
·
Some text is left
out (i.e. “redacted”). This has been done with the third section of Chapter 1,
with six of the ten sections in Chapter 15, and with part of Chapter 25.
·
Footnotes are
sometimes left out. This is regrettable! The footnotes to “Capital” are a
treasury of great worth. For this reason, wherever there is spare space,
footnotes have been retained.
Capital Volume 1 is then
re-divided in the following ways:
·
Short Chapters
are combined together.
·
Long Chapters are
divided.
·
In one situation
(Chapters 2 and 3) a chapter is divided and part of it is added to the previous
chapter
The above results in a
division of Capital Volume 1 into 20 parts, which are than divided in an
appropriate way among the remaining 9 parts (weeks) of the course, with one “main”
text in each part and the others given as alternative, or additional, reading.
Thus we end up with a
ten-week course, which is our standard CU course-length.
After completing Volume 1, we
follow on with a ten-week combined treatment of Capital, Volumes 2 and 3, but
in these cases the codification has been managed differently. It will be
explained at the beginning of the second course.
By completing this
collective, co-operative reading of Marx’s Capital, you will join a relatively small
group of people in this world who have actually read it all.
You will know by then that it
is an enjoyable work, and not at all the terrifying thing that it may at first
appear to be.
·
To download the full Capital,
Volume 1 course in PDF files, please click here
