Basics, Part 2a
Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
We now go straight from Machiavelli's “The Prince” to the most famous work of the Communist canon: Karl Marx’s “Capital”.
The short Chapter 32 is the second last chapter in Volume 1 of “Capital”. It is a broad-brush summary of the whole first volume. Use the first link below to download and read the document.
This particular chapter is only about 1000 words long - approximately the same length as a newspaper “feature” article. It is one of several passages in the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin that compress large amounts of world history into a single sweep. In this case it goes from the time of ancient slaves and serfs, through the stages of the development of capitalism, to the anticipated proletarian revolution.
Other such passages in the “classics” include Chapter 9 of “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” by Frederick Engels”, which will be posted as the next item, and the first few pages of “The Communist Manifesto”, by Marx and Engels, which is the main text in the next part of this “Basics” course.
Our “Basics” course is partly an attempt to answer the frequently-expressed desire for a “simple” explanation of the politics of the working class and of the intellectual partisans of the working class.
In attempting this task, some texts have been chosen that exemplify the various original authors’ own attempts to respond to, and to satisfy, the manifest popular craving for a brief and easily-absorbed overall explanation of how politics works. This chapter from Marx is one of those.
Please download and read the text via the following link:
Further reading:
