Capital, Vol. 1

A Critique of Political Economy

Capital, originally intended as a tremendously ambitious (and never completed) six-volume work, represents one of the key landmarks in the scientific understanding of capitalist development, bourgeois society and the economics of class conflict.

“What I have to examine in this work”, wrote Marx in the preface, “is the capitalist mode of production”, its natural laws and tendencies “winning their way through and working themselves out with iron necessity”. In Volume 1 (1867) years of research resulted in a marvellously lucid exposition that builds up from the basic unit of the commodity to a detailed consideration of the labour theory of value, the role of money, the modern factory system and the ways in which capital extracts surplus value from wage labour. Throughout, Marx draws on a profound knowledge of 19th­ century England to support his analysis and generate countless fresh insights. Yet despite the failure of some of his specific predictions, there is nothing dated about Marx’s main contentions and conclusions. As Ernest Mandel suggests in his stimulating introduction: “Today’s Western world is much nearer to the ‘pure’ model of Capital than was the world in which it was composed.”

Each of the three Penguin volumes of Capital contain a substantial introduction by the renowned Marxist economist Ernest Mandel.