Book Bearings
Capital
- 579 pages · about 10 hours
- First published 1867
- 189 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is Karl Marx's major work, an analysis of how the capitalist mode of production operates. The first volume, the only one published in his lifetime, appeared in 1867; Friedrich Engels completed the second and third from Marx's manuscripts and published them in 1885 and 1894. Marx begins with the commodity and with money, and goes on to argue that profit has its source in surplus value, the part of the worker's labor that goes unpaid, and that capitalism is one historical system among others, not a natural order.
- Economics
- History
- Philosophy and religion
- Happiness
- Communism
- Socialism
- Capitalism
- Imprisonment
2 What to expect
Marx's huge critique of capitalism, part economic theory, part history and part indictment. It starts with dense, abstract chapters on commodities, value and money, then becomes more concrete, with long sections on the working day, machinery and factory conditions in nineteenth-century Britain. It is long, difficult and sometimes sarcastic, with many footnotes, and editions range from the full first volume to short abridgments.
Good for readers who want: economic and political theory, the foundations of Marxism, and a landmark classic.
3 Read it free, right here
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Read it on the Internet Archive4 About Karl Marx
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5 More by Karl Marx
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