MARX’S CAPITAL

A Student Edition
Edited and
introduced
by
C J Arthur
ELECBOOK CLASSICS

Marx's Capital
A Student Edition
Karl Marx
ISBN 1 84327 096 X

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Marx’s Capital
A Student Edition

Edited and Introduced by C J Arthur

This edition is an edited and abridged version of the first volume of

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx, using the text of
the English edition of 1887 which was translated from the third German
edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Friederich
Engels.

First published by Lawrence & Wishart 1992

Edition and introduction © C J Arthur 1992

ElecBook London
1998
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CONTENTS

Editor's Introduction 8
Preface to the First German Edition 27
Afterword to the Second German Edition 30

PART I—COMMODITIES AND MONEY

Chapter 1 – Commodities 36
Section 1. The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-value
and Value 36
Section 2. The Two-fold Character of the Labour
Embodied in Commodities 42
Section 3. The Form of Value or Exchange-value 49
A. Elementary or Accidental Form of Value 50
B. Total or Expanded Form of Value 64
C. The General Form of Value 67
D. The Money-form 73
Section 4. The Fetishism of Commodities 74
Chapter 2. – Exchange 88
Chapter 3 – Money, or the Circulation of Commodities 97
Section 1. The Measure of Values 97
Section 2. The Medium of Circulation 104
Section 3. Money 131

PART II—THE TRANSFORMATION OF MONEY INTO CAPITAL

Chapter 4 – The General Formula for Capital 142
Chapter 5 – Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital 152
Chapter 6 – The Buying and Selling of Labour-power 161

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PART III—THE PRODUCTION OF ABSOLUTE SURPLUS-VALUE

Chapter 7-The Labour-process and the Process of Producing
Surplus-value 171
Section 1. The Labour-process 171
Section 2. The Production of Surplus-value 180
Chapter 8 – Constant Capital and Variable Capita] 196
Chapter 9 – The Rate of Surplus-value 209
Chapter 10 – The Working Day 216
Section 1. The Limits of the Working Day 216
Section 2. The Greed for Surplus-labour 219
Section 3. Branches of English Industry without Legal
Limits to Exploitation 223
Section 4. Day and Night Work. The Relay System 231
Section 5. The Struggle for a Normal Working Day 237
Section 6. The English Factory Acts, 1833 to 1864 243
Section 7, Reaction of the English Factory Acts on Other
Countries 264
Chapter 11 – Rate and Mass of Surplus-value 268

PART IV—PRODUCTION OF RELATIVE SURPLUS-VALUE

Chapter 12 – The Concept of Relative Surplus-value 276
Chapter 13 – Cooperation 268
Chapter 14- Division of Labour and Manufacture 297
Section 1. Two-fold Origin of Manufacture 297
Section 2. The Detail Labourer and his Implements
Section 3. The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture:
Heterogeneous Manufacture, Serial Manufacture 303
Section 4. Division of Labour in Manufacture, and Division
of Labour in Society 312
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Section 5. The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture 321

Chapter 15- Machinery and Modern Industry 329
Section 1. The Development of Machinery 329
Section 2. The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product 342
Section 3. The Proximate Effects of Machinery on the
Workman 349
Section 4. The Factory 372
Section 5. The Strife between Workman and Machine 379
Section 6. The Theory of Compensation as regards the
Workpeople Displaced by Machinery 391
Section 7. Repulsion and Attraction of Workpeople by the
Factory System. Crises in the Cotton Trade 397
Section 8. Revolution Effected in Manufacture, Handicrafts,
and Domestic Industry by Modern Industry 403
Section 9. The Factory Acts. Educational Clauses of the Same.
Their General Extension in England 422
Section 10. Modern Industry and Agriculture 434

PART V—THE PRODUCTION OF ABSOLUTE AND OF RELATIVE

SURPLUS-VALUE
Chapter 16 – Absolute and Relative Surplus-value 438
Chapter 17 – Changes of Magnitude in the Price of
Labour-power and in Surplus-value 442

PART VI – WAGES
Chapter 19 – The Transformation of the Value (and
Respectively the Price) of Labour-power into Wages 449
Chapter 22 – National Differences in Wages 457

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PART VII – THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL

Chapter 23 – Simple Reproduction 461
Chapter 24 – Conversion of Surplus-value into Capital 471
Section 1. Capitalist Production on a Progressively Increasing
Scale. Transition of the Laws of Property that Characterise
Production of Commodities into Laws of
Capitalist Appropriation 471
Section 3. Separation of Surplus-value into Capital and
Revenue 481
Chapter 25 – The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation 486
Section 1. The Increased Demand for Labour-power that
Accompanies Accumulation. the Composition of
Capital Remaining the Same 486
Section 2. Relative Diminution of the Variable Part
of Capital Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation
and of the Concentration that Accompanies it 492
Section 3. Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus
Population or Industrial Reserve Army 501
Section 4. Different Forms of the Relative Surplus
Population. The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation 512

PART VIII – THE SO-CALLED PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION

Chapter 26-The Secret of Primitive Accumulation 520
Chapter 27 – Expropriation of the Agricultural Population
from the Land 520
Chapter 28 – Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated,
from the End of the Fifteenth Century 534
Chapter 32 – Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation 538

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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

K
arl Marx was one of the intellectual giants of the modern epoch.
While it is true that even without him we would still be arguing
about capitalism and socialism, class struggle and revolution, it
cannot be denied that in his work he established in large part the
framework within which the discussion has been carried on.
Furthermore, many of his own concepts have become common currency
in the social sciences: ‘class consciousness’; ‘alienation’, ‘ideology’;
‘exploitation’; ‘mode of production’; ‘relations of production’;
‘commodity fetishism’; ‘materialist conception of history’. Above all,
Marx challenged the rationality of capitalist society. His ‘critique of
political economy’ argued that capitalism was exploitative, inherently
contradictory and systematically prone to crisis. That we still speak of
capital and wage labour, that we can trace the booms and slumps in the
economy since his day, means that Marx may still have much to teach
us. Serious scholars, whether economists, historians or political
scientists, know that if his work is not accepted or developed it must be
refuted. In a word, he is unavoidable: anyone wishing to further their
own education must take Marx's Capital seriously.
It was in 1867 that Marx brought out his masterpiece Capital: A
Critique of Political Economy; to be precise, he brought out Volume
One: The Process of Production of Capital. From the mass of his notes,
Friedrich Engels brought out after his death two more volumes: Volume
Two on circulation of capital, and Volume Three dealing with revenues
such as rent. These are inferior in literary quality and coherence to

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Volume One. Karl Kautsky brought out a ‘Volume Four': Theories of

Surplus Value, itself a mass of notes taking up three volumes. When
people speak of Marx's Capital they usually have in mind simply Volume
One. This is the book read by students, workers, social scientists,
philosophers, historians and the educated public wishing to acquaint
themselves with one of the great minds of the modern era. This is what
is presented in our abridgement. The other volumes are read by
economists of course; but they are relatively less known than the first
volume. As Engels said in his Preface to the English Edition of 1887,
Volume One ‘is in great measure a whole in itself’ and ranks ‘as an
independent work’. This was a verdict oft-repeated. Karl Korsch said that
the book ‘impresses us both in form and content as a finished and
rounded whole’, while Rosa Luxemburg asserted that it shows ‘not a
trace of theoretical incompleteness’. Moreover, it fully realises Marx's
ambition to create an ‘artistic whole’ (as expressed in a letter to Engels
31 July 1865).
In the past it was undoubtedly true that people were discouraged
from reading Capital by the text's formidable length and forest of
footnotes. This is why we have issued this ‘student edition’. We have
done our best to retain the meat of the book, while making the way clear
by judicious pruning of its sprawling branches. Of course, nothing can be
done about the theoretical content. Marx presupposed a reader prepared
to ‘get stuck in’.

THE PRINCIPLE OF TOTALITY

Capital: Volume One is therefore a whole, not just a quarter of the

complete theory, because the inner workings of capitalist production,
which Marx laid bare in it, form the originating framework within which
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all other relations in this mode of production can be located. The later
volumes are thus not of equal weight to the first, nor are they the
conclusions to premises established here; rather, they are
concretisations in more determinate form of the main relationships and
tendencies established in the first volume.
Methodologically speaking, Marx can work in this way because, as
the presentation itself shows, the capitalist mode of production has an
organic unity. This means that knowledge of it must take the form of a
system of related categories rather than a series of discrete
investigations; moreover, in the theory, it is necessary to establish what
is the hierarchy of determinations involved, and especially what lies at
the heart of the matter – the principle that works itself out through the
increasingly complex secondary and tertiary layers of the entire structure.
Of course, it is equally necessary for theory to develop these further
mediations, in order to show, in principle at least, how this fundamental
dynamic grounds itself in its effects and thereby successfully reproduces
the whole system.
But Marx's most significant problem clearly lay in disentangling from
the bewilderingly complicated phenomena of modern economic life the
essential features, which can be articulated in a few simple abstract
categories (value, surplus-value, etc.). This he gives us here.
This means that the argument of Capital is pitched at a high level of
generality throughout all three volumes, but especially Volume One.
New readers should not make the mistake of imagining that the
discussion deals with very detailed movements and relationships of
wages, prices and profits as they are determined in everyday life. When
Marx formulates his law of value it is certainly intended to be the really
fundamental regulator of everyday phenomena, but many further stages
would be necessary to explain, even in principle, its concrete
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manifestation. This leads the more obtuse critic to wonder what use it is
then, if it cannot be immediately ‘applied’, if it refers to relationships not
visible on the surface of things. But no science, including social science,
can dispense with such fundamental principles, ‘abstracted’, if you like,
from contingent empirical phenomena.
It is clear that when Marx uses the metaphor ‘laws of motion’ he has
Newton in mind. This should be taken quite seriously. No one ever saw
a body moving at a constant speed in a straight line for ever. Such a
body is always subject to disturbing influences, friction, air resistance,
gravity and the like. But this did not stop Newton correctly considering
such a law as the basic regulator of mechanical motion, and defending it
against the Aristotelian assumption that bodies tend to a state of rest.
Marx's law of value, explained in this volume, has much the same
status. In its purity it is the principle underlying the most complex
phenomena of capitalism, albeit that market prices never coincide with
values, or profits with surplus-value. But Marx shows how one must
understand the latter as a stage in generating the former.
Marx makes the point in Volume Three that there would be no need
for science if the appearance of things directly coincided with their
essence. He argues that the real relationships may be quite contrary to
the way they appear; though that they appear so must itself be
explained as well. Thus Marx's theory is explanatory because, instead of
making observations of surface phenomena like costs and prices, it
develops the inner structure of the observable relations. In so far as
appearances are systematically misleading it is a critical science; for it
undercuts moral and political positions rooted in these appearances; and
conversely it represents in theory the standpoint of the proletariat.

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THE PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL FORM

It is important to understand, especially for those already acquainted

with modern ‘economics’, that Marx's approach to his subject matter has
very little in common with what is understood today by ‘economics’. For
example, Marx regards analysis of supply and demand curves as an
entirely superficial problem compared with the theorisation of market
exchange itself as a peculiar social form, and the divination of its long-
run tendencies of development. Furthermore, the differential distribution
of economic power in modern capitalism, which is glossed over and
taken for granted in bourgeois economics, is precisely what Marx thinks
requires investigation and explanation, in particular of course, the power
of capital.
As early as 1847 Marx had adumbrated his basic approach to the
understanding and critique of ‘political economy’, namely that ‘economic
categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions, of the
social relations of production’ (Poverty of Philosophy). It was these
‘social relations of production’ that Marx investigated. In his view,
scientific study of the economy is not only about material
transformations, for example the managing of scarce resources, or the
correlation of inputs and outputs to determine technically consistent
systems. Rather, such topics are to be subordinated to the
understanding of how people relate to each other in particular,
historically specific modes of production. Thus Marx's theory is not
addressed primarily to ‘economising’ (a relation between people and
things) nor to ‘utility maximisation’ (another, dubious relation between
people and things) but to the ‘social economy’, through which labours
are socially recognised, commensurated, allocated and exploited. It
understands that technical methods are employed only within certain
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social forms: ‘An African is an African. Only in certain relations does he

become a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning cotton. Only in certain
relations does it become capital.’ (Wage Labour and Capital)
The specificity of the capitalist mode of production is, first, that the
products of labour take the form of commodities for sale. The reason for
this phenomenon is that labours are undertaken in private enterprises
which are socially synthesised only through exchange in which products
assume the form of value; this is not the only possible form of social
synthesis, but it is the one determining almost all production in this
society. Second, the immediate producers, the workers, have been
deprived of means of production of their own and hence have nothing to
sell but their labour-power; from this feature of the organisation of
production arises the capital relation based on exploitation of wage--
labour. Clearly this nexus is a social fact, not a natural one. In this way
Marx can demonstrate that the Industrial Revolution was defined by the
form of capitalist development. In general, Marx holds that it is the
social form of the economy that is the key to understanding its
movement, reproduction, development, limits and destiny.

THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICITY

Because social forms vary, there are no economic laws valid for each
and every different form of society. Each socially specified mode of
production has its own laws of motion. Marx's concern, as the very title
of his work indicates, is with the capitalist mode of production; nothing
he says here necessarily has any application to pre-capitalist, post-
capitalist or, in general, non-capitalist societies. It is important,
therefore, for theorists today to determine whether or not the mode of
production has changed sufficiently to invalidate the laws Marx
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formulated. In 1859 Marx outlined a sketch of economic development

listing the ‘Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of
production’. His topic is the last named only, as he puts it in his Preface:
‘it is the ultimate aim of this work to reveal the economic law of motion
of modern society’ (my emphasis). History implies, in other words, an
evolution of socio-economic forms of life. A Russian reviewer, quoted
with approval by Marx, said that the value of Marx's book ‘lies in the
illumination of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence,
development and death of a given social organism and its replacement
by another, higher one.’ We are now in a position to understand how
Marx starts the exposition of his theory. We know that he must begin
with that relationship which conditions the economy as a whole. We
know that this relation must be social in form. We know that it must be
historically specific, not just ‘production in general’. Marx's chosen
foundation is the relation of capital to wage-labour. Whereas in earlier
modes of production land-ownership was the key element, nowadays it
is industrial capital that is the dominant force, the overriding moment in
the dynamic of the system. Thus in Volume One he concentrates entirely
on this relation of production, leaving until later volumes such matters as
rent, interest and commerce.
But capital is itself complex. Marx defines it as self-expanding value,
so he must first thematise value in exchange (as distinguished from
value in use) as it is borne by the mass of commodities circulating in the
market place, then he must develop the logic of money from this, and
finally reach the concept of capital. What Marx shows, then, in Volume
One, is that capitalist production is a matter of producing value, surplus-
value and capital itself; that this is at the same time a matter of the
continual reproduction of its basic social form the opposition of capital
and wage-labour – within which the capitalist is compelled to
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accumulate and the workers are compelled to sell themselves; and

finally that this in turn grounds the compulsion for the proletariat to
unite itself as a class against capital, and to end wage-slavery.
On the basis of the method outlined above he can even risk already
sketching out the destiny of the capitalist system, and reaffirming his
judgement of nearly twenty years before – in the Communist Manifesto –
that what capitalism produces above all else is its own gravediggers, a
revolutionary proletariat.

HISTORICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS

Throughout Capital Marx has undertaken a systematic investigation of

capitalism, its articulation as an ongoing system. But in the last part of
the book he locates it historically. It has its origins and destiny.
Capitalism is able to reproduce itself if its basic presuppositions, capital
and wage-labour, are in place. But these are by no means ‘givens’
historically, however familiar they seem to us today. They are social
forms taken on by labour and the means of production, which had to be
historically produced. The most important single point here is that
capital depends on the availability of labour-power. This requires the
existence of a class without access to the means of production on their
own account – thus forced to sell their services to capital in order to
subsist. This separation of the producer from the means of production
was by no means a natural, God-given fact; if anything was natural, it
was the converse – an immediate unity of the producers with the land
on which they subsisted. Marx therefore explains the real historical
process of expropriation in Britain, whereby people were driven off the
land, through such measures as the Enclosure Acts, the Highland
‘clearances’ and the like. It is noteworthy that the intervention of the
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‘clearances’ and the like. It is noteworthy that the intervention of the

state plays a role in forcing on the process.
Every country's history is different but in one way or another the
traditional smallholder has been driven off the land to be made into a
wage-labourer. How or when it happens is a historically specific matter.

COMMODITY FETISHISM

The main conceptual difficulties which lie in the way of the reader of
Capital relate to the concepts of ‘value’ and ‘surplus-value’. It is
important to understand that Marx sharply distinguishes between use-
value and exchange-value, and that the latter has a purely social reality.
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe naturally took a great interest in the
useful properties of the items salvaged from his ship, but it would have
had no meaning whatsoever to ‘value’ them to see how much he was
‘worth’. Nor does it make sense in any communal form of social
production. It is only when the products of labour are treated by society
as exchangeable commodities that they acquire value in the economic
sense. Value does not inhere in them naturally like their mass. Just as a
pawn is only an oddly shaped piece of wood outside the contest of the
rules of chess, within which it acquires certain powers in relation to
other pieces, so also does a product of labour acquire a certain value in
relation to other such commodities within the rules of the ‘exchange
game’. To treat such powers as naturally inherent is to fetishise the
commodity, says Marx.
At the same time, once the exchange system is in operation then the
value of a commodity is perfectly objective, as against the hopes and
wishes of individuals. Marx argues that the substance of value is
‘abstract labour’ and that its measure is ‘socially necessary labour-time’.
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In principle, then, commodities exchange in proportions ultimately

determined by the labour-time necessary to produce their kind.
In truth, what Marx does is to reduce a relation between products to
another relation – between producers. But he points out that this
theoretical achievement does not alter the fact that people have to
conform to the laws of the market. Having set up the exchange system
in which commodities have value relations to each other, we become its
victim. It is not that the law of value appears like the law of gravity in its
independence of human will. It really is effective over the agents
concerned, whether they understand it or not, as long as private property
and exchange exist. Commodity fetishism characterises not so much a
confused consciousness as the form of appearance of the relations
themselves (just as one distinguishes the hallucinations of a madman
from the mirage everyone can ‘see’).

EXPLOITATION

It is clear from the outset that Marx's law of value is intended to be

descriptive and explanatory: it shows how the system works. It has got
nothing to do with any normative principle about how production and
exchange ought to be carried on. (Marx's own prescription is that the
market, and with it the law of value, should be abolished.)
It is not often so well understood that Marx stuck to this view even
where surplus-value was concerned. It was not a question for him of
complaining that appropriation of surplus-value broke the law of
equivalent exchange. Rather, he undertakes to show how the capital
relation ensures the systematic exploitation of the immediate producers
on the basis of the law itself. So for him, it is not a matter of demanding
‘fair wages’ but of abolishing the wages system. Even those, like Smith
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and Ricardo, who advanced a labour theory of value, stumbled when it

came to explaining surplus-value. If costs and prices were based on
labour values, how could a surplus-value arise at all? Yet it obviously
does; and forms the basis of profit, rent and interest. But this seems
impossible if labour is paid for in full.
Marx solves the problem by pointing out that the expression ‘value of
labour’ makes no sense. What workers sell is not their labour but their
labour-power, their capacity to labour. Labour may be paid by the hour
or by the piece, but Marx argues that the underlying determinant of the
wage is the value of labour-power and that this is something distinct
from labour itself.
There are two reasons Marx can advance for this conceptual
innovation. First, the expression ‘value of labour’ has no sense because
labour as the source of value can no more itself be valued than gravity
which gives things weight can itself have a weight, or the wavelength of
light which explains colour can itself be coloured. In logical terms, it is a
category mistake to ask about the value of labour.
Second, a less abstract argument can be derived from considering the
labour theory of value itself. What it envisages is that value is
determined not by the use to which a thing is put, but in its conditions
of production. For instance, it is no good my going to a furniture shop
and telling the vendor I intend to use the goods for firewood. I have to
pay compensation for all the work embodied in the commodity, even if it
is no good for the use to which I intend to put it. In exactly the same
way the value of what the worker sells must be determined not by the
use to which the employer puts it but by its conditions of production. To
produce a worker fit and ready for work involves the consumption of
certain values, that is, means of subsistence. It is the quantity of labour
embodied in these inputs which determines the value of labour-power,
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not the labour-time extorted out of it during the working day. One sees
immediately that there is no necessary relationship between these two
quantities. In Marx's favourite arithmetical illustration, suppose it takes
six hours’ labour a day to produce the workers’ means of subsistence,
and yet the employer gets twelve hours’ labour a day out of them. Six
hours of these twelve must go to create the counter-value of their wages.
But this still leaves six hours’ ‘surplus labour’ for the benefit of the
capitalist, if he succeeds in realising it in the form of surplus-value.
Unfortunately Marx often confuses the matter by using the expression
unpaid labour’, contrary to his own argument. In chapter eighteen he
asserts that this ‘popular expression’ for surplus labour could not mislead
anyone into thinking that the capitalist pays for labour. But it has.
The temptation to use the expression ‘unpaid labour’ has obvious
political roots. It can even be justified theoretically in so far as ‘surplus
labour’ is too general an expression. All exploitative modes of production
rest on the ‘pumping out’ (Volume Three) of surplus labour. Marx
explains the implications of this in Volume One: ‘What distinguishes the
various economic formations of society – the distinction for example
between slavery and wage-labour – is the form in which this surplus
labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the
worker.’ The slave and the serf are obliged by force or customary
obligations to work ‘for nothing’. Yet capital claims to ‘pay for’ labour.
Therefore Marx's interest (theoretical and practical) lies in the specific
form in which surplus labour is appropriated in this case.
Marx did not discover that capitalism is exploitative. It does not
require great intellect to see that the capitalists live off other people's
labour. The theoretical problem resolved in the way just discussed is
how it happens. Even those who had isolated labour as the sole source
of value thought exploitation must be based on a failure to return to the
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Students’ Capital 20

labourers the full value of their labour. Marx grasped that surplus-value
resulted, not from such a deduction, but from something, namely
surplus labour, being added to the original values brought into play in
the production process. This was how the value originally in the hands
of the worker could be paid for in full, and yet surplus-value be
appropriated by its purchaser.

DOMESTIC LABOUR AND HUMAN REPRODUCTION

Marx is a little too glib when he suggests that labour-power is a

commodity like any other. Apart from the fact that normally it can only
be hired and not bought outright, its conditions of production are not
those of capitalist competition. As a consequence, it is impossible to
establish the socially necessary labour-time for its production. Marx
replies that, nonetheless, its value can be equated to the value of the
means of subsistence required to sustain the worker and his or her
family. Fair enough. But what is subsistence? Marx concedes that this
notion has a ‘historical and moral’ component which does make a real
difference to the value of labour-power. In the context of Volume One,
perhaps, Marx does not need to develop this point because, however the
value of labour-power is determined, the potentiality for the creation of
surplus-value through exploitation remains. (It is worth noting that in
chapter seventeen Marx points out that, given increased productivity,
real wages can rise while the value of labour-power falls.)
Nevertheless, in view of much recent controversy on one aspect of the
matter, we must dwell on the question a little longer. Some feminists
have advanced the argument that Marx is at fault for neglecting the role
of domestic labour in the production of labour-power. Surely this labour
contributes to the value of labour-power?
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