AUTHOR: KARL MARX
DATE: 1867–83
Das Kapital (Capital) is the magnum opus of Karl Marx, his ‘Critique of Political Economy’ that, although much of it was published after his death, fuelled (along with his much shorter 1848 work, co-written with Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto) the socialist revolutions that defined a large part of twentieth-century history. The work’s central theme is that capitalism only thrives through the exploitation of labour, and Marx aims to trace its historical circumstance and explore the mechanisms by which it functions.
Marx was born in Prussia in 1818 and read law and philosophy at a number of German universities, before moving to Paris with his wife in the 1840s and then, after expulsion from France, on to London. Espousing radical, socialist views, he was also profoundly influenced by Hegel, believing existence not to be a fixed reality but rather a process of historical change. In terms of humanity, Marx identified four major stages of human history that he described in socio-economic terms. First, an ancient system of common ownership, superseded by one of private property and slavery, which in turn fell to a system of feudalism, itself replaced by capitalism. Every stage, he suggested, had a common denominator in that one social group dominated until another dislodged it in a violent transition. He predicted that capitalism would itself be overcome by communism in just such a way. As he put it in the Manifesto: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’
If the Communist Manifesto set out Marx’s vision of the future and was a call to arms, Das Kapital was his attempt to give it intellectual weight and gravitas through an in-depth – and sometimes unwieldy – combination of historical, economic and sociological analysis. He goes into such technical areas as the nature of commodities, capital accumulation, the business cycle, wage labour (i.e. the relationship between workers and employers) and the theory of surplus value (i.e. the value created by a worker above the level of the wages they receive).
According to Marx, it all went to prove that capitalism inevitably exploits the labour force, which in turn renders the whole system unstable. Workers (the proletariat) remain poor because they can never access the profits of their own work. Moreover, because the nature of that work tends to be repetitive, they become little more than automatons with diminishing quality of life. Yet, by facilitating the cycle of surplus value, the workers perpetuate the very system that enchains them.
The means of production, meanwhile, are concentrated in the hands of the property-owning class (the bourgeoisie), a number in diminishing proportion to the ever-swelling ranks of the proletariat. They are permitted, indeed enabled, to reap the profits of others’ labour by an establishment that, according to Marx, is rooted in a history of conquest and plunder. As the bourgeoisie enjoy the benefits of improved technology, increasing their profits while requiring fewer workers, the number of unemployed, disenchanted members of the proletariat increases until the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the collapse of capitalism becomes an inevitability. Another stage in the cycle of socio-economic change that defines human existence.
WHERE ENGELS DARED TO TREAD
Friedrich Engels, born in Prussia in 1821, is often regarded as something like the junior partner in his relationship with Marx. We speak, after all, of Marxism, not Engelsism. A journalist and son of a wealthy mill-owner, he was nonetheless a significant figure in his own right, and one who facilitated much of Marx’s work on Das Kapital. Marx rarely had money to spare and lived a life of near destitution back in London after the failed revolutions of 1848. Were it not for the handouts of Engels, his fate would have been highly uncertain and it seems unlikely that Das Kapital would ever have seen the light of day.
Marx had high hopes of witnessing first-hand some of the social change he predicted. When Europe was in the grip of several revolutions in 1848 – in France, Prussia, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the moment seemed to have arrived but those revolutions were soon snuffed out one by one. Marx, who had gone to the continent to see events for himself, was profoundly disappointed by what historian G. M. Trevelyan has called a ‘turning point in modern history that modern history failed to turn’.
Marx returned to London, doubling down in Das Kapital on the ideas he introduced in the Communist Manifesto. The first of three bulky volumes appeared in 1867, but the second and third volumes would not appear until after his death in 1883. His old friend Engels edited them into publishable shape from the notes Marx left behind. Still, it would be many decades before Marx’s famous summons, ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’, came to pass. In 1917 Russia established the world’s first communist state, following the Bolshevik-led overthrow of the bourgeoisie just as Marx predicted. Many more nations followed over the course of the century, across the continents and including the world’s most populous country, China. None, however, ushered in the nirvana that Marx had dreamed of, instead serving up a mélange of popular dissatisfaction, poverty, leader cults and tyranny.
Today, ‘Marxist’ is often used as a slur by those on the political right against anybody deemed in opposition to their beliefs: a catch-all term to signify a failed political philosophy. Yet, for all that Marxism in the twentieth century failed to deliver on its promise of social and economic justice for the masses, its figurehead produced a body of work that altered the world in fundamental ways. Moreover, if Marxism is not the answer, it remains highly unclear – in a world of increasing inequality and subject to devastating cycles of boom and bust – that unfettered capitalism is either. Marx might not have found the solution, but he may have identified a problem.