Introduction: the making of Marx’s Capital¶
Core Argument¶
In the Introduction: the making of Marx’s Capital, the chapter traces the intellectual and political genesis of Marx’s magnum opus, situating it as a theoretical weapon forged for the working class in an epoch of capitalist decline. From his exile in London in 1849, Marx subjected classical political economy—Smith, Ricardo, Mill—to a rigorous critique, culminating in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) after a decade of meticulous labour. While acknowledging the achievements of bourgeois economics, Marx exposed its fundamental limitation: its bourgeois outlook treated capitalism as the final, natural form of social production. Ricardo’s labour theory of value had been abandoned by his successors precisely because it risked revealing the origin of surplus-value. Marx, by contrast, fused theory with revolutionary practice, distinguishing himself from academic “Marxists” who rejected the dialectical method. He insisted that a grasp of Hegel’s dialectic was indispensable to understanding Capital.
Marx’s historical materialism held that when productive forces come into conflict with existing property relations, the ground is prepared for social revolution. In Capital, he demonstrated that exploitation arises not because workers sell their labour, but their labour-power; surplus-value is extracted from unpaid labour time. Capital is dead labour; only living labour creates value. Capitalism’s relentless drive to reinvest surplus-value generates periodic crises of overproduction—not of goods people need, but of commodities that cannot be sold profitably. In the current epoch of capitalist decline, recoveries grow weaker and slumps more prolonged, preparing the conditions for revolutionary upheaval.
The chapter details the arduous production of Capital. Volume one appeared in German in 1867, eight years after the Critique, each draft page sent to Engels for comment. Marx credited Engels with making the work possible, while the preface blamed delays on prolonged illness. The first English edition did not appear until 1887, after Marx’s death, supervised by Engels. The 1857–58 notebooks, published nearly a century later as the Grundrisse, were never intended for publication; Marx described them as notes for “self-clarification” and a “fragmentary sketch.” In these studies, using Hegel’s dialectical method, he discovered the source of surplus-value, overthrowing previous conceptions of profit. Between 1861 and 1865, he revised and redrafted his notes, and by 1867 had completed drafts for all three volumes of Capital and the Theories of Surplus-value, despite his work for the First International. Illness, further study, and death prevented final completion. After Marx’s death, Engels prepared the second and third volumes from the manuscripts.
Volume one passed the Tsarist censors as too difficult to be revolutionary, yet was read aloud in Russian workers’ circles and became known as the ‘Bible’ of the working class. The text concludes with Marx’s argument that capitalist production begets its own negation: “The expropriators will be expropriated.”