Philosophy › The 19th century › Karl Marx
Das Kapital
1867· Book or text· Politics, society & justice
Well documentedSolid records, texts or physical evidence.
Marx's unfinished critique of capitalism, its first volume published in 1867, arguing that profit comes from unpaid labor.
See it on the Philosophy map →The idea
The idea: workers sell their capacity to work and are paid roughly what it costs to keep them alive, but they produce more than that. If a worker produces a day's wage in six hours but works twelve, the other six hours' value, 'surplus value,' goes to the owner as profit. Competition forces owners to accumulate, replace workers with machines and concentrate wealth, causing recurring crises. Main objection: modern economics replaced the labor theory of value with supply, demand and marginal utility.
Why it matters
It is the most influential critique of capitalism ever written, shaping labor politics, Communist states and debates about exploitation and inequality to this day.
Think of it like
Like a spread: the owner buys a day's labor at its wage and sells the day's output for more. Marx said that spread is unpaid work.
Where it comes from
Volume 1's 1867 first edition and Marx's later revisions; it draws heavily on British government reports on factory conditions and child labor.
Still debated
The 'transformation problem': whether labor values can be converted consistently into actual prices, raised in 1896 by Böhm-Bawerk and still argued.
Connections (2)
▸The Wealth of Nations was critiqued in Das KapitalWell documented
The connection
Marx accepted Smith's and Ricardo's view that labor creates value, then asked where profit comes from if workers are paid the value of their work. His answer, surplus value, turned classical economics against capitalism. Das Kapital's subtitle, 'A Critique of Political Economy,' names Smith's tradition as its target.
When and how
Marx studied Smith from 1844 in Paris, then for years in the British Museum Reading Room in London before Volume 1 appeared in 1867.
How we know
Capital cites Smith dozens of times, and Marx's manuscript Theories of Surplus Value (1862–63) devotes a long chapter to him.
Debates and open questions
Whether Smith held a labor theory of value in Marx's sense; many economists read Smith's version as a measure of value, not its source.
▸Karl Marx wrote Das KapitalWell documented
The connection
Marx spent some fifteen years researching in the British Museum Reading Room, supported largely by Engels, whose family owned a Manchester cotton mill. He drafted thousands of pages, published only Volume 1 himself, and left the rest unfinished at his death in 1883.
When and how
London, 1850s–1867; Volume 1 published in Hamburg by Otto Meissner in September 1867, in 1,000 copies.
How we know
His manuscripts, held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and published in the MEGA edition, document the work.
Debates and open questions
How much Engels reshaped Volumes 2 (1885) and 3 (1894) while editing them; the original manuscripts show substantial changes, and Marx's full plan was far larger.