Capital

The full title is Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Capital is a great achievement related to the theory of political economy that Marx spent 40 years of his life writing, a masterpiece of epoch-making significance. In September 1867, Capital, Vol. 1 was published by the Hamburg publisher Meisner, and Volumes 2 and 3 were organized and published by Engels after Marx passed away. In March 1930, the Shanghai Kunlun Bookstore published the first instalment of the first volume of Marx’s chief classic Capital, translated by Chen Qi Xiu according to the German version with reference to the Japanese version. After the subsequent twists and turns, it was only after the founding of New China that the publication of the three major volumes was completed by the Sanlian Bookstore.

The birth of Capital has a deep historical background. The development of capitalist economy in Europe in the middle of the 19th century furnished Marx with the objective conditions to create Capital. At that time, the fundamental contradictions inherent in capitalist society were increasingly exposed, and the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie became increasingly acute and complex. Especially the defeats of the three major European workers’ movements showed that the proletarian movement was in need of a scientific theory as a guide, which made Marx and Engels unshirkably shoulder the historical mission of founding the political economy of the working class. From 1843 onwards, Marx systematically began to collect materials on political economy. Due to the expulsion of the French government in 1849, Marx came from Paris, France to London, England. In the British Museum in London, he extensively read a large number of relevant literature and materials, and made a large number of excerpts and notes, of which merely the theoretical works that he read thoroughly through amounted to more than 1,500 books. On the basis of extensive and in-depth study of existing research materials, he set out to write Capital. In this work, Marx used the world outlook and methodology of dialectical and historical materialism to reveal the laws of economic movement law of capitalist society and to prove the historical laws governing the emergence, development and fall of the capitalist mode of production. More importantly, starting from the analysis of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, Marx proved the historical necessity of the inevitable downfall of capitalism and the inevitable victory of communism, thus laid a solid theoretical foundation for scientific socialism, subverted bourgeois economics, founded Marxist political economy and achieved a great revolution in the field of political economy. From the point of view of research content, although Capital chiefly studies political economy, it also contains a large number of related expositions of Marxist philosophy and scientific socialism, and even involves theoretical views on politics, history, education, literature and art, law, morality, religion, science and technology, worthy of being called an encyclopedic work of Marxist theory. In the Preface to the First Edition and Afterword to the Second Edition of Capital Vol. 1, Marx elaborated the object and method of inquiry of Capital. The object of inquiry of Capital is capitalist relations of production. These relations of production is a broad concept, which includes not only the relations of production, exchange, distribution and consumption, but also the relations of production between men in the process of production. As for the method of inquiry, the method that runs through the whole book of Capital is materialist dialectics. When Marx established the theoretical system of the whole book, he made use of the logical method of rising from the abstract to the concrete. Capital is divided into four volumes. Volume 1 is The Process of Production of Capital, and its main content is the process of production of capital. In this volume, starting with the analysis of the cells of capitalist economy—commodities, Marx first revealed the twofold character of commodities and the fundamental principle of money, elaborated the direct production process of surplus-value and the process of accumulation of capital, examined the primitive accumulation of capital, and revealed the historical tendency of the inevitable fall of the relations of capital. Volume 2 The Process of Circulation of Capital chiefly studies the process of capital circulation and the realization of surplus-value. Marx pointed out that in the process of movement of capital, the process of production of capital and the process of circulation of capital are unified, and the process of production of capital is necessarily supplemented by the process of circulation of capital. Generally speaking, Volume 2 serves as a bridge between the previous and the next, both as a continuation of the theoretical logic of Volume 1 and as an introduction to the contents of Volume 3. Volume 3 The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole is the concluding volume of the theoretical part of Capital, which mainly reveals and clarifies the various concrete forms in the process of capitalist production as a whole. Here, capital is transformed from the general form presented in the analysis of the previous two volumes into industrial capital, commercial capital and interest-bearing capital, value into price of production, surplus-value into profit and average profit, and further into industrial profit, commercial profit, interest and ground-rent.

Capital is an encyclopedic work of Marxism, the culmination of Marx’s study of the capitalist economic formation of society. In the work, guided by the fundamental thought of the materialist conception of history, Marx reproduced the entire process of development of capitalism by profoundly analyzing the capitalist mode of production and, on this basis, revealed the laws of the development of capitalist society, so that the materialist conception of history has been scientifically verified and further enriched and developed. Engels once commented: “As long as there have been capitalists and workers on earth, no book has appeared which is of as much importance for the workers as the one before us. The relation between capital and labor, the axis on which our entire present system of society turns, is here treated scientifically for the first time, and at that with a thoroughness and acuity such as was possible only for a German. Valuable as the writings of an Owen, Saint-Simon or Fourier are and will remain—it was reserved for a German first to reach the height from which the whole field of modern social relations can be seen clearly and in full view just as the lower mountain scenery is seen by an observer standing on the top-most peak.”