Galtland Index

Capital

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Capital

Capital (Das Kapital, Volume I, 1867) is Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. Its first chapter is the most systematic statement of the classical labor theory of value: stripped of use-value, what commodities share is that they are products of abstract human labour, and the magnitude of a commodity’s value is the socially necessary labour-time required to produce it. This is the objective, in-the-object theory of value that the Mengerian subjective revolution set out to replace.

Chapter 1: The Argument

Marx begins with the commodity as the “cell-form” of capitalist wealth and distinguishes its two aspects: use-value (its usefulness, a qualitative matter that varies by article) and value (what governs the proportions in which commodities exchange). Use-values are incommensurable, so the common element that exchange-value expresses cannot be any physical property; it must be that all commodities are products of labour. Abstracting from the concrete, useful character of each particular labour leaves “human labour in the abstract” — and a commodity “has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it.”

The magnitude of value is social, not individual: a lazy or unskilled producer does not create more value by working slowly. What counts is “the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its production” under average conditions of skill and intensity. Marx then traces the form of value (how value comes to be expressed in another commodity, and finally in money) and closes the chapter with the fetishism of commodities — the way a social relation between producers appears as an objective property of things.

On this base the later argument is built: labour-power becomes a commodity, and the surplus value extracted in production is the source of profit. The theory of exploitation is downstream of the theory of value.

Why It Matters in This Wiki

Capital supplies the primary text for the labor-theory side of The Subjective Theory of Value vs. the Labor Theory of Value. Where Marx makes value an objective magnitude deposited by labour, Menger’s Principles makes it a subjective judgment of importance; Böhm-Bawerk’s Karl Marx and the Close of His System argues the system contradicts itself by Volume III.

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