Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3

At the final of this extensive and tough read, the rewards are worth the effort. This third volume of Das Kapital concludes Marx attempt to describe how a Capitalist economic and society works. The most difficult part of it is to follow the concepts and ideas that compose the subject and how the different concepts are related to one another.The most impressive part of all is the scope of the work and how it formulates the inherent flaws and machinations of the capitalist system. Overall, a tough read, but a rewarding experience.

The third volume of Das Kapital is a bit more well known than the second and it makes for some interesting, if somewhat dry, reading. This volume has gained notoriety through the works of Bohm-Bawerk who insisted that Marx's theory of value was inconsistent. In the third volume, Marx says that instead of commodities selling at their value per se, they rather sell according to a certain formula that he lays out. Instead f commodities selling at the "old" formula of p= v+s+c, now commodities sell at r(v+c)+v+c. Now, such a modification does not alter the dynamics of the capitalist system one whit. Rather, it allows Marx to show how values as such are translated into prices. Rudolf Hilferding wrote an excellent criticism of Bohm-Bawerk's critique which is, alas, rather hard to find now. *whew* Alright, the rest of the volume deals with Marx's theory of rent and his rather short contribution to a theory of credit and banking. once again, Rudolf Hilferding elaborates upon Marx's theory of credit, banking, and "fictitious capital" in his work Das Finanzkapital. Written in 1911, it predicted the First World War and was regarded as the fourth/ fifth volume of Capital (the fourth volume of Capital sometimes held as Marx's Theories of Surplus Value, a history of bourgeois economic theory). I hope this has been relatively coherent. All in all, it isn't Daniel Steele or the Da Vinci Code. Nor is it the Leftist equivalent of Mein Kampf. Rather, it's a somewhat dry, but extremely important, economics text, far better than anything Adam Smith ever produced. I recommend it to economics students, Marxian scholars, and anyone seeking an economic justification of socialism. I hope this was of some use to you.

...P>The key to grappling with Vol. 2 involves two major problems. <p>First, Marx took capital as irrational, and the capital-labor relation as an anatagonistic relation of domination. So part of the problem with Capital involves explaining how capitalism can even function in the first place. This helps us to grapple with Marx's discussion of circulation sans crisis.<p>Secondly, think of department one and department two as capital and labor respectively and it makes a lot more sense. As with Vols. 1 and 3, every aspect of Capital is steeped in a description of the antagonistic social relations (class struggle) and the forms in which they appear (form here means 'mode of existence', the way in which the antagonistic social relations make themselves apparent to us.)<p>The reason that Marx investigates the forms of the underlying social relations has to do with Marx's conception of science. Marx uses the term science to denote thought which critiques, which does not assume that essence and appearance (form and content) mirror each other, but are mediated and therefore distorted and not directly perceived.<p>As for the people who continue to insist that Marx wrote an alternate economics textbook, wake up. The book is not about economics per se, since Marx felt that the separation of the economic from the political, legal, artistic, etc. was a specific manifestation of the capital-labor relation. He critiques this separation and does so, not through a transhistorical set of 'laws' (as so many claim), but through a critique of bourgeois society's own understanding of itself (most prominently for Marx, via political economy.) For Marx, the 'laws' of capital are the forms of motion of the class struggle, not transhistorical, disembodied rules.<p>A complete argument can hardly be made here, but do yourself a favor if you wish to make a comment on or engage with Marx: read what Marx says. Like any other worthwhile intellectual, Marx takes a lot of effort (an acquaintance with Hegel helps a lot). Unlike most, Marx really was serious, even (especially) in relation to Das Kapital, that the point is not to understand the world, but to change it. Theory can never resolve the contradictions of the practical world, only revolutionary practice, the self-activity of the working class (most of us), can produce a society based on the 'free association of producers', in which 'the freedom of each is the precondition of the freedom of all'. Hardly the vision of a totalitarian.

it rips off the veneer and hypocrisy of capitalism shows how human being is reduced to machines

very important words over the economic vision over english production mode in the last century and your generic influence in future world. many economics appointments of the industrial world, statistics and a great concepcion of many categories of the political economy