Das Kapital · Kritik der politischen Oekonomie

The Value Ledger

A Reader's Compendium to Volume I — The Process of Capitalist Production

Karl Marx published only one volume of Capital in his lifetime. This compendium keeps to that volume: how it came to be written, the mechanism it argues for from the commodity to accumulation, its own table of contents, its working vocabulary, and a small set of its most-cited passages.

Erster Band · Hamburg: Otto Meissner, 1867 · compendium prepared 2026

Scope & editions Covers Volume I only — the volume Marx saw through the press himself. Volumes II and III were assembled by Engels from Marx's manuscripts after his death and are outside this compendium's scope. Quotations follow the traditional Moore & Aveling English translation; citations point to Part and Chapter rather than page numbers, since pagination differs across editions.
FOLIO I

Provenance

Marx had been gathering material since the mid-1850s, filling notebooks in the British Museum's Reading Room with figures drawn from the Reports of the Inspectors of Factories — the Parliamentary Blue Books whose statistics supply much of Volume I's evidence on the working day, child labour, and factory discipline. Those years of preparatory drafting, including the long 1857–58 notebooks now known as the Grundrisse, were compressed into the book he finally sent to press.

Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Erster Band appeared in Hamburg in 1867 under Otto Meissner's imprint. Marx was living at 41 Maitland Park Road in north London at the time, his household kept afloat by Friedrich Engels, whose own earlier account of Manchester's mills, The Condition of the Working Class in England, fed directly into Volume I's descriptions of industry.

Marx intended two further volumes on the circulation and the totality of capitalist production. He did not live to finish either manuscript. Engels edited Marx's drafts into Capital, Volume II (1885) and Volume III (1894), both published after Marx's death in 1883 — which is why this compendium, keeping to material Marx himself prepared for print, stops at Volume I.

FOLIO II

The Mechanism

Volume I's argument is a single chain, run from the commodity to the reproduction of the whole system. Click any box to jump to its entry in the glossary (Folio IV).

historical precondition · Part VIII reproduces labour-power re-enters circulation as more capital COMMODITY use-value + value MONEY universal equivalent CAPITAL  M – C – M′ value that valorizes itself LABOUR-POWER bought as a commodity PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION dispossession from the land, Part VIII NECESSARY LABOUR paid · reproduces the wage SURPLUS LABOUR unpaid · the capitalist's gain — THE WORKING DAY — WAGES variable capital, v SURPLUS-VALUE s  =  unpaid labour, realized ABSOLUTE SURPLUS-VALUE lengthen the working day Part III RELATIVE SURPLUS-VALUE raise productivity · Part IV co-op → manufacture → machinery ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL surplus-value reconverted into capital CONCENTRATION & CENTRALIZATION fewer, larger capitals INDUSTRIAL RESERVE ARMY relative surplus population Part VII, Ch. 25
The chain Volume I traces, Part by Part: a commodity's value becomes money (Part I); money advanced to make more money is capital (Part II); capital buys labour-power, whose working day splits into paid and unpaid time — the width of the red segment above is illustrative, not fixed, since widening it is exactly what Parts III–V describe two ways of doing; the resulting surplus-value is reconverted into more capital (Part VII), which both re-enters circulation and produces, as its own by-products, concentrated capitals and an industrial reserve army whose existence keeps wages down. Primitive accumulation (Part VIII, dashed) is not a step in this cycle but its historical precondition: the prior separation of producers from the means of production that made labour-power a commodity in the first place.
FOLIO III

Contents

Volume I's own table of contents, eight Parts and thirty-three chapters, in the standard English (Moore & Aveling) chapter numbering.

I

Commodities and Money

  • 1. Commodities
  • 2. The Process of Exchange
  • 3. Money, or the Circulation of Commodities
II

The Transformation of Money into Capital

  • 4. The General Formula for Capital
  • 5. Contradictions in the General Formula
  • 6. The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power
III

The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value

  • 7. Labour-Process & Valorization Process
  • 8. Constant Capital and Variable Capital
  • 9. The Rate of Surplus-Value
  • 10. The Working Day
  • 11. Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value
IV

Production of Relative Surplus-Value

  • 12. The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value
  • 13. Co-operation
  • 14. Division of Labour and Manufacture
  • 15. Machinery and Modern Industry
V

Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value Combined

  • 16. Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value
  • 17. Changes of Magnitude in Price of Labour-Power and Surplus-Value
  • 18. Various Formulae for the Rate of Surplus-Value
VI

Wages

  • 19. Value (Price) of Labour-Power Transformed into Wages
  • 20. Time-Wages
  • 21. Piece-Wages
  • 22. National Differences of Wages
VII

The Process of Accumulation of Capital

  • 23. Simple Reproduction
  • 24. Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital
  • 25. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
VIII

The So-Called Primitive Accumulation

  • 26. The Secret of Primitive Accumulation
  • 27–30. Expropriation & the Agricultural Revolution
  • 31. Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
  • 32. Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
  • 33. The Modern Theory of Colonisation
FOLIO IV

Terms

Twenty-three working terms, defined as Volume I uses them. Search to filter; click a term to open it.

FOLIO V

Entries

Six passages, cited by Part and Chapter rather than page, in the Moore & Aveling translation.

Ch. 1
§1
“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity.”

The opening sentence of the book — the reason Chapter 1 begins with the commodity rather than with money or capital.

Ch. 1
§4
“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour.”

The statement of commodity fetishism: social relations between producers show up as relations between things.

Ch. 10
“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

From the chapter on the working day — Marx's most quoted line on the relation between capital and living labour.

Ch. 10
“Between equal rights, force decides.”

On the standoff between the capitalist's right to lengthen the day and the worker's right to limit it — Marx's answer to why factory legislation was fought over, not reasoned out.

Ch. 13
“It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist.”

From the chapter on co-operation, on the authority of capital over the labour process, derived from ownership rather than the reverse.

Ch. 24
“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”

On the conversion of surplus-value into capital — accumulation for its own sake, as the classical economists' first commandment.