How to Read Marx's Capital

Commentary and Explanations on the Beginning Chapters

Michael Heinrich

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781583678961
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An accessible companion to Karl Marx's essential Capital

With the recent revival of Karl Marx's theory, a general interest in reading Capital has also increased. But Capital—Marx's foundational nineteenth-century work on political economy—is by no means considered an easily understood text. Central concepts, such as abstract labor, the value-form, or the fetishism of commodities, can seem opaque to us as first-time readers, and the prospect of comprehending Marx's thought can be truly daunting. Until, that is, we pick up Michael Heinrich's How to Read Marx's Capital.

Paragraph by paragraph, Heinrich provides extensive commentary and lucid explanations of questions and quandaries that arise when encountering Marx's original text. Suddenly, such seemingly gnarly chapters as "The Labor Process and the Valorization Process" and "Money or the Circulation of Capital" become refreshingly clear, as Heinrich explains just what we need to keep in mind when reading such a complex text. Deploying multiple appendices referring to other pertinent writings by Marx, Heinrich reveals what is relevant about Capital, and why we need to engage with it today. How to Read Marx's Capital provides an illuminating and indispensable guide to sorting through cultural detritus of a world whose political and economic systems are simultaneously imploding and exploding.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Commentary on the Beginning of Capital
• Part One: Commodities and Money
• Part Two: The Transformation of Money into Capital
• Part Three: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value
• Appendix 1: Marx’s Critical Economic Writings
• Appendix 2: The Universality of Labor as a Social Characteristic of “Labor that Posits Exchange Value” (from the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859], MECW 29: 273–275)
• Appendix 3: A Paradoxical Form of Value (from Das Kapital, First Edition, [1867], MEGA II/5: 42–43, English: Dragstedt [1976, 32–34])
• Appendix 4: Value-Objectivity as Objectivity Held in Common (from Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals [1871–72], MEGA II/6: 29–32)
• Appendix 5: The “Transition to Capital” (from “Original Text of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (Urtext) [1858], MECW 29: 478–499)
• Appendix 6: Levels of Abstraction and the Course of Argument in the First Seven Chapters of Capital
• Glossary
• Bibliography