Capital, Volume I

The only volume of Capital that Marx saw through the press; the second and third were edited by Engels from his drafts. It is a critique of political economy that tries to explain how capitalism works and why it produces both wealth and exploitation. It opens with the commodity, its use-value and exchange-value, and the claim that value is set by socially necessary labour time, then discusses money and the 'fetishism of commodities', in which relations between people appear as relations between things. Marx then explains surplus value: workers sell their labour-power, and capital profits from the gap between what their labour produces and what their wages cost. Long chapters follow on the working day, cooperation, the division of labour and machinery, drawing on British factory reports. The book ends with the general law of capitalist accumulation, the reserve army of labour, and 'so-called primitive accumulation' through enclosure and colonial plunder. Most economists since the marginalist revolution reject its labour theory of value.

Whatever one's politics, it is the most sustained critique of capitalism ever written, and its analyses of work, technology and accumulation are still argued over by economists, historians and philosophers.