Tag Archives: Volume 1 of Capital

Eduard Bernstein in Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (1909) describes Friedrich Engels’ attempt to defend the idea that the law of value in volume 1 of Capital was both empirical and historical: “According to the Marxist theory surplus value is, as we have seen, the pivot of the economy of a capitalist society. But in order to understand surplus value one must first know what value is. The Marxist representation of history and of the course of development of capitalist...

From Alexander Gray’s book The Development of Economic Doctrine: An Introductory Survey (1956): “… the Marxian explanation suffers from two inner inherent contradictions (or two aspects of the same contradiction) from which it never escaped, and on which it finally made shipwreck in the third volume. In the first place, if all profit springs from variable capital and none from machinery, then it is the height of folly ever to introduce machinery, and it is a poor explanation to suggest that...

Labour value in volume 1 of Capital is defined in the following passages: “A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article.” (Marx 1906: 45).“Since the magnitude of the value of a commodity represents only the quantity of labour embodied in it, it follows...

I cannot stress enough how important this issue is for clarifying and refuting Marx’s economic theory. Though I have said much of what is below before, it bears repeating with some new observations.In essence, Marx published volume 1 of Capital in German in 1867, but only volume 1 of Capital was published in Marx’s lifetime. The other volumes were edited and published by Engels (for an extended discussion of this, see here). For some reason, Marx refused to publish volumes 2 and 3.In volume...