Marx's Critique of Capital: Commodity, Value, and Surplus

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital), Marx's major theoretical work, published its first volume in 1867 in Hamburg; volumes 2 (1885) and 3 (1894) were compiled and edited by Engels from Marx's unfinished manuscripts after Marx's death in 1883, and a fourth part, often published separately as Theories of Surplus Value, was edited later by Karl Kautsky (1905–1910). The analysis opens, famously, not with capitalists or workers but with the commodity (Ware), which Marx calls "the economic cell-form" of bourgeois society: every commodity possesses a use-value, its concrete usefulness in satisfying some human want, and an exchange-value, the proportion in which it exchanges for other commodities on the market. Marx follows Ricardo in holding that exchange-value is ultimately regulated by the quantity of socially necessary labor time required, under average conditions of productivity and intensity prevailing in a given society, to produce a commodity — the labor theory of value — but he adds an analysis absent from Ricardo of the specific historical form value itself takes under generalized commodity production.