Introduction

The first volume of Capital is the only one Marx published himself; it cost him more than twenty years and the reading of thousands of books and government reports in the British Museum. It begins with the analysis of the simplest and most universal thing, the commodity: a commodity has use-value and value, and the substance of value is abstract human labour. From this Marx asks: in a market of equal exchange, where does profit come from? The answer lies in a special commodity, labour-power: in a working day the worker creates more value than the wages the capitalist pays him, and the difference is 'surplus value'. Quoting at length the reports of English factory inspectors, the book describes the lengthening of the working day, the misery of child labour, the domination of workers by machines, and the 'primitive accumulation' of capital, which came into the world 'dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt'. It is a book that changed the world. The work is translated in several volumes.