Das Kapital by Karl Marx: Summary of the Three Volumes and Surplus Value

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, studies of Marx often describe him as a revolutionary activist, engaged in the labor movements of his time more than as a professional philosopher. Capital, his major work, went on to inspire the founding of communist states in several countries during the 20th century.

Readers looking for a biography of Marx or a summary of his broader thought will find that in the Recap on Karl Marx: his thought and critique of capitalism; the focus here is the book itself, Das Kapital: how it is structured, what it says about surplus value, and how it reached its final, three-volume form in 1894, in pieces published years apart.

Three volumes, published across three different decades

Marx publishes Volume I of Capital in 1867, through the publisher Otto Meissner. It is the only volume of the work Marx sees printed in his own lifetime, titled The Process of Production of Capital, and it remains the most widely read of the three. The first English edition does not appear until 1887, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling under the supervision of Friedrich Engels.

Marx works on the material for Volume II between 1863 and 1878, and on Volume III up to 1883, without reaching a publishable version for either; he dies in 1883 leaving both manuscripts unfinished. Engels takes them on: he publishes Volume II in 1885 and Volume III in 1894, closing out an editorial task that runs eleven years past his friend’s death. In the preface to Volume II, Engels writes that he limited himself to reproducing Marx’s manuscripts as literally as possible, touching the style only where he judged Marx himself would have changed it; the passages written or reworked in his own hand, he adds, fill barely ten printed pages and concern matters of form alone. Only the first and third parts of the manuscript, he says, gave him real and considerable editorial trouble.

The relationship that makes this posthumous editing possible grows out of decades of shared work, told in the Recap on Marx and Engels: The Partnership That Lasted Almost Forty Years; the same partnership had already produced, in the 1840s, The German Ideology, the pair’s first attempt at explaining history through the material activity of human beings.

The theory of surplus value: absolute and relative

Surplus value is the thread running through all three volumes. For Marx it is, by definition, the source of all profit under capitalism: the capitalist pays the worker a wage, but the labor the worker performs produces more value than that wage, and the gap stays with the capitalist. Marx had first worked through the link between wages and capital in lectures he gave in Brussels in December 1847, published in 1849 and known as Wage Labour and Capital. The concrete setting Marx draws his examples from — factories, grinding working days, mechanized labor — is the one described in the Recap on the Industrial Revolution.

In chapter 16 of Volume I, Marx separates two forms of surplus value. Absolute surplus value appears when the working day runs longer than the time needed for the worker to produce a value equal to their own wage: that extra stretch goes to capital. Relative surplus value, instead, comes from overhauling the technical processes of labor and raising productivity, without extending the hours.

Example: picture a factory worker on an eight-hour shift. If the employer tacks on two more hours without raising her pay, those two hours are absolute surplus value. If the shift stays the same length but a new machine lets her turn out more in that time, the extra value comes from relative surplus value instead: nothing about her schedule changed, only what one hour of her labor can now produce.

The stated aim: uncovering the economic law of capitalism

In the preface to the first German edition of 1867, Marx sets out what the book is for: to bring to light the economic law that, in his view, governs the movement of modern capitalist society. It is the ambition he announces up front, before building the argument across the three volumes, starting from the factory floor and the wage packet and moving, by Volume III, to the broader mechanics of accumulation.

The school of neoclassical economics offers an alternative framework for explaining prices and profits, one that does without surplus value altogether.