Working people, we who work for a living, we who can't live off the labor of others, must go to work for the bosses if they we are to live. We don't own the factories or the stores or the fields or the offices, so we have to sell our time to the capitalists. They buy our time to work for them and then they own the product of our labor. They pay us as little as they can get away with, but all the value we create on the job becomes the property of the capitalist. That is where his profit comes from.
Capital is wealth or money.
But capital is not just any money. If you have crazy cash in a bag under your bed doing nothing, that's not capital. Capital is wealth on the move, it is money in power. Capital is the boss money being used to make more money for the boss. In order to understand capital, we have to ask a more basic question.