Das Kapital: A Critque of Political Economy: Karl Marx, Samuel Moore: 9781453886328: Amazon.com: Books By James W. Ritter on July 18, 2013 Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase This version, the CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, seems to be an amateur printing with a blurry, digital cover photo. I returned mine, and recommend you consider another version if you value a real book and don't want what seems to be the result of someone clicking print on a PDF and having it bound at Staples. Update #1: Having returned this version to Amazon, I bought the Penguin Classics edition and am happy with it. Update #2: I wish Amazon would separate reviews by edition, and not heap them chaotically. My low rating has nothing to do with Marx's work, and everything to do with the edition I referenced. This has kept me from writing more reviews. What if I love a book but hate an edition, because it is poorly abridged (like this one)? Update #3: It seems Amazon has begun to group reviews by edition, though not always reliably.

Above you'll see "This review is from: [edition]" on the reviews for this book, but try and navigate through the hodgepodge of seven thousand reviews for the seemingly unlimited number of printings of The Hobbit. By Martin Asiner on January 4, 2014 Format: Kindle Edition When historians look at the impact that Das Kapital has had on world events, they tend to place it in a literary continuum that began with his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), followed by Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology (1846), The Communist Manifesto (1848), Grundrisse (1857), "Theses on Feuerbach" (1886), and Das Kapital (Volume I, 1867, Volumes II/III, 1893-1894). What they share is the belief that history is a forward moving phenomenon with one stage leading predictably to the next. Further, Marx saw only a very limited number of stages. The first stage was the primitive hunter-gatherer one of the Paleolithic.

The second was the centering of clans into tribes and tribes into small cities and small cities into larger ones and ultimately into empires. The third was the feudal system following the dissolution of the Roman Empire. The fourth was the mercantile/capitalist system that began with the gradual breakup of feudalism beginning in the sixteenth century. According to Marx, when he wrote Das Kapital, humanity was in the Last Days of capitalism. Looming inevitably in the near future was the coming revolution of the proletariat that would usher in a workers' paradise of a classless society. Where Marx differs from his predecessors (most notably Hegel) was how and why the current capitalist system would soon enough vanish. Hegel used the dialectic of ideas to nail down his thesis that the future of mankind lay in the gradual maturation of a Spirit that would infuse man with the driving force for change. Marx agreed with Hegel concerning the need for a driving impetus but disagreed about this impetus. Marx envisioned a world of a constantly evolving materialism that forced human beings to remain in eternal conflict.

As a result, in The Communist Manifesto and in Das Kapital, he boldly announced that he found Hegel standing on his head and determined to swap his head with his feet. This "swapping" forms the basis of the three volumes of Das Kapital. While The Communist Manifesto was a passionate call to arms, Das Kapital was a reasoned carefully researched treatise based on what he saw as the inevitably ongoing class conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Marx assumed that one class exists only to be in conflict with another class. It did not occur to him that class conflict could occur within each class. Further, history has proven that differing classes more often than not co-operate rather than conflict to achieve stated goals. Marx uses "value" in two senses: use-value (the immediate usefulness of a product) and exchange-value (the value that accrues due to the labor invested in the making of a product). Although money is the means of exchange to equate varying commodities, it does not follow (according to Marx) that it is solely money that invests commodities as commensurable. It is the labor that went into their production that makes money possible as a measure of value.

For capital to exist, money had to pre-exist since it is money that permits capital to be sold creating surplus value which in turn is used to create more capital. When a producer creates something for personal use and not for sale, that something is not capital nor is it a commodity. It is a product. But as soon as this product goes on sale, the expectation is that the selling price will exceed the cost of production with the surplus being the profit that goes to the capitalist who owns the means of production. The worker gets paid a wage but does not share in the profit, and it is the worker's being denied this share that fills him with alienation. Capital, then in the form of commodities can exist only as the end-point of value addition. The capitalist owns the raw material as it goes through the assembling process. He owns the means of production that his workers use to add value to the product. The capitalist has no intention to view the product in terms of its use-value. His only concern is to sell the commodity for a profit, and the only way to do this is to exploit the worker who has no choice but to work for low wages just as the capitalist has no choice but to offer only low wages.

Thus, capitalism must result in a division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. At some point, the discontent of the proletariat will increase so that they will overthrow the existing capitalist structure and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat which in turn will be the precursor of a classless society with equal justice and equal fairness for all. Thus, this centuries-long metamorphosis from feudalism to capitalism to socialism was foreseen and historically mandated by the inexorable laws of Nature. Why do we even bother to read Marx now? Clearly, every nation that calls itself Marxist has either failed as did the USSR in 1991 or suffers from severe economic malaise as do North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and much of Western Europe. The key here is the phrase "that calls itself Marxist." On the one hand, it is arguable that none of the failed or failing states that call themselves Marxist are truly based on Marx's original principles. And on the other one can with equal justification point out most of Marx's predictions about the economic future of capitalism have been hugely wrong. Capitalism has not gone out of business nor is it likely to do so while socialism has failed at nearly every step of the way.

Whether historians judge Karl Marx as the most significant thinker of the last two centuries or the most inept prognosticator of those centuries is a controversy that will likely never end. Das Kapital | work by Marx | Britannica.com work by Marx nonfictional prose Das Kapital, ( German: Capital [3 vol., 1867, 1885, 1894]) one of the major works of the 19th-century economist and philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83), in which he expounded his theory of the capitalist system, its dynamism, and its tendencies toward self-destruction. He described his purpose as to lay bare “the economic law of motion of modern society.” The second and third volumes were published posthumously, edited by his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95). Much of Das Kapital spells out Marx’s concept of the “ surplus value ” of labour and its consequences for capitalism . According to Marx, it was not the pressure of population that drove wages to the subsistence level but rather the existence of a large army of unemployed, which he blamed on the capitalists.

He maintained that within the capitalist system, labour was a mere commodity that could gain only subsistence wages. Capitalists, however, could force workers to spend more time on the job than was necessary to earn their subsistence and then appropriate the excess product, or surplus value, created by the workers. Because all profit results from an “exploitation of labour,” the rate of profit—the amount per unit of total capital outlay—depends largely on the number of workers employed. Because machines cannot be “exploited,” they cannot contribute to total profits, though they help labour produce more useful products. Only payroll capital—“variable capital”—is productive of surplus value and consequently of profit. The introduction of machines is profitable for the individual entrepreneur , to whom they give an advantage over his competitors. However, as outlay for machinery grows in relation to outlay for wages, profit declines in relation to total capital outlay. Thus, for each additional capital outlay, the capitalist will receive less and less return and can attempt to postpone his bankruptcy only by applying pressure on the workers.

Ultimately, according to Das Kapital, the “capitalist class becomes unfit to rule, because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery.” Consequently, the capitalist system collapses, and the working class inherits economic and political power. Similar Topics Marx's 'Das Kapital' Lives On in Capitalist Age : NPR Marx's 'Das Kapital' Lives On in Capitalist Age Marx's 'Das Kapital' Lives On in Capitalist Age Listen to this 'Talk of the Nation' topic Embed Embed Karl Marx struggled for two decades to complete his masterpiece, Das Kapital. Grove/Atlantic Inc. hide caption toggle caption The Influence of Karl Marx Francis Wheen, biographer of Karl Marx, argues that as long as capitalism endures, Marx's masterwork, Das Kapital, will be required reading. First published in 1867, Marx's influential critique of capitalism laid the groundwork for thinkers and revolutionaries to follow.

In his "biography" of Marx's treatise — the latest in the Grove/Atlantic Books That Changed the World series — Wheen writes that Marx describes "a world in which humans are enslaved by the monstrous power of inanimate capital and commodities." The biography sheds light on Marx's childhood, his experience of alienation, and his 20-year struggle to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Excerpt: 'Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography' November 28, 200712:59 PM ET Francis Wheen Chapter 1: Gestation Although Das Kapital is usually categorized as a work of economics, Karl Marx turned to the study of political economy only after many years of spadework in philosophy and literature. It is these intellectual foundations that underpin the project, and it is his personal experience of alienation that gives such intensity to the analysis of an economic system which estranges people from one another and from the world they inhabit - a world in which humans are enslaved by the monstrous power of inanimate capital and commodities.

Marx himself was an outsider from the moment of his birth, on 5 May 1818 - a Jewish boy in a predominantly Catholic city, Trier, within a Prussian state whose official religion was evangelical Protestantism. Although the Rhineland had been annexed by France during the Napoleonic wars, three years before his birth it was reincorporated into Imperial Prussia and the Jews of Trier thus became subject to an edict banning them from practising in the professions: Karl's father, Heinrich Marx, had to convert to Lutheranism in order to work as an attorney. No wonder the young Karl Marx began to brood upon alienation. 'We cannot always attain the position to which we believe we are called,' he wrote in a schoolboy essay, at the age of seventeen. 'Our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them.' His father encouraged Karl to read voraciously. The years of annexation had given Heinrich a taste for French flavours in politics, religion, life and art: one of his grandchildren described him as 'a real eighteenth-century "Frenchman" who knew his Voltaire and his Rousseau by heart'.

The boy's other intellectual mentor was Heinrich's friend Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a cultured and liberal government official who introduced Karl to poetry and music (and to his daughter Jenny von Westphalen, the future Mrs Karl Marx). On long walks together the Baron would recite passages from Homer and Shakespeare, which his young companion learned by heart - and later used as the essential seasonings in his own writings. In adult life Marx re-enacted those happy hikes with von Westphalen by declaiming scenes from Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe while leading his own family up to Hampstead Heath for Sunday picnics. As Professor S. S. Prawer has written, anyone in Karl Marx's household was obliged to live 'in a perpetual flurry of allusions to English literature'. There was a quotation for every occasion: to flatten a political enemy, enliven a dry text, heighten a joke, authenticate an emotion - or breathe life into an inanimate abstraction, as when capital itself speaks in the voice of Shylock (in Volume I of Das Kapital) to justify the exploitation of child labour in factories. Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered: My deeds upon my head!

I crave the law, The penalty and forfeit of my bond. To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx quotes a speech from Timon of Athens on money as the 'common whore of mankind', followed by another from Sophocles' Antigone ('Money! Money's the curse of man, none greater!/That's what wrecks cities, banishes men from home,/Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul,/Pointing out the way to infamy and shame...'). Economists with anachronistic models and categories are likened to Don Quixote, who 'paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight-errantry was equally compatible with all economic forms of society'. Marx's earliest ambitions were literary. As a law student at the University of Berlin he wrote a book of poetry, a verse drama and even a novel, Scorpion and Felix, which was dashed off in a fit of intoxicated whimsy while under the spell of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

After these experiments, he admitted defeat: 'Suddenly, as if by a magic touch - oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow - I caught sight of the distant realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing... A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.' Suffering some kind of breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to retreat to the countryside for a long rest - whereupon he at last succumbed to the siren voice of G. W. F. Hegel, the recently deceased professor of philosophy at Berlin, whose legacy was the subject of intense dispute among fellow students and lecturers. In his youth Hegel had been an idealistic supporter of the French Revolution, but by middle age he had become comfortable and complaisant, believing that a truly mature man should recognize 'the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it'. According to Hegel, 'All that is real is rational,' and since the Prussian state was undoubtedly real, in the sense that it existed, his conservative supporters argued that it must therefore be rational and above reproach.

Those who championed his more subversive early work - the Young Hegelians - preferred to quote the second half of that dictum: 'All that is rational is real.' An absolute monarchy, buttressed by censors and secret police, was palpably irrational and therefore unreal, a mirage that would disappear as soon as anyone dared touch it. At university, Marx 'adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read' - a habit he never lost. A reading list from this period shows the precocious scope of his intellectual explorations. While writing a paper on the philosophy of law he made a detailed study of Winckelmann's History of Art, started to teach himself English and Italian, translated Tacitus's Germania and Aristotle's Rhetoric, read Francis Bacon and 'spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight'. This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of research which gave Das Kapital its extraordas dinary breadth of reference.

The description of Democritus in Marx's doctoral thesis, on 'The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy', looks remarkably like a self-portrait: 'Cicero calls him a vir eruditus. He is competent in physics, ethics, mathematics, in the encyclopaedic disciplines, in every art.' For a while, Marx seemed uncertain how best to use all that erudition. After gaining his doctorate he thought of becoming a philosophy lecturer, but then decided that daily proximity to professors would be intolerable. 'Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!' Besides, since leaving university Marx had been turning his thoughts from idealism to materialism, from the abstract to the actual.

'Since every true philosophy is the intellectual quintessence of its time,' he wrote in 1842, 'the time must come when philosophy not only internally by its content, but also externally through its form, comes into contact and interaction with the real world of its day.' That spring he began writing for a new liberal newspaper in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung; within six months he had been appointed editor. Marx's journalism is characterized by a reckless belligerence which explains why he spent most of his adult life in exile and political isolation. His very first article for the Rheinische Zeitung was a lacerating assault on both the intolerance of Prussian absolutism and the feeble-mindedness of its liberal opponents. Not content with making enemies of the government and opposition simultaneously, he turned against his own comrades as well, denouncing the Young Hegelians for 'rowdiness and blackguardism'. Only two months after Marx's assumption of editorial responsibility, the provincial governor asked the censorship ministers in Berlin to prosecute him for 'impudent and disrespectful criticism'.

No less a figure than Tsar Nicholas of Russia also begged the Prussian king to suppress the Rheinische Zeitung, having taken umbrage at an anti-Russian diatribe. The paper was duly closed in March 1843: at the age of twenty-four, Marx was already wielding a pen that could terrify and infuriate the crowned heads of Europe. Realizing that he had no future in Prussia, he accepted an invitation to move to Paris as co-editor of a new journal-in-exile for Germans, the Deutsche- Französische Jahrbücher. There was only one caveat: 'I am engaged to be married and I cannot, must not and will not leave Germany without my fiancée.' Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen in June 1843. For the rest of the summer, while awaiting their summons to Paris, he and his new bride enjoyed an extended honeymoon in the fashionable spa resort of Kreuznach. When not walking by the river he shut himself away in a workroom, reading and writing with furious intensity.

Excerpted from Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography Copyright 2007 by Francis Wheen, reprinted with permission of Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Francis Wheen on Das Kapital | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close In February 1867, shortly before delivering the first volume of Das Kapital to the printers, Karl Marx urged Friedrich Engels to read The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac. The story was itself a little masterpiece, he said, "full of the most delightful irony". We don't know whether Engels heeded the advice. If he did, he would certainly have spotted the irony but might have been surprised that his old friend could take any delight in it. The Unknown Masterpiece is the tale of Frenhofer, a great painter who spends 10 years working and reworking a portrait which will revolutionise art by providing "the most complete representation of reality". When at last his fellow artists Poussin and Porbus are allowed to inspect the finished canvas, they are horrified to see a blizzard of random forms and colours piled one upon another in confusion.

"Ah!" Frenhofer cries, misinterpreting their wide-eyed amazement. "You did not anticipate such perfection!" But then he overhears Poussin telling Porbus that eventually Frenhofer must discover the truth - the portrait has been overpainted so many times that nothing remains. "Nothing on my canvas!" exclaimed Frenhofer, glancing alternately at the two painters and his picture. "What have you done?" said Porbus in an undertone to Poussin. The old man seized the young man's arm roughly, and said to him: "You see nothing there, clown! varlet! miscreant! hound! Why, what brought you here, then? - My good Porbus," he continued, turning to the older painter, "can it be that you, you too, are mocking at me? Answer me! I am your friend; tell me, have I spoiled my picture?" Porbus hesitated, he dared not speak; but the anxiety depicted on the old man's white face was so heart-rending that he pointed to the canvas saying: "Look!" Frenhofer gazed at his picture for a moment and staggered. "Nothing! Nothing!

And I have worked ten years!" He fell upon a chair and wept. After banishing the two men from his studio, Frenhofer burns all his paintings and kills himself. According to Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, Balzac's tale "made a great impression on him because it was in part a description of his own feelings". Marx had toiled for many years on his own unseen masterpiece, and throughout this long gestation his customary reply to those who asked for a glimpse of the work-in-progress was identical to that of Frenhofer: "No, no! I have still to put some finishing touches to it. Yesterday, towards evening, I thought that it was done . . . This morning, by daylight, I realised my error." As early as 1846, when the book was already overdue, Marx wrote to his German publisher: "I shall not have it published without revising it yet again, both as regards matter and style.

It goes without saying that a writer who works continuously cannot, at the end of six months, publish word for word what he wrote six months earlier." Twelve years later, still no nearer completion, he explained that "the thing is proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further". An obsessive perfectionist, he was forever seeking out new hues for his palette - studying mathematics, learning about the movement of celestial spheres, teaching himself Russian so he could read books on the country's land system. Or, to quote Frenhofer again: "Alas! I thought for a moment that my work was finished; but I have certainly gone wrong in some details, and my mind will not be at rest until I have cleared away my doubts. I have decided to travel, and visit Turkey, Greece and Asia in search of models, in order to compare my picture with Nature in different forms." Why did Marx recall Balzac's tale at the very moment when he was preparing to unveil his greatest work to public scrutiny?

Did he fear that he too might have laboured in vain, that his "complete representation of reality" would prove unintelligible? He certainly had some such apprehensions - Marx's character was a curious hybrid of ferocious self-confidence and anguished self-doubt - and he tried to forestall criticism by warning in the preface that "I assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself." But what ought to strike us most forcibly about his identification with the creator of the unknown masterpiece is that Frenhofer is an artist - not a political economist, nor yet a philosopher or historian or polemicist. The most "delightful irony" of all in The Unknown Masterpiece, noted by the American writer Marshall Berman, is that Balzac's account of the picture is a perfect description of a 20th-century abstract painting - and the fact that he couldn't have known this deepens the resonance. "The point is that where one age sees only chaos and incoherence, a later or more modern age may discover meaning and beauty," Berman wrote.

"Thus the very open-endedness of Marx's later work can make contact with our time in ways that more 'finished' 19th-century work cannot: Das Kapital reaches beyond the well-made works of Marx's century into the discontinuous modernism of our own." Like Frenhofer, Marx was a modernist avant la lettre. His famous account of dislocation in the Communist Manifesto - "all that is solid melts into air" - prefigures the hollow men and the unreal city depicted by TS Eliot, or Yeats's "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". By the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage - juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors' reports and fairy tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound's Cantos or Eliot's The Waste Land. Das Kapital is as discordant as Schoenberg, as nightmarish as Kafka. Marx saw himself as a creative artist, a poet of dialectic. "Now, regarding my work, I will tell you the plain truth about it," he wrote to Engels in July 1865.

"Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole." It was to poets and novelists, far more than to philosophers or political essayists, that he looked for insights into people's material motives and interests: in a letter of December 1868 he copied out a passage from another work by Balzac, The Village Priest, and asked if Engels could confirm the picture from his own knowledge of practical economics. Had he wished to write a conventional economic treatise he would have done so, but his ambition was far more audacious. Berman describes the author of Das Kapital as "one of the great tormented giants of the 19th century - alongside Beethoven, Goya, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Van Gogh - who drive us crazy, as they drove themselves, but whose agony generated so much of the spiritual capital on which we still live". Yet how many people would think of including Marx in a list of great writers and artists? Even in our postmodern era, the fractured narrative and radical discontinuity of Das Kapital are mistaken by many readers for formlessness and incomprehensibility.

Anyone willing to grapple with Beethoven, Goya or Tolstoy should be able to "learn something new" from a reading of Das Kapital - not least because its subject still governs our lives. As Berman asks: how can Das Kapital end while capital lives on? It is fitting that Marx never finished his masterpiece. The first volume was the only one to appear in his lifetime, and the subsequent volumes were assembled by others after his death, based on notes and drafts found in his study. Marx's work is as open-ended - and thus as resilient - as the capitalist system itself. Although Das Kapital is usually categorised as a work of economics, Marx turned to the study of political economy only after many years of spadework in philosophy and literature. It is these intellectual foundations that underpin the project, and it is his personal experience of alienation that gives such intensity to the analysis of an economic system which estranges people from one another and from the world they inhabit - a world in which humans are enslaved by the monstrous power of capital and commodities.

Marx was an outsider from the moment of his birth, on May 5 1818 - a Jewish boy in a predominantly Catholic city, Trier, within a Prussian state whose official religion was evangelical Protestantism. Although the Rhineland had been annexed by France during the Napoleonic wars, three years before his birth it was reincorporated into Imperial Prussia and the Jews of Trier became subject to an edict banning them from practising in the professions: Karl's father, Heinrich Marx, had to convert to Lutheranism in order to work as an attorney. His father encouraged Karl to read voraciously. The boy's other intellectual mentor was Heinrich's friend Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a cultured and liberal government official who introduced Karl to poetry and music (and to his daughter Jenny, the future Mrs Karl Marx). On long walks together the Baron would recite passages from Homer and Shakespeare, which his young companion learned by heart - and later used as the essential seasonings in his own writings. In adult life Marx re-enacted those happy hikes with von Westphalen by declaiming scenes from Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe while leading his own family up to Hampstead Heath for Sunday picnics.

There was a quotation for every occasion: to flatten a political enemy, enliven a dry text, heighten a joke, authenticate an emotion - or breathe life into an inanimate abstraction, as when capital itself speaks in the voice of Shylock (in volume one of Das Kapital) to justify the exploitation of child labour in factories: Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered: My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, The penalty and forfeit of my bond. To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx quotes a speech from Timon of Athens on money as the "common whore of mankind", followed by another from Sophocles's Antigone ("Money! Money's the curse of man, none greater! / That's what wrecks cities, banishes men from home, / Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul, / Pointing out the way to infamy and shame . . ."). Economists with anachronistic models and categories are likened to Don Quixote, who "paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight-errantry was equally compatible with all economic forms of society". Marx's earliest ambitions were literary.

As a law student at the University of Berlin he wrote a book of poetry, a verse drama and even a novel, Scorpion and Felix, influenced by Laurence Sterne's wildly digressive novel Tristram Shandy. After these experiments, he admitted defeat: Suddenly, as if by a magic touch - oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow - I caught sight of the distant realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing . . . A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed. Suffering some kind of breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to retreat to the countryside for a long rest - whereupon he at last succumbed to the siren voice of GWF Hegel, the recently deceased professor of philosophy at Berlin, whose legacy was the subject of intense dispute among fellow students and lecturers. At university, Marx "adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read" - a habit he never lost. A reading list from this period shows the precocious scope of his intellectual explorations.

While writing a paper on the philosophy of law he made a detailed study of Winckelmann's History of Art, started to teach himself English and Italian, translated Tacitus's Germania and Aristotle's Rhetoric, read Francis Bacon and "spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight". This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of research which gave Das Kapital its extraordinary breadth of reference. As a student Marx was infatuated by Tristram Shandy, and 30 years later he found a subject which allowed him to mimic the loose and disjointed style pioneered by Sterne. Like Tristram Shandy, Das Kapital is full of paradoxes and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical tomfoolery, fractured narratives and curious oddities. How else could he do justice to the mysterious and often topsy-turvy logic of capitalism? "What does it matter to you what people whisper here?' Virgil asks Dante in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio.

"Follow me and let the people talk." Lacking a Virgil to guide him, Marx amends the line in his preface for the first volume of Das Kapital to warn that he will make no concession to the prejudices of others: "Now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti [Go your own way, and let the people talk]." From the outset, then, the book is conceived as a descent towards the nether regions, and even in the midst of complex theoretical abstractions he conveys a vivid sense of place and motion: Let us, therefore, leave this noisy region of the market, where all that goes on is done in full view of everyone's eyes, where everything seems open and above board. We will follow the owner of the money and the owner of labour-power into the hidden foci of production, crossing the threshold of the portal above which is written, "No admittance except on business". Here we shall discover, not only how capital produces, but also how it is itself produced. We shall at last discover the secret of making surplus value.

The literary antecedents for such a journey are often recalled as he proceeds on his way. Describing English match factories, where half the workers are juveniles (some as young as six) and conditions are so appalling that "only the most miserable part of the working class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it", he writes: With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night labour, irregular meal-times, and meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves, pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed in this industry. Other imagined hells provide further embellishment for his picture of empirical reality: From the motley crowd of workers of all callings, ages and sexes, who throng around us more urgently than did the souls of the slain around Ulysses, on whom we see at a glance the signs of overwork, without referring to the Blue Books under their arms, let us select two more figures, whose striking contrast proves that all men are alike in the face of capital - a milliner and a blacksmith.

This is the cue for a story about Mary Anne Walkley, a 20-year-old who died "from simple overwork" after labouring for more than 26 hours making millinery for the guests at a ball given by the Princess of Wales in 1863. Her employer ("a lady with the pleasant name of Elise", as Marx notes caustically) was dismayed to find that she had died without finishing the bit of finery she was stitching. There is a Dickensian texture to much of Das Kapital, and Marx gives the occasional explicit nod to an author he loved. Here, for example, is how he swats bourgeois apologists who claim that his criticisms of particular applications of technology reveal him as an enemy of social progress who doesn't want machinery to be used at all: This is exactly the reasoning of Bill Sikes, the celebrated cutthroat. "Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only consider! Where would agriculture and trade be without the knife?

Is it not as salutary in surgery as it is skilled in anatomy? And a willing assistant at the festive table? If you abolish the knife - you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism." Bill Sikes makes no such speech in Oliver Twist: this is Marx's satirical extrapolation. "They are my slaves," he would sometimes say, gesturing at the books on his shelves, "and they must serve me as I will." The task of this unpaid workforce was to provide raw materials which could be shaped for his own purposes. "His conversation does not run in one groove, but is as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves," wrote an interviewer from the Chicago Tribune who visited Marx in 1878. In 1976 SS Prawer wrote a 450-page book devoted to Marx's literary references.

The first volume of Das Kapital yielded quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Schiller, Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Defoe, Cervantes, Dryden, Heine, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Thomas More, Samuel Butler - as well as allusions to horror tales, English romantic novels, popular ballads, songs and jingles, melodrama and farce, myths and proverbs. What of Das Kapital's own literary status? Marx knew it could not be won second-hand, by the mere display of other men's flowers. In volume one he scorns those economists who "conceal under a parade of literary-historical erudition, or by an admixture of extraneous material, their feeling of scientific impotence and the eerie consciousness of having to teach others what they themselves felt to be a truly strange subject". A fear that he could himself have committed this offence may explain the anguished admission, in the afterword to its second edition, that "no one can feel the literary shortcomings of Das Kapital more strongly than I".

Even so, it is surprising that so few people have even considered the book as literature. Das Kapital has spawned countless texts analysing Marx's labour theory of value or his law of the declining rate of profit, but only a handful of critics have given serious attention to Marx's own declared ambition - in several letters to Engels - to produce a work of art. One deterrent, perhaps, is that the multilayered structure of Das Kapital evades easy categorisation. The book can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created ("Capital which comes into the world soiled with gore from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore"); or as a Victorian melodrama; or as a black farce (in debunking the "phantom-like objectivity" of the commodity to expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality, Marx is using one of the classic methods of comedy, stripping off the gallant knight's armour to reveal a tubby little man in his underpants); or as a Greek tragedy ("Like Oedipus, the actors in Marx's recounting of human history are in the grip of an inexorable necessity which unfolds itself no matter what they do," C.

Frankel writes in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought). Or perhaps it is a satirical utopia like the land of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile: in Marx's version of capitalist society, as in Jonathan Swift's equine pseudo-paradise, the false Eden is created by reducing ordinary humans to the status of impotent, alienated Yahoos. To do justice to the deranged logic of capitalism, Marx's text is saturated with irony - an irony which has yet escaped most scholars for the past 140 years. One exception is the American critic Edmund Wilson, who argued in To The Finland Station: a study in the writing and acting of history (1940) that the value of Marx's abstractions - the dance of commodities, the zany cross-stitch of value - is primarily an ironic one, juxtaposed as they are with grim, well-documented scenes of the misery and filth which capitalist laws create in practice. Wilson regarded Das Kapital as a parody of classical economics.

No one, he thought, had ever had so deadly a psychological insight into the infinite capacity of human nature for remaining oblivious or indifferent to the pains we inflict on others when we have a chance to get something out of them for ourselves. "In dealing with this theme, Karl Marx became one of the great masters of satire. Marx is certainly the greatest ironist since Swift, and has a good deal in common with him." What, then, is the connection between Marx's ironic literary discourse and his "metaphysical" account of bourgeois society? Had he wished to produce a straightforward text of classical economics he could have done so - and in fact he did. Two lectures delivered in June 1865, later published as Value, Price and Profit, give a concise and lucid précis of his theories about commodities and labour: A man who produces an article for his own immediate use, to consume it himself, creates a product but not a commodity . . . A commodity has a value, because it is a crystallization of social labour . . . Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value . . .

What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist . . . And so on. Whatever its merits as an economic analysis, this can be understood by any intelligent child: no elaborate metaphors or metaphysics, no puzzling digressions or philosophical excursions, no literary flourishes. So why is Das Kapital, which covers the same ground, so utterly different in style? Did Marx suddenly lose the gift of plain speaking? Manifestly not: at the time he gave these lectures he was also completing the first volume of Das Kapital. A clue can be found in one of the very few analogies he permitted himself in Value, Price and Profit, when explaining his belief that profits arise from selling commodities at their "real" value and not, as one might suppose, from adding a surcharge. "This seems paradox and contrary to everyday observation," he writes. "It is also paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases.

Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things." The function of metaphor is to make us look at something anew by transferring its qualities to something else, turning the familiar into the alien or vice versa. Ludovico Silva, a Venezuelan critic of Marx, has drawn on the etymological meaning of "metaphor" as a transfer to argue that capitalism itself is a metaphor, an alienating process which displaces life from subject to object, from use-value to exchange-value, from the human to the monstrous. In this reading, the literary style Marx adopted in Das Kapital is not a colourful veneer applied to an otherwise forbidding slab of economic exposition, like jam on thick toast; it is the only appropriate language in which to express "the delusive nature of things", an ontological enterprise which cannot be confined within the borders and conventions of an existing genre such as political economy, anthropological science or history. In short, Das Kapital is entirely sui generis. There has been nothing remotely like it before or since - which is probably why it has been so consistently neglected or misconstrued. Marx was indeed one of the great tormented giants.

·This an edited extract from Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography, part of a series, Books that Shook the World, published this month by Atlantic and to be serialised in Review in coming weeks. Next: Christopher Hitchens on Paine's Rights of Man

Question: Who wrote the book "Das Kapital"?
Answer: Karl Marx