In the Library
Das Kapital
Karl Marx, 1867
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Reading time
- Reading time 19 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (1887)
- Chapters
- Chapters 41
- Length
- Length 256k words
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About the book
A table, Marx writes, is an ordinary thing of wood until it goes to market, and then it stands on its head, sprouting out of its wooden brain ideas stranger than if it had begun dancing of its own accord. Das Kapital opens on that image and never lets it go, because its whole argument is that everything for sale hides something: a life's hours, a bent back, dissolved into a price until no one can see them there anymore. Marx wrote it across nearly two decades in the British Museum's Reading Room, worn down by debt and grief, chasing down the government's own Factory Inspectors until the numbers could not be denied: children maimed by unguarded machines, girls dead of exhaustion after shifts that ran past midnight, a whole class spent past the point of repair for wages that could never buy back what they cost. Read one chapter and you will never again pick up an ordinary object without wondering, quietly, who paid for it in hours.