KAPITAL, DAS

English Capital (3 vol., 1867, 1885, 1894) one of the major works of the 19th-century economist Karl Marx, 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. Much of Das Kapital deals with Marx's concept of the surplus value of labour and its consequences for capitalism. In Marx's mind, 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 held that under the capitalistic system, labour was merely a commodity and could get only its subsistence. The capitalist, however, could force the worker to spend more time on his job than was necessary to earn his subsistence, and the excess product, or surplus value, thus created, was taken by the capitalist. Because all profit results from this exploitation of labour, the rate of profitthe amount per unit of total capital outlaydepends largely on the number of workers employed. Machines cannot be exploited; they can therefore not contribute to total profits, although they help labour produce more useful things. Only payroll capitalvariable capitalis 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; but, as outlay for machinery grows in relation to outlay for wages, profit declines in relation to total capital outlay. The capitalist will receive less and less per hundred dollars of capital and can only try to postpone his bankruptcy by pressure upon the workers; finally, the capitalist class becomes unfit to rule, because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery. Consequently the system collapses, and the working class inherits the power.