UK’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell believes there is so much to learn from reading Das Kapital. What is it?
The book was written in the middle of the 19th century by the renowned German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. Das Kapital is essentially an explanation of how the capitalist system will destroy itself.
Following his set ideas on class struggle in the Communist manifesto and other writings-how the workers of the world would seize power from the ruling elites.
Das capital is hard to read. It is a product of 30 years of work, Marx’s study the condition of the mid 19th century factory workers in Britain at the peak of the Industrial revolution. Das Kapital is part history, part economics and part sociology.
Francis Wheen, Marx’s biographer, pointed out it reads at times like a Gothic novel “whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created.”
Marx argues that capitalism is an unstable way to structure the society for it will eventually collapse because of its own contradictions. He is unclear about the time this collapse will loom.
And he doesn’t explicitly state the structure of the communist society that will overtake and replace capitalism, only that it will free workers from their servitude (he did not complete work on the theory, he died in 1883).
Das Kapital was first published in 1867, he had settled in London with his family at the time, and Friedrich Engels a rich son of a cotton mill owner was his financial sponsor.
Marx continued to refine the ideas set out in the first volume for the rest of his life, although the next two volumes would not appear in print until after his death.
Ds Kapital ‘contained’ ideas that went on to inspire revolutions in Russia, China and many other countries around the world in the 20th century as ruling elites were overthrown and private property seized on behalf of the workers.
The book also would exert a powerful influence over many in the Labour Part and trade Union movement, even if they did not always share his vision of a global worker’s revolution.
Marxism became a way of interpreting the world-the simple idea at its core was that history was a battle between opposing social classes could be applied to everything from study of literature and film to the education system.
It also became a byword for totalitarianism as one-party states and dictators proclaimed Marxism as their guiding philosophy.
Some argued that this was a perversion of Marx’s ideas as set out in Das Kapital, and that the Soviet Union, for many-the ultimate example of Marxist state, was really just a form state capitalism, where the factory owners had been replaced by government bureaucrats.
But the Soviet’s Union’s collapse in the early 1990’s dealt a major blow to the credibility of Marxist theory and it went out of fashion on university campuses and in mainstream left wing political parties that inspired to gain power in the west, such as the labour party.
Marxism underwent a revival in the wake of the 2008 global financial crash, however, which some saw as a classic example of capitalism in crisis just as Marx had predicted.
You can obtain a copy here.
This article is a BBC publication.
