Capital, vol. 3 (Penguin Classics)

CAPITAL
VOLUME 3

KARL MARX was born at Trier in 1818 of a German-Jewish family converted to Christianity. As a student in Bonn and Berlin he was influenced by Hegel’s dialectic, but he later reacted against idealist philosophy and began to develop his theory of historical materialism. He related the state of society to its economic foundations and mode of production, and recommended armed revolution on the part of the proletariat. In Paris in 1844 Marx met Friedrich Engels, with whom he formed a life-long partnership. Together they prepared the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) as a statement of the Communist League’s policy. In 1848 Marx returned to Germany and took an active part in the unsuccessful democratic revolution. The following year he arrived in England as a refugee and lived in London until his death in 1883. Helped financially by Engels, Marx and his family nevertheless lived in great poverty. After years of research (mostly carried out in the British Museum), he published in 1867 the first volume of his great work, Capital. From 1864 to 1872 Marx played a leading role in the International Working Men’s Association, and his last years saw the development of the first mass workers’ parties founded on avowedly Marxist principles. Besides the two posthumous volumes of Capital compiled by Engels, Karl Marx’s other writings include The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Civil War in France, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy and Theories of Surplus-Value.

ERNEST MANDEL was born in 1923. He was educated at the Free University of Brussels, where he was later Professor for many years, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He gained his PhD from the Free University of Berlin. He was a Member of the Economic Studies Commission of FGTB (Belgian TUC) from 1954 to 1963 and was chosen for the annual Alfred Marshall Lectures by Cambridge University in 1978. His many books include The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, Late Capitalism, The Long Waves of Capitalist Development, The Second Slump and The Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy. His influential pamphlet, An Introduction to Marxist Economics, sold over half a million copies and was translated into thirty languages. Ernest Mandel died in July 1995. In its obituary the Guardian described him as ‘one of the most creative and independent-minded revolutionary Marxist thinkers of the post-war world’.

KARL MARX

Capital

A Critique of
Political Economy

Volume Three

Introduced by
Ernest Mandel

Translated by
David Fernbach

Penguin Books

in association with New Left Review

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This edition first published in Pelican Books 1981
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1991
13

Edition and notes copyright © New Left Review, 1981
Introduction copyright © Ernest Mandel, 1981
Translation copyright © David Fernbach, 1981
All rights reserved

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Contents

 

Introduction by Ernest Mandel

Preface (Frederick Engels)

Book III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole

 

Part One: The Transformation of Surplus-Value into Profit, and of the Rate of Surplus-Value into the Rate of Profit

 

Chapter 1: Cost Price and Profit

Chapter 2: The Rate of Profit

Chapter 3: The Relationship between Rate of Profit and Rate of Surplus-Value

Chapter 4: The Effect of the Turnover on the Rate of Profit

Chapter 5: Economy in the Use of Constant Capital

1. General Considerations

2. Saving on the Conditions of Work at the Workers’ Expense

3. Economy in the Generation and Transmission of Power, and on Buildings

4. Utilization of the Refuse of Production

5. Economy through Inventions

Chapter 6: The Effect of Changes in Price

1. Fluctuations in the Price of Raw Material; Their Direct Effects on the Rate of Profit

2. Revaluation and Devaluation of Capital; Release and Tying-Up of Capital

3. General Illustration: The Cotton Crisis

Chapter 7: Supplementary Remarks

Part Two: The Transformation of Profit into Average Profit

 

Chapter 8: Different Compositions of Capital in Different Branches of Production, and the Resulting Variation in Rates of Profit

Chapter 9: Formation of a General Rate of Profit (Average Rate of Profit), and Transformation of Commodity Values into Prices of Production

Chapter 10: The Equalization of the General Rate of Profit through Competition. Market Prices and Market Values. Surplus Profit

Chapter 11: The Effects of General Fluctuations in Wages on the Prices of Production

Chapter 12: Supplementary Remarks

1. The Causes of a Change in the Price of Production

2.