On the Contents of the Third Volume of Capital

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

The third book of Capital, by Marx, “The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole”, will now appear this coming autumn, as already announced in the Vorwärts It will be recalled that the first book was concerned with “the process of capitalist production”, while the second examined the “process of circulation of capital”. The third book will deal with “the process of capitalist production as a whole”. Thus the separate processes of production and circulation are no longer examined each in isolation but in their interconnection, as preconditions of, and mere links in, the uniform overall process of the movement of capital. As each of the first two books only concerned itself with one of the two main aspects of this process, the contents turned out to be in need of supplementing and the form grew one-sided and abstract. This was particularly apparent in the fact that in both books surplus value could only be investigated in so far and so long as it remained in the hands of its first appropriator, the industrial capitalist; it could only be indicated in general terms that this first appropriator was not necessarily—or even usually—its last appropriator. But it is precisely in the distribution of surplus value among its various interested parties—businessmen, money-lenders, landowners, etc.—that the overall movement of capital takes place most conspicuously and on the surface of society, so to speak. The distribution of surplus value, after it has undergone the processes analysed in the first two books, thus forms the leitmotif running through the third book. The laws governing this distribution are demonstrated in detail: the relation of the rate of surplus value to the rate of profit; the formation of average rate of profit; the tendency of this average rate of profit to fall progressively in the course of economic development; the diversion of commercial profit; the intervention of loan capital and the division of profit into interest and profit of enterprise; the credit system erected on the basis of loan capital with its mainstays, the banks, and the fraudulent blossom, the stock exchange; the genesis of surplus profit and the transformation of this surplus profit, in certain cases, into ground rent; the landed property which receives this rent; as a result the overall distribution of the product value newly created by labour among the three kinds of revenue: wages, profit (including interest), ground rent; finally, the recipients of these three kinds of income: workers, capitalists, landowners—the classes of present-day society. Unfortunately this final section—the classes—was not elaborated by Marx.

This brief survey of the contents should, however, suffice to show that all the relevant questions which, of necessity, had to be left unanswered in the first two volumes of the work are given exhaustive treatment here.