Das Kapital
1867
- economics
- capital
- communism
- marxian economics
- socialism
- scientific socialism
- one-act plays, american
- one-act plays, english
- history
- économie politique
The story
Das Kapital, Karl Marx's seminal work, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth century. From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that at one time dominated half the earth and for nearly a century kept the world on the brink of war.
What it’s like
Dense, deliberate prose with long chains of argument, dry wit breaking through in sharp aphorisms, and a voice that moves between cool analysis and rising moral indignation. The texture is less lush than severe: sentences built like scaffolding, with footnotes and digressions reaching into factory reports, parliamentary blue books, and the dismal arithmetic of wages and working hours. Its world is smoke-darkened English workshops and mills, ledgers, and the crowded ledger-filled counting houses of nineteenth-century London, rendered through statistics and bitter anecdote rather than sensory detail. The mood is heavy, austere, and unhurried, closer to a long winter study than a warm evening read, with flashes of grim humour and righteous anger. Sustained concentration is needed, and the reward is slow, cumulative understanding rather than momentum. Best for readers who want a demanding, historically rooted treatise on work, money, and power, approached in short sittings with a notebook at hand. It contains no violence or sexual content, though its accounts of child labour and industrial injury are grim and unsparing.
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