Capital, Volume 1

This opus work by Marx was originally intended to be six volumes. It is an ambitious attempt to scientifically understand the capitalist mode of production, bourgeois society and class conflict.

As Marx wrote in his Preface, "What I have to examine in this work is the capitalist mode of production, its natural laws and tendencies winning their way through and working themselves out with iron necessity."

Volume 1 is a lucid exposition that builds up from the basic unit of the commodity to a detailed consideration of the labor theory of value, the role of money, the modern factory system and the ways in which capital extorts surplus-value from wage-labor.