Karl Marx

“'Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,' Volume I — the only volume Marx published himself. Starting from the humble commodity, Marx traces how money becomes capital, how capital draws surplus-value from the unpaid labour of the worker, how the struggle over the working day and the coming of machinery reshape industry, and how accumulation piles up wealth at one pole and misery at the other — until, in a history written 'in letters of blood and fire,' he shows how it all began.”

“'Capital,' Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital. Having shown in Volume I how surplus-value is produced, Marx follows capital out of the factory and into circulation — the changing shapes it takes as money, production and commodities, the time and costs of its turnover, and finally the great exchange between the two departments of social production by which a whole economy reproduces itself, year after year, on the same or an expanding scale.”

“'Capital,' Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Marx descends from the hidden world of value and surplus-value to the forms in which capital shows itself on the surface of society: profit, the average rate of profit and prices of production, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, merchants' profit, interest and credit, the rent of land — and the 'trinity formula' in which capital, land and labour seem each to yield their own revenue, until the manuscript breaks off in the middle of a chapter on classes.”

“The 'fourth volume' of 'Capital': Marx's critical history of political economy from the Physiocrats to the vulgar economists of his own day. He follows his predecessors' attempts to explain where profit and rent come from — Quesnay's 'net product,' Adam Smith's two theories of value and his productive and unproductive labour, Ricardo's great achievement and its contradictions, Malthus's apology for the landlords — and the decay of the classical school into apologetics.”