Theories of Surplus-Value, Part Three (Volume IV of Capital)

The last of the three volumes, and the volume of the aftermath.

Where Part One took the history from the Physiocrats through Adam Smith and Part Two was the volume of Ricardo, Part Three watches the great edifice Ricardo built dissolve in two directions at once.

On one side stand the epigones - McCulloch, James Mill and their kind - who kept Ricardo's forms while emptying them of content, until the science curdled into apologetics: a defence of the existing order dressed in the language of laws it no longer sought to explain. On the other stand the men Marx found far more interesting, the Ricardian socialists and radical pamphleteers who turned Ricardo's own weapons against capital and argued that if labour creates value then labour should have it.

It closes with the addenda on revenue and its sources, which contain Marx's most concentrated statement of what he called the fetishism of economic relations - how the social relations of production come to appear as properties of things.

For a reader who wants to see a critical intelligence at work on the history of its own discipline, rather than on its opponents' politics, this is the volume.

Translated from the German by Jack Cohen and S. W. Ryazanskaya, edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya and Richard Dixon.

Part Three of three.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.