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

The middle volume of Theories of Surplus Value, and the Ricardo volume.

It is dominated by the towering figure of David Ricardo, the last and greatest of the classical economists, and by the two questions on which Marx thought the fate of the whole science turned: the theory of rent, and the possibility of crisis.

Read on its own terms, this is where Marx's powers as a critic are at their height. His treatment of Ricardo is a model of what criticism can be - not the dismissal of an enemy but the honouring of a great mind, taken at his strongest, followed step by step through his own logic to the exact point where it breaks, and shown why it breaks.

He works through Ricardo's theory of rent and sets his own against it, disentangling the differential rent of better soils from the absolute rent that landed property as such can command. He separates, as Ricardo could not, surplus value in general from the particular form of profit. And in the chapter on accumulation he mounts his most sustained assault on the comfortable doctrine that general overproduction is impossible - the argument that has been mined ever since by everyone writing on crisis.

Translated from the German by Renate Simpson, edited by S. Ryazanskaya.

Part Two of three.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.