CAPITAL (DAS KAPITAL)
A Critique of Political Economy
Karl Marx, revised and abridged by Sergei Levitsky
Gateway Editions, reprint (1999)
(Marx published the first volume in 1867. The remaining two volumes of Capital were never completed by Marx, but were reconstructed by Engels from extensive notes and drafts, and published posthumously.)

"The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital. The production of commodities, their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the historical ground-work from which it rises. The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.

If we abstract from the material substance of the circulation of commodities, that is, from the exchange of the various use-values, and consider only the economic forms produced by this process of circulation, we find its final result to be money: this final product of the circulation of commodities is the first form in which capital appears.

As a matter of history, capital, as opposed to landed property, invariably takes the form at first of money; it appears as moneyed wealth, as the capital of the merchant and of the usurer. But we have no need to refer to the origin of capital in order to discover that the first form of appearance of capital is money. We can see it daily under our very eyes. All new capital, to commence with, comes on the stage, that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even in our days, in the shape of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into capital.

The first distinction we notice between money that is money only, and money that is capital, is nothing more than a difference in their form of circulation...." Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume One, part II: The Transformation of Money and Capital, Chapter Four, "The General Formula for Capital" (from first English edition of 1887 quoted on marxists.com)

BOOK DESCRIPTION
ANNOTATION
One of Marx's major and most influential works was the product of 30 years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England.

PUBLISHER
Das Kapital, Karl Marx's masterwork, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth century. From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that in our time dominated half the earth and for half a century kept the world on the brink of war. Even today, one billion Chinese remain in the power of the Marxist system.

Yet this important and powerful work has been passed over by many readers frustrated by Marx's difficult style and his preoccupation with nineteenth-century events of little relevance to today's reader.

Now Serge Levitsky presents a new revised version of this masterpiece, carefully retranslated for the modern reader and abridged to emphasize the political and philosophical core of Marx's work, while trimming away much that is now unimportant.

Here then is a fresh and highly readable version of a work whose ideas have influenced the lives of nearly every person alive today.