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by Karl Marx
Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was the book that formed the economic and political systems that, in the twentieth century, dominated half the earth. The ideas and work of this man have influenced almost every person alive today.
This masterpiece covers Marx’s entire philosophy on the driving force of capitalism, from commodities and money, money and capital, and buying and selling, to wages and the exploitation of labor. Marx explains his view on building blocks of the capitalist market related to workers, employers, and commodities.
The central driving force of capitalism, according to Marx, was in the exploitation and alienation of labour. The ultimate source of the new profits and value-added was that employers paid workers the market value of their labour-capacity, but the value of the commodities workers produced exceeded that market value. Employers were entitled to appropriate the new output value because of their ownership of the productive capital assets. By producing output as capital for the employers, the workers constantly reproduced the condition of capitalism by their labour.
Marx viewed the commodity as the "cell-form" or building unit of capitalist society—it is an object useful to somebody else, but with a trading value for the owner. Because commercial transactions implied no particular morality beyond that required to settle transactions, the growth of markets caused the economic sphere and the moral-legal sphere to become separated in society: subjective moral value becomes separated from objective economic value. Political economy, which was originally thought of as a "moral science" concerned with the just distribution of wealth, or as a "political arithmetick" for tax collection, gave way to the separate disciplines of economic science, law and ethics.
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