ABSTRACT
Capital treats of capitalism as a quasi-religious phenomenon. It tells a story of working man divided against another man who is dominated by a maniacal money-worship. Capital is concerned not with the labour process as such but with the capitalist labour process, which Karl Marx describes as 'a unity of the labour process and the process of creating surplus value'. The labour process itself is simply purposive activity carried on for the production of use-values, and is the perennial condition imposed by nature on human life. Marx treats capitalist production as a process of self-aggrandizement of capital via the extraction of the maximum possible surplus value from the living labour power consumed in the process. The reduction of necessary labour time is achieved by raising labour productivity through the introduction of more and more machinery, and therewith more and more minute division of labour, into the labour process.
