ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with Marx’s economic theory as set out in his great book Capital, or to give it its full title in English, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, which he himself regarded as his major scientific work, and on which he laboured for nearly twenty years between the late 1840s and the mid-1860s. Most of the concepts and propositions dealt with in this chapter derive from volume 1 of that three-volume work, the only one to be published in Marx’s own lifetime (in 1867), and the only one to be published in the finished form which he intended. We shall however also consider some issues dealt with in volume 3 of Capital, notably the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ which is developed in that volume.
