About this ebook
Published posthumously in 1885 by Friedrich Engels from Marx's incomplete drafts, Das Kapital: Critique of Political Economy, Part II (Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Buch II), subtitled The Circulation of Capital, shifts the focus from the immediate process of production to the movement of capital through its several metamorphoses money capital, productive capital, and commodity capital. While less polemical and more schematic than the first volume, the second volume retains the philosophical structure shaped by Marx's dialectical inheritance, presenting capital not merely as a sequence of transactions but as a living, self reproducing totality. The movement of capital, which appears autonomous and self generating, is laid out in circuits that echo Hegel's logic of mediation and return each phase of circulation negating and preserving the previous, forming an internally coherent yet opaque system.
Though filled with detailed analysis of turnover time, fixed capital, and the reproduction of the social aggregate, the metaphysical undertones remain pronounced, especially in the treatment of capital as an abstract subject that posits and re posites itself through the labor and consumption of others. The system described seems to move independently of the individuals within it, drawing them into its rhythmic cycles like a quasi natural law, yet one that is historically contingent and ideologically mystified. Here, labor continues to function as the hidden core of value, but the veil grows thicker capital now appears as a total social process, reified and autonomous, but driven by contradictions immanent to its very form. The metaphysics of capital, which began as a riddle in the commodity, now expands into a self regulating organism whose dark intelligibility recalls the speculative structure of Hegel's Logic, but with the ghost of Geist replaced by the cold necessity of value in motion.
The volume pairs Das Kapital: Critique of Political Economy (Part II) with an afterword tracing Marx's intellectual relationships with revolutionary thinkers and philosophers (including Hegel, Feuerbach, Engels, and Ricardo), containing research into his ideological development and economic metaphysical theories, a complete timeline of his life and works, a glossary of Marxist terminology, and a detailed index of all of Marx's writings. The translation of Das Kapital: Critique of Political Economy (Part II) renders Marx's dense dialectical prose in modern English while preserving its force and precision. In this edition, Das Kapital: Critique of Political Economy (Part II) is framed by material on Marx's intellectual development and the broader political, economic, religious, and philosophical consequences of his work.
