Das Kapital Themes

Bet you saw this one coming, huh?Lots of people think they know what Karl Marx's philosophy of communism is all about but haven't read anything by the dude himself. Das Kapital, Marx's most importa...

Karl Marx is known for saying that working conditions under capitalism are degrading to workers. But in Das Kapital, he also says that there's nothing inherently degrading about work itself. The la...

According to Marx, it all boils down to moolah. Even traditions and customs that seem to arise from something else entirely—they too are all about the bucks. That's part of the depressing message...

In Das Kapital, Karl Marx takes aim at the various ways capitalism improves technology and modernizes the organization of work. Yeah, he's not to thrilled about it. The tail end of the Industrial R...

Marx is known for saying, in the Communist Manifesto, that the history of society is the history of class struggles. But in Das Kapital he goes into much more detail about what makes the capitalist...

Ever since Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations, economists have been trying to figure out what exactly wealth is. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx takes his stab at the question. He looks at the commod...

There's a famous Charlie Chaplin scene in which his employers put him in an eating machine to make his meal-time more efficient. Sound familiar? Yeah, the scene has its origins in what Marx describ...

Workers of the world, unite—right? Yeah, Marx is known for advocating for workers to overthrow capitalists, but that happens in the Communist Manifesto. In Das Kapital, he's all about diagnosing...

It's now accepted fact that working conditions in the factories in 19th-century England and Europe were inhumane, leading to death and despair for countless workers. But how did those conditions an...

In Das Kapital, Karl Marx lays out what he calls the fetishism of the commodity. Don't look at us like that; we didn't make that term up. Basically, Karl argues that the reality of labor-time as va...