Karl Marx - Capital, Vol. 3

Book III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole

If the first volume of Capital is the most famous and widely read, and if the second is the unknown one, the third is the most controversial. The disputes started before it was even published, as Frederick Engels indicates in his Preface. They continued after the latter brought it out in 1894, most notably in the form of a critique of Marxs economic doctrines by the Austrian economist Eugen von Bhm-Bawerk two years later.

The reason for these insistent polemics is not hard to discover. Volume 1 concentrates on the factory, the production of surplus-value, and the capitalists need constantly to increase this production. Volume 2 concentrates on the market-place and examines the reciprocal flows of commodities and money (purchasing power) which, as they realize their values, allow the economy to reproduce and grow (while requiring a proportional division both of commodities into different categories of specific use-value and of money flows into purchasing power for specific commoditiesideology with all that these entail for human beings, and above all for workers they give no precise indication of the way in which the systems inner contradictions prepare the ground for its final and inevitable downfall.

Volume 1 shows us only that capitalism produces its own grave-digger in the form of the modern proletariat, and that social contradictions intensify inside the system. Volume 2 indicates that capitalism cannot achieve continuously enlarged reproduction; that its growth takes the form of the industrial cycle; that its equilibrium is only a product of constantly reappearing disequilibria; that periodic crises of overproduction are inevitable. But the precise way in which these contradictions (and many others) are interrelated, so that the basic laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production lead to explosive crises and its ultimate collapse, is not worked out in detail in these first volumes. They are initial stages in an analysis whose final aim is to explain how the system concretely operates in essence as in appearance.

Such an explanation of the capitalist economy in its totality is precisely the object of Volume 3. However, it is not completed here. In the first place, Marx did not leave a finished manuscript of the volume, so that important sections are lacking. It is certain that the unfinished Part Seven, which ends with the barely initiated Volume 3 provides valuable indications of how Marx would have set about the integration of these questions into an overall view of the capitalist system. But it does not contain a fully developed theory of the world market, of (national and international) competition, or especially of industrial crisis. Many of the controversies centring around the third volume of Capital are precisely due to the incomplete nature for the reasons just indicated of some of the theories contained in it.

But the basic reason for the amplitude and duration of these polemics lies in the fact that Volume 3 aims to answer the question: Whither capitalism? It seeks to show that the system is intrinsically (immanently) crisis-ridden: that neither the efforts of individual capitalists nor those of public authorities can prevent crises from breaking out. It seeks to show that inherent mechanisms, which cannot be overcome without abolishing private property, competition, profit and commodity production (the market economy), must lead to a final collapse. That this judgement is unpalatable to capitalists and their hangers-on hardly needs emphasizing. That it is equally unwelcome to neutral economists who, in spite of their claims to be value-free, in reality assume the permanence and preferability of commodity production and the market economy as determined by human nature and corresponding to the interests of mankind can also be taken for granted. Finally, that it poses formidable problems for philanthropists and social reformers who, though sharing Marxs indignation at the mass poverty and destitution provoked by the spontaneous workings of the system, believe that these can be overcome without getting rid of the system itself, has been confirmed repeatedly in theoretical discussions and political struggles within and around the labour movement since the end of the nineteenth century. So there are indeed compelling social reasons why Volume 3 should have created the furore it undoubtedly has.