Capital: The Book of Communism

This is an article written for the specialist on and the advanced student of Marx’s work. The main focus is to show that, far from being exclusively an analysis of capitalism, Capital really comes into its own by showing how the main law(s) of motion of capital inexorably lead humanity towards the threshold of communism by laying the technological basis that makes a classless society not only possible but also necessary. A parallel argument is that this progression towards communism is intertwined inseparably with Marx’s dialectical method and its application to the entire structure of Capital. A third strand of argument is the emphasis on how the advent of communism in Marx is entirely woven into the fabric of the development of capitalism, finally reaching a threshold when the individual interests of each person can be satisfied much more fully on the basis of the common property of the means of production, thus relegating the pursuit of self-interest in the narrow sense of the term to history. Hence it is shown that the struggle for a communist society is not a self-sacrificial moral act, but one totally based on the radical transformation of the material-practical world.