Das Kapital has the densest prose among the books I've read. A lot of complex philosophical and economic concepts are being mixed. Somewhere in the middle, I felt like giving up. But pushed through. And yes, I read the book to understand why my Grandpa is an avid supporter of the past soviet system.

There is a central argument that Marx presents: capitalism is inherently flawed and it always leads the bourgeoisie (capitalists, or the owners of the means of production) to exploit the proletariat (the working class, the labor). I wrote more about surplus value in the notes section. (press the title to read more)

My Notes

I will start with an example. Imagine a certain worker creates something in a factory. The value of that product (as per what Marx argues) is equal to the amount of labor required to make it. But the worker ends up receiving only a portion of that product's wage. Let's say John, a worker, makes a car-toy for a certain toy company. That toy is priced at 10 dollars. But John only receives 1 dollar from the toy's sale. The remaining 9 dollars is the surplus value. (Note that this is a very basic explanation.)

That surplus value goes to the capitalists. Not the worker. And Marx claims this is the source of income for the capitalists. And he says that for capitalism to thrive, labor exploitation should always happen, meaning it is not accidental, but rather a built-in feature of the entire system.

Some neoclassical thinkers think the opposite, however, including Jevons, the founder of neoclassical economics himself. Jevons introduced the idea called marginal utility theory. It argues that the value of the product is driven by its usefulness to a consumer, not by the labor invested in it.

A very hard read, but a compound lift. The book introduced ideas in multiple spheres: economics, politics, philosophy, history, sociology, and more.