Capital: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole

🚩Capital: The Process of Capitalist Production as a WholeThe provided episode constitutes the front matter, table of contents, and introductory chapters of Karl Marx’s Capital: Volume III, a seminal work edited and completed by Friedrich Engels from Marx's unfinished manuscripts. The volume focuses on the capitalist production process as a whole, transitioning from abstract theories of value to the concrete realities of competition, market prices, and profit distribution. Engels’s detailed preface recounts the arduous editorial challenges he faced in organizing Marx's fragmented notes, while also critiquing contemporary economists who attempted to solve the "riddle" of the average rate of profit. The subsequent chapters formally introduce the cost-price and the mathematical relationship between the rate of surplus-value and the rate of profit. Marx explains how the mystification of capital occurs when surplus-value—the product of unpaid labor—appears on the surface of society as profit derived from the total invested capital. These sources ultimately provide a rigorous framework for understanding how interest, ground-rent, and industrial profit function within a unified economic system.