Das Kapital
Marx analyses commodities, wage labour, accumulation, and the social relations hidden inside apparently ordinary market exchange.
Commodity exchange presents social relations between people as relations between things. Marx distinguishes use-value from value and develops his account through labour and the organisation of production.
A price tag can make an object look detached from the people who made it. Marx tries to restore those relationships, asking what work and dependence the finished commodity conceals.
Workers sell labour-power, while capitalist production seeks surplus value beyond its cost. Exploitation is analysed within formally contractual exchange, not only as an unusually harsh employer's behaviour.
Competition encourages accumulation, technological change, and the reorganisation of work. These processes can concentrate capital and reproduce workers' dependence on selling their labour-power.
The broader volumes examine circulation, reproduction, profit, and contradictions of the system. The work combines economic theory with historical analysis; its value theory and predictions remain debated rather than constituting settled contemporary economics.
Labour-power is distinguished from the work produced through its use.
The disagreement is not merely whether one employer is kind. It concerns a system in which people can enter formally voluntary agreements while having very unequal power to refuse them.
Working time becomes a contested relation rather than a neutral measure.
Commodity fetishism hides human arrangements behind apparently independent prices.
Productivity gains can alter dependence without automatically freeing workers.
Circulation links individual production processes within the reproduction of capital.
Historical dispossession helps explain how wage dependence became established.