Capital, Volume I

Capital is the masterwork of dialectical-materialist social theory. Engels in Anti-Dühring and the subsequent Marxist tradition treat it as canonical.

"In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany... With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind." (Capital I, Postface to 2nd ed.)

Marx's materialist conception of history reads social phenomena as natural processes of human productive activity — a thoroughgoing naturalism about human social life.

"The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life." (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859 — formula consistent with Capital)

Twentieth-century Latin American liberation theology (Gutiérrez, Boff, Sobrino) reads Marx's analysis of class and alienation as a structural-analytical tool compatible with Christian commitment, even where rejecting his metaphysical atheism.

"The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities." (Capital I, opening sentence)

A genuine resonance: Marx's relational ontology of social formations — capitalism is not a thing but a social relation between persons mediated by things — has structural similarities with process philosophy.

"Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons established by the instrumentality of things." (Capital I, ch. 33)

Marxist methodology has shaped contemporary critical realism in social science (Bhaskar, Sayer, Andrew Collier): Capital reads commodities, classes, and economic crises as real social structures with real causal powers, irreducible to either individual psychology or surface observation.

"A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." (Capital I, ch. 1)

Marx's analysis of value as socially constituted — not a property intrinsic to objects but the crystallisation of socially necessary labour time — has been read by contemporary social constructivists as a foundational analysis.

"It is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things." (Capital I, ch. 1, on commodity fetishism)

Marx is a robust realist about social structures: classes, modes of production, and economic laws are real, not nominal, and the empirical method of Capital is dialectical inquiry into them.

"The method of inquiry has to appropriate the material in detail... Only after this work is done can the actual movement be adequately described." (Capital I, Postface to 2nd ed.)

Marxist tradition.