Capital (Das Kapital)

Capital mind map is economic, philosophy-based non-fiction. According to Karl Marx, capitalism's driving force is the exploitation of labor, whose unpaid labor is the ultimate source of profit and surplus value. Because he or she owns the productive capital assets (means of production), which are legally protected by the State through property rights, the employer has a claim to the profits (new output value).

Workers constantly recreate the economic conditions in which they work by generating capital (money) rather than commodities (goods and services). Capital proposes an explanation of the capitalist economic system's "laws of motion," from its origins to its future, by describing the dynamics of capital accumulation, wage labor growth, workplace transformation, capital concentration, commercial competition, the banking system, and the profit rate decline. Much of Das Kapital spells out Marx’s concept of the “surplus value” of labor and its consequences for capitalism.

According to Marx, it was not the pressure of population that drove wages to the subsistence level but rather the existence of a large army of unemployed, which he blamed on the capitalists. He maintained that within the capitalist system, labor was a mere commodity that could gain only subsistence wages. Capitalists, however, could force workers to spend more time on the job than it was a necessary to earn their subsistence.