Thought of “Capital” in Intelligent Era

As a Chinese scholar in the digital age, I was greatly influenced by Marxist thought naturally. In studying his ideological achievements, there is no doubt that “Capital” is one of his most influential works. In his “Speech at Karl Marx’s Funeral”, Engels pointed out that Marx had two great discoveries in his life. “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, Marx discovered the law of development human history”, “But that is not all, Mark also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.” His second discovery—the modern capitalist mode of production and the special law of movement of the bourgeois society it produces is what Marx intensively expounded in “Capital”. In the preface of the first edition of this work, Marx clearly stated his research purpose: “what I want to study in this book is the capitalist mode of production and the relations of production and exchange corresponding to that mode”. And this is also the heart of the discussion in this section.