KAPITAL, Das. Although it was Karl Marx’s magnum opus, Das Kapital represents only fragment of his projected work on political economy. From the time of his exile from Germany and arrival in Paris in the early 1840’s, Marx had been amassing material for his work. Interrupted by the 1848 revolutions, he got down to serious work after settling in London in 1849. He produced an important rough draft of his whole project in 1857—1858 but did not mange to get volume one of Das Kapital published until 1867. Although he worked on the manuscripts of volumes two and THREE virtually until his death in 1883, they were left unfinished and had to be edited by his collaborator, Friedrich Engels. These volumes appeared respectively in 1887 and 1895.

资本论。尽管它是卡尔·马克思的代表作，但《资本论》只是他对政治经济学专题研究的片断。自他从德国流亡至19世纪40年代早期到达巴黎的那段时间开始，马克思一直在为他的著作积累材料。但1848年的革命中断了该项工作，1849年在伦敦定居后他才开始认真工作。他为1857年至1858年整个计划撰写了重要草稿，但直到1867年才出版了《资本论》第一卷。虽然到1883年他去世前他实际上都在撰写第二卷和第三卷的手稿，但未能完成，不得不由他的合作者弗里德里希·恩格斯来编辑。后两卷分别于1887年和1895年出版。

   In a sense, Marx was the last and the greatest of the classical economists, for the concepts he used were part of the language common to all economists in the mid-19^th century but thereafter abandoned by the orthodox schools of economics. Central to classical economics was the labor theory of value, according to which the value of objects was measured by the amount of labor embodied in them. This seemed to involve the puzzle that in the exchange of capital and labor, the wage of the laborer had a smaller exchange value than the exchange value of the object he produced.

    在某种意义上，马克思是最后的，最伟大的古典经济学家，因为他使用的概念是19世纪中期所有经济学家通用语言的一部分，但此后被正统的经济学派所放弃。古典经济学的核心是劳动价值论，根据这种理论，物品的价值是由它们包含的劳动量来衡量的。这似乎涉及到这种困惑，即在资本与劳动的交换中，劳动者工资获得的交换价值小于他生产物品的交换价值。

   Marx accounted for this phenomenon of profit by means of his theory of surplus value—characterized by Engels as Marx’s most important “discovery” in economics. The essential point was that the capitalist got the worker to work longer than was merely sufficient to embody in his product the value of his labor power. The capitalist was more or less successful in this, and the consequent variation in surplus value was called the rate of surplus value (or rate of exploitation), around which the struggle between capitalists and workers centered. The theory of surplus value involved predications about the future of capitalism; for the capitalists, that their rate of profit would decrease; for the workers, that their relative standard of living would decline; and for the capitalist system as a whole, the it would be shaken by a series of crises culminating in a transition to communism. These predications have yet to be fulfilled.

马克思用他的剩余价值理论阐述了这种利润现象---恩格斯认为这是马克思在经济学中最重要的 “发现”。关键点是，资本家使工人工作的时间超过了工人在产品中足以体现其劳动力的价值。在这方面资本家或多或少是成功的，而由此引起的剩余价值的变化被称为剩余价值率（或叫剥削率），资本家与工人之间的斗争便与此为中心。剩余价值理论涉及到对资本主义未来的预测；对资本家而言，他们的利润率会降低；对工人而言，他们生活的相对标准会下降；而对于作为整体的资本主义制度而言，它会被一系列达到顶峰的危机所动摇，进而过渡到共产主义。但这些预测尚未现实。

                                              DAVID McLellan, University of Kent

                                                大卫·麦克来伦，肯特大学

                                                      2022年10月20日译

（译者注：该词条位列《大美百科全书》1985年版，第16卷，第316页）