Reddit mentions of Marx's 'Das Kapital' For Beginners

It's literally the seminal work of anti-capitalist thought in modern history , there is not a socialist or communist or syndicalist or whatever-leftist writer or leader alive who hasn't based their arguments partly or entirely on Marx's critique of Capitalism as laid out in 'Capital'. You started this thread to try to get a better understanding of what socialists believe, well here's the socialist bible. If you give even an ounce of a damn about reading up on socialist ideology in any book, it would be this book.

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Now that said, it is super duper long, dry, and translated from german, so it's a bit of difficult read for a lot of people, which is why many over the years have taken it upon themselves to write lighter, more rudimentary summaries. Here's one: ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JGE4DDQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 )

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I've heard there are also some good summaries on youtube, but can't think of any to recommend at the moment.

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Also,

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> Forgive me if I’m wrong that it seems like this specific author interpreted capitalism in such a way that it would be nearly impossible to actually defend it.

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Capitalism as a word was created by French socialists and left anarchists in the 1850's like Blanc and Proudhon to define what they didn't like about the economic system of their time. Proudhon defined it as:

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>"Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labour",

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i.e rule of society by and for the benefit of capitalists; 'capitalist' here referring in its original meaning to essentially mean people who make most or all of their money by sole virtue of already having lots of money. Socialism, then, was and is used by Socialists to describe any active measure to take control of the resources away from those kinds of people and give them to the people who actually use them to produce value. There's a million different ways one could imagine doing this, which is why there's a million different kinds of socialism, and why socialists tend to argue a lot, to answer the question in your OP.

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It was within this tradition, and with this definition of Capitalism in mind, that Marx was writing. Marx didn't selectively cater his definition of capitalism to suit his purposes, the term was later co-opted out from under him.

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People haven't used the word "Capitalism" in terms of a positive ideology for all that long at all the in the grand scheme of things, I think but can't source at the moment that it emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century, first with the likes of Keynes and then with the Austrian School with the likes of Hayek and Rothbard, and then modern 'libertarian' free market types like Milton Friedman. The Cold War was probably a big impetus; giving western non-socialist democracies their own "-ism" to describe what made those places better than places with Totalitarian Soviet-style Communism.

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The ideology that people who self-identify with "capitalism" nowadays describes what in Marx's time was called 'Liberalism'; the idea that the best outcome for everyone is when the people control the government and when that government doesn't have too much power; specifically as pertaining to the economy, which of course had its start in the age of enlightenment with the likes of Adam Smith. Before Marx, Liberals were primarily locked in an ideological battle with Monarchists (the original left vs right issue). As Monarchism faded away, Liberalism itself evolved over time, in the late 19th century splitting into 'Neoclassical' Liberals, (who maintained their lesseiz-faire economic attitudes and evolved into what in the US make up Libertarian and Republican economic positions), and 'Progressives' who wanted to use the democratic government to improve the conditions of the poor somewhat but without fundamentally changing the system that makes them poor, the contingent that more or less evolved into the modern Democrats.

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What makes the debate between 'socialism' and 'capitalism' so interesting and so frustrating is that marxists have more or less been using the same vocabulary since the 1850's, while common usage of those words has drifted past them over time in places like the US. This is why you hear socialists refer to both Obama and Romney as 'liberals', or why they tell libertarians 'you're not a capitalist, you don't even own your own car'.