SAARUTU · Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground · Value-Theory Brief Library
This is the SAARUTU hub for Marx's value-theory. It is organized by volume. Each volume opens with its complete brief — the synthesis layer that gathers all of that volume's parts into a single standalone reconstruction, built to be read straight through and written from. Beneath it sit the source briefs, one per Part of the work, each reconstructing the argument in detail with full, page-anchored quotes. The complete brief draws on all of them and stands on its own; the part briefs are where the receipts live.
The library grows as the briefs are written. The master reference below is the top of the whole structure: a standalone synthesis across the entire project, Capital and the Grundrisse together. Beneath it, the three volumes of Capital are laid out in turn, followed by the Grundrisse — each opening with its complete brief and then its parts.
Across the whole project
Marx and the critique of political economy: Capital I–III and the Grundrisse, gathered into one synthesis.
Master Reference Document
The standalone reference and crash course across the entire project. Every load-bearing concept — value, surplus-value, capital, the circuits, the falling rate of profit, rent, the trinity formula, and the Grundrisse's method — gathered as a dossier of full, page-anchored quotes, built to be written from. It draws on all the volume and source briefs and stands on its own.
Capital · Volume I
Marx, Capital, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin, 1976). Eight Parts.
The complete brief
Complete Brief · Volume I
All eight Part briefs below, combined into one standalone reconstruction of the whole of Volume I, from the commodity to primitive accumulation.
The source briefs
Part One · Chapters 1–3
The commodity and its two factors, the value-form, the fetish, and the genesis of money.
Part Two · Chapters 4–6
The general formula M–C–M′, the contradictions it raises, and the peculiar commodity that resolves them: labour-power.
Part Three · Chapters 7–11
The labour process and valorization, constant and variable capital, the rate of surplus-value, the working day, and the rate and mass of surplus-value.
Part Four · Chapters 12–15
Relative surplus-value, co-operation, the division of labour in manufacture, and machinery and large-scale industry.
Part Five · Chapters 16–18
Productive labour and subsumption, the changing magnitudes of the price of labour-power and surplus-value, and the formulae for the rate of surplus-value.
Part Six · Chapters 19–22
The wage-form as the mystification of the value of labour-power, time-wages, piece-wages, and national differences in wages.
Part Seven · Chapters 23–25
Simple reproduction, the transformation of surplus-value into capital, and the general law of capitalist accumulation.
Part Eight · Chapters 26–33
The historical presupposition of capital: the divorce of the producer from the means of production, and the expropriation of the expropriators.
Capital · Volume II
Marx, Capital, Volume II, trans. David Fernbach (Penguin, 1978). Three Parts.
The complete brief
Complete Brief · Volume II
All three Part briefs below, combined into one standalone reconstruction of the whole of Volume II, from the circuits of capital to the reproduction schemas.
The source briefs
Part One · Chapters 1–6
The three circuits of capital — money, productive, commodity — their unity in industrial capital, and circulation time and its costs.
Part Two · Chapters 7–17
Turnover time and its number, fixed and circulating capital, the classical economists, the working and production periods, and the turnover of variable capital and the circulation of surplus-value.
Part Three · Chapters 18–21
The two departments of social production, the reproduction schemas, and the conditions of simple and expanded reproduction.
Capital · Volume III
Marx, Capital, Volume III, trans. David Fernbach (Penguin, 1981). Seven Parts.
The complete brief
Complete Brief · Volume III
All seven Part briefs below, combined into one standalone reconstruction of the whole of Volume III, from the rate of profit to the trinity formula.
The source briefs
Part One · Chapters 1–7
Cost price and profit, the rate of profit, its relation to the rate of surplus-value, and the effects of turnover, economy, and price change.
Part Two · Chapters 8–12
Differing compositions of capital, the formation of the general rate of profit, and the transformation of values into prices of production.
Part Three · Chapters 13–15
The law itself, the factors that counteract it, and the unfolding of its internal contradictions.
Part Four · Chapters 16–20
The transformation of commodity capital and money capital into commercial and money-dealing capital: commercial profit, its turnover, and the history of merchant's capital.
Part Five · Chapters 21–36
Interest-bearing capital and the M–M′ fetish, the division of profit into interest and profit of enterprise, credit, fictitious capital, and pre-capitalist usury.
Part Six · Chapters 37–47
Differential rent in its two forms, absolute ground-rent, and the genesis of capitalist ground-rent.
Part Seven · Chapters 48–52
The trinity formula and the completed fetishism of capitalist production, the critique of the surface, distribution, and classes.
The Grundrisse
Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Penguin, 1973). Complete brief and source briefs to follow.
The complete brief
Complete Brief · Grundrisse
All five source briefs below, combined into one standalone reconstruction of the 1857–58 notebooks, from the Introduction to the fragment on machines.
The source briefs
Brief One · The 1857 Introduction
Production, distribution, exchange, and consumption as a totality; the method of political economy; the historical ordering of the categories.
Brief Two · The Chapter on Money
The critique of labour-money, money as the autonomous form of exchange-value, and money as impersonal social power — the real community of bourgeois society.
Brief Three · The Chapter on Capital
The transition from money to capital, the exchange between capital and living labour, the concept of capital as self-valorizing value, and the great civilizing influence of capital.
Brief Four · The Chapter on Capital
The original unity of the labourer with the earth; the communal, ancient, and Germanic forms of property; the dissolution that produces the free labourer and the presupposition of capital.
Brief Five · The Chapter on Capital
Circulation and turnover, fixed capital, the automatic system of machinery and the general intellect, real wealth as disposable time, and the transformation into profit.
SAARUTU (Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground)
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Last updated 9 July 2026