The first volume of Capital has quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Schiller, Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Defoe, Cervantes, Dryden, Heine, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Thomas More and Samuel Butler – as well as allusions to horror tales about werewolves and vampires, German chap-books, English romantic novels, popular ballads, songs and jingles, melodrama and farce, myths and proverbs.

Capital has spawned countless texts analysing Marx's labour theory of value or his law of the declining rate of profit, but only a handful of critics have given serious attention to Marx's own declared ambition to produce a work of art. One deterrent, perhaps, is that its multi-layered structure evades easy categorization. The book can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created ('Capital which comes into the world soiled with gore from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore'); or as a Victorian melodrama (in his 1962 study The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers, S.E. Hyman even proposes an apt title for the drama: The Mortgage on Labour-Power Foreclosed); or as a black farce (in debunking the 'phantom-like objectivity' of the commodity to expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality Marx is using one of the classic methods of comedy, stripping off the gallant knight's armour to reveal a tubby little man in his underpants); or as a Greek tragedy ('Like Oedipus, the actors in Marx's recounting of human history are in the grip of an inexorable necessity which unfolds itself no matter what they do,' C. Frankel writes in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought. 'And yet all that links them to this fate is their own tragic blindness, their own idées fixes, which prevent them from seeing the facts until too late'). Or perhaps it is a satirical utopia like the land of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile: in Marx's version of capitalist society, as in Jonathan Swift's equine pseudo-paradise, the false Eden is created by reducing ordinary humans to the status of impotent, alienated Yahoos.

Had Marx wished to produce a straightforward text of classical economics he could have done so - and in fact he did. Two lectures delivered in June 1865, later published as Value, Price and Profit, give a concise and lucid précis of his theories about commodities and labour. So why is Capital, which covers the same ground, so utterly different in style? A clue can be found in one of the very few analogies he permitted himself in Value, Price and Profit, when explaining his belief that profits arise from selling commodities at their 'real' value and not, as one might suppose, from adding a surcharge. 'This seems paradox and contrary to everyday observation,' he writes. 'It is also paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things.'

Capitalism, it is said, is a world system that was mature in the Nineteenth Century, but has now entered its declining stage. In our view this theory of capitalist decline or of the decadence of capitalism hinders the project of abolishing that system.