Overview
What Is Capital? is a short polemical work in political economy by Ferdinand Lassalle, presented as a free English translation by F. Keddell of chapter IV of Lassalle’s larger polemic Herr Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch. The text is not a biography or a general treatise; it is a focused essay asking how “capital” should be defined and why the definitions used by established economists are misleading.
The essay opens by reviewing definitions that have “hitherto passed muster.” It rejects Bastiat’s definition of capital as the “saved portion of a man’s income” as childish and absurd, then turns to more respectable formulations: capital as “the instruments of labor,” as “hoarded labor,” or as “products which are continually applied to further production.” Lassalle’s strategy is to show that each definition is too broad. If capital were simply an instrument of labor, or any product of past labor used in further production, then the category would include things that plainly are not capital.
He develops this through the example of a “Red Indian” in the primeval forests hunting with a bow and arrow. The bow is an instrument of labor; it is the result of expended labor; it is used in further production. All the standard definitions would therefore make the bow capital and the hunter a capitalist. Lassalle treats this as a reductio ad absurdum. The bow serves the hunter’s subsistence, but it cannot be “laid out at interest,” and the capacity to yield interest is, in his argument, the distinguishing mark of capital. He extends the point by imagining the hunter trading the bow for a deer, furs, or a nugget of gold. In the primitive conditions described, those goods still cannot be made profit-bearing; they become capital only when transported into a different, “European” set of economic relations. The example is meant to show that capital is not a physical attribute of an object. The same object can be a means of production or a product of labor without being capital.
From this negative critique, the essay moves toward a positive conception: capital is a historical and social category, not a mere thing. It is a product or means of production that becomes capital under specific social conditions—conditions in which it can yield interest or profit and in which its owners can derive an income from it without directly laboring. Lassalle’s emphasis falls on the distinction between the material form of wealth and the social relation that turns wealth into capital. The essay therefore attacks the tendency of Bastiat and other “vulgar” economists to treat capital as a natural, timeless feature of production, and it argues that their definitions serve apologetic purposes by making profit or interest appear to be a natural return from mere tools or saved goods.
The tone is polemical and satirical. Lassalle writes as a critic of bourgeois political economy, using irony and hypothetical examples rather than a systematic treatise. The text stays tightly focused on the definitional question: what is capital, and what follows from defining it correctly? It does not set out a full economic system; it is an excerpt from a larger controversy, and its argument is that the standard definitions confuse the instruments of production with the specific social form they take under capitalist conditions. Capital, in Lassalle’s account, is not the bow and arrow as such, but a social power of disposal over products and labor that arises under particular historical conditions.
Because the essay treats capital as a social power rather than a thing, the question of ownership becomes central to its argument. The same object can serve production while remaining merely an instrument; it becomes capital only when inserted into relations that allow its owner to claim an income from it. Lassalle’s critique therefore separates the technical role of tools and saved goods from the social and legal claims that surround them. This separation is what gives the essay its polemical force against Bastiat: if interest cannot be derived from the physical nature of tools or from the bare fact of saving, then the standard defense of interest as a natural return loses its foundation. The text’s method is to press definitions until they either include too much—the hunter’s bow—or silently presuppose the very social conditions they claim merely to describe. Its significance lies in this analytic strategy: it makes capital a historically specific category and exposes the apologetic function of presenting it as timeless. The essay is thus a critique of political economy rather than a neutral taxonomy; it argues that how capital is defined determines whether existing property incomes appear natural or conventional.
