What’s Up With the Ending?

Marx has a few different styles of chapter endings.

Half of them, chapters 4, 7, and 14, end pretty basically with theoretical information. Here's Chapter 4: "M-C-M' is in fact therefore the general formula for capital, in the form in which it appears directly in the sphere of circulation" (4.24).

Not exactly a cliffhanger.

Chapters 6 and 10, though, end with some legit rhetorical flourishes. At the end of Chapter 6, Marx sets up a nice contrast between the sphere of circulation, which is just commodity exchange, where the capitalist is money personified. In the production process, the money-owner becomes the capitalist, who "smirks self-importantly and is intent on business" (6.23).

Well, that's a bit of a cliffhanger, right?

And in Chapter 10, Marx congratulates the working-class movement on achieving a "modest Magna Carta" of the legally limited working day (10.7.7). Okay, he's at least trying.

Marx also ends that Chapter 10 with a quotation from Virgil. Chapter 1 ends with a quotation as well, from Shakespeare.

Yeah, Marx is a bit of a snob, all that love for the working class notwithstanding.

One thing you should know is that old Karl revised this first volume of Das Kapital several times in his life, publishing multiple editions. Maybe he spent too much time on it: the remaining volumes were never published in his lifetime, and many of his planned ones were never worked on at all. But that's all right—this baby is big enough as it is.