Two Tools for Understanding Capital: Kritik Systems and Praxis Primer

We hear that wages are set by the market, as though employers had no say in what they pay and workers could choose not to sell their labour. For example, wages become what a market will bear, profit is simply a reward for risk, and rent is an unavoidable cost of living. Meanwhile the relations that produce each figure—ownership, dependence on wages, control over land and housing, the appropriation of surplus—disappear behind the appearance of an impersonal mechanism. We are left to experience rising prices, layoffs, and a pay packet consumed by housing as separate misfortunes, even though each belongs to a social order organised around accumulation. The difficulty is not that these relations are beyond our understanding, but the concepts needed to examine them are rarely made available as working tools.

I have been building two projects around soving that issue: Kritik Systems is a browser-based suite for working through the quantitative categories of Marxian political economy, while Praxis Primer supports the collective study of socialist and communist texts. They do different work, but share a premise: if we want to understand capital as a set of historical relations people reproduce and can change, we need to study both the theory and the concrete relations between wages, surplus value, and profit.

A materialist account begins with how we produce the conditions of life and how those conditions are reproduced: who owns the means of production, who must sell labour-power to survive, who controls the product, and where the surplus goes. Law, politics, and common sense develop within those relations, helping to stabilise them even as they give us ways to contest them. Taking this seriously means asking what a firm’s accounts conceal as well as what they record, how changes in machinery and labour affect profitability, and what conditions allow an economy to reproduce itself from one cycle of production to the next.

Capital asks these questions through ratios, worked examples, and schemas as well as argument. Yet its numerical passages are often passed over in introductory discussions, while more detailed treatments sit behind the barriers of academic training, time, and access. Kritik Systems is meant to make that work easier to enter without making it seem simpler than it is. It lets us calculate surplus value, the rate of exploitation as the ratio of surplus value to variable capital, the organic composition of capital as the ratio of constant to variable capital, and the rate of profit under changing conditions; it also lets us work through reproduction schemas, where the relation between the production of means of production and the production of means of consumption becomes a condition of the system’s continued operation.

The value of a calculator depends on whether we can inspect the reasoning it performs. Kritik Systems shows its derivations, assumptions, and references alongside the result, so that changing an input becomes a way to test a relation rather than merely generate another figure. We can extend the working day and see what that does to the rate of exploitation, or raise constant capital relative to living labour and examine the pressure this places on the rate of profit, while remaining attentive to the counteracting forces and historical conditions that no single equation can settle. The point is to make the model available for criticism and use, especially for readers working through Capital, educators explaining its categories, and researchers who need a derivation they can reproduce.

In a firm’s accounts, wages are a cost to be cut and profit is the figure left after costs are paid; there is no entry for the unpaid labour that produces it. When wages appear only as a cost and profit as the achievement left over after costs have been paid, the labour that produces surplus value is obscured within the firm’s own description of itself. Recasting the same figures as constant capital, variable capital, and surplus value brings the relation between paid and unpaid labour into view, while also reminding us that the profit realised by any particular firm is mediated by competition, prices, and the distribution of surplus across the economy. A useful tool should clarify that relation without pretending that an entered figure is, by itself, a complete account of exploitation.

The software has material conditions of its own. A project about extraction would reproduce its subject rather closely if its calculators required an account, gathered behavioural data, and converted continued access into a subscription. Kritik Systems is therefore designed without accounts, advertising, trackers, or analytics SDKs. Scenarios stay in the browser unless we choose to export them; the core calculators are free, and a one-time purchase unlocks the full suite. The code is licensed under the AGPL, and the explanatory content under CC BY-SA, so that the tool can be inspected and the teaching material shared and adapted.

None of these choices place a small project outside the market, or make paying for its development an embarrassment that needs concealing. They establish limits on what the project will do to the people using it. There is a material difference between charging once for access to work and arranging software so that its users continually supply data, attention, and rent; that difference does not abolish capitalist relations, but it is still worth building into the infrastructure we make.

Praxis Primer approaches the same problem through study. Marxist-Leninist theory has been developed and carried forward through organised reading, argument, and practice, where a difficult passage could be tested against the conditions people knew and the political work before them. Access to a digitised text does not, on its own, provide the time, continuity, or collective setting that kind of learning requires. Many of us can find The State and Revolution or Wage Labour and Capital more easily than we can find a group able to work through either book together.

Praxis Primer provides reading plans with manageable sections and time estimates, original summaries that make each section’s argument easier to check, glossaries for terms whose meanings cannot be guessed from everyday usage, and prompts that ask where a claim comes from and how it bears on present conditions. Spaced review helps keep concepts available beyond the week we first encounter them, while private annotations remain on our own devices. These features cannot substitute for collective study, but they can reduce some of the friction that keeps a circle from sustaining it.

The original texts remain with the archives that have made them accessible, particularly the volunteer labour of the Marxists Internet Archive. Praxis Primer links to those texts rather than enclosing them inside another service. Its contribution is the material around the reading—the plans, summaries, prompts, and glosses—which is also released under a Creative Commons licence. If a shared intellectual inheritance is to remain useful, access must include the practical means to work with it, without every new layer of assistance becoming another claim of ownership over the commons beneath it.

That principle also shapes how study circles share plans. A read-only link can carry a plan and its prompts to a group without requiring profiles, membership records, comments, or a directory of who is reading what. Discussion can happen in the union hall, the lounge room, or a group chat the circle already controls. Building a social network into the study tool would create a different set of incentives—moderation burdens, engagement metrics, pressure to keep people on the platform—and a central record of reading habits and political associations that nobody needs in order to study together. The smaller design gives the group something useful while leaving the group itself beyond the platform.

The two sites connect where reading and calculation meet. A passage in Praxis Primer can open a relevant Kritik Systems calculator with figures already entered, so that an argument about exploitation or accumulation can be worked through rather than accepted as a phrase. A single purchase unlocks the paid material on both sites without an account on either. The connection is practical, but it reflects a deeper relation: numbers acquire political meaning through an account of the social relations that produce them, while theory stays more exact when we can follow those relations through concrete examples and test its claims.

We are often told that economics requires deference to specialists, as though the organisation of production were too complex for the people whose lives sustain it to examine. Expertise matters, but its authority should not spare its assumptions from scrutiny, especially when prevailing economic categories take private ownership and wage dependence as given. Tools cannot organise us or change ownership by themselves. They can help us read further, argue more precisely, teach one another, and recognise where a figure presented as an unavoidable fact expresses a relation of power. That is the work Kritik Systems and Praxis Primer are being built to support.