Karl Marx
Capital Volume One
1873
Afterword to the Second German Edition
I must start by informing the readers of the first
edition about the alterations made in the second edition. One is struck
at once by the clearer arrangement of the book. Additional notes are everywhere
marked as notes to the second edition. The following are the most important
points with regard to the text itself:
In Chapter I, Section 1, the derivation of value from an analysis of the equations
by which every exchange-value is expressed has been carried out with greater
scientific strictness; likewise the connexion between the substance of
value and the determination of the magnitude of value by socially necessary
labour-time, which was only alluded to in the first edition, is now expressly
emphasised. Chapter I, Section 3 (the Form of Value), has been completely revised, a task
which was made necessary by the double exposition in the first edition,
if nothing else. — Let me remark, in passing, that that double exposition
had been occasioned by my friend, Dr. L Kugelmann in Hanover. I was visiting
him in the spring of 1867 when the first proof-sheets arrived from Hamburg,
and he convinced me that most readers needed a supplementary, more didactic
explanation of the form of value. — The last section of the first chapter,
“The Fetishism of Commodities, etc.,” has largely been altered. Chapter
III, Section I (The Measure of Value), has been carefully revised, because
in the first edition this section had been treated negligently, the reader
having been referred to the explanation already given in “Zur Kritik der
Politischen Oekonomie,” Berlin 1859. Chapter VII, particularly Part 2 [Eng.
ed., Chapter IX, Section 2], has been re-written to a great extent.
It would be a waste of time to go into all the partial textual
changes, which were often purely stylistic. They occur throughout the book.
Nevertheless I find now, on revising the French translation appearing in
Paris, that several parts of the German original stand in need of rather
thorough remoulding, other parts require rather heavy stylistic editing,
and still others painstaking elimination of occasional slips. But there
was no time for that. For I had been informed only in the autumn of 1871,
when in the midst of other urgent work, that the book was sold out and
that the printing of the second edition was to begin in January of 1872.
The appreciation which “Das Kapital” rapidly gained in wide circles
of the German working-class is the best reward of my labours. Herr Mayer,
a Vienna manufacturer, who in economic matters represents the bourgeois
point of view, in a pamphlet published during the Franco-German War aptly
expounded the idea that the great capacity for theory, which used to be
considered a hereditary German possession, had almost completely disappeared
amongst the so-called educated classes in Germany, but that amongst its
working-class, on the contrary, that capacity was celebrating its revival.
To the present moment Political Economy, in Germany, is a foreign
science. Gustav von Gulich in his “Historical description of Commerce,
Industry,” &c., [1] especially
in the two first volumes
published in 1830, has examined at length the historical circumstances
that prevented, in Germany, the development of the capitalist mode of production,
and consequently the development, in that country, of modern bourgeois
society. Thus the soil whence Political Economy springs was wanting. This
“science” had to be imported from England and France as a ready-made article;
its German professors remained schoolboys. The theoretical expression of
a foreign reality was turned, in their hands, into a collection of dogmas,
interpreted by them in terms of the petty trading world around them, and
therefore misinterpreted. The feeling of scientific impotence, a feeling
not wholly to be repressed, and the uneasy consciousness of having to touch
a subject in reality foreign to them, was but imperfectly concealed, either
under a parade of literary and historical erudition, or by an admixture
of extraneous material, borrowed from the so-called “Kameral” sciences,
a medley of smatterings, through whose purgatory the hopeful candidate
for the German bureaucracy has to pass.
Since 1848 capitalist production has developed rapidly in Germany,
and at the present time it is in the full bloom of speculation and swindling.
But fate is still unpropitious to our professional economists. At the time
when they were able to deal with Political Economy in a straightforward
fashion, modern economic conditions did not actually exist in Germany.
And as soon as these conditions did come into existence, they did so under
circumstances that no longer allowed of their being really and impartially
investigated within the bounds of the bourgeois horizon. In so far as Political
Economy remains within that horizon, in so far, i.e., as the capitalist
regime is looked upon as the absolutely final form of social production,
instead of as a passing historical phase of its evolution, Political Economy
can remain a science only so long as the class-struggle is latent or manifests
itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena.
Let us take England. Its Political Economy belongs to the period
in which the class-struggle was as yet undeveloped. Its last great representative,
Ricardo, in the end, consciously makes the antagonism of class interests,
of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting-point of his investigations,
naively taking this antagonism for a social law of Nature. But by this
start the science of bourgeois economy had reached the limits beyond which
it could not pass. Already in the lifetime of Ricardo, and in opposition
to him, it was met by criticism, in the person of Sismondi. [2]
The succeeding period, from 1820 to 1830, was notable in England
for scientific activity in the domain of Political Economy. It was the
time as well of the vulgarising and extending of Ricardo’s theory, as of
the contest of that theory with the old school. Splendid tournaments were
held. What was done then, is little known to the Continent generally, because
the polemic is for the most part scattered through articles in reviews,
occasional literature and pamphlets. The unprejudiced character of this
polemic — although the theory of Ricardo already serves, in exceptional
cases, as a weapon of attack upon bourgeois economy — is explained by
the circumstances of the time. On the one hand, modern industry itself
was only just emerging from the age of childhood, as is shown by the fact
that with the crisis of 1825 it for the first time opens the periodic cycle
of its modern life. On the other hand, the class-struggle between capital
and labour is forced into the background, politically by the discord between
the governments and the feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance
on the one hand, and the popular masses, led by the bourgeoisie, on the
other; economically by the quarrel between industrial capital and aristocratic
landed property - a quarrel that in France was concealed by the opposition
between small and large landed property, and that in England broke out
openly after the Corn Laws. The literature of Political Economy in England
at this time calls to mind the stormy forward movement in France after
Dr. Quesnay’s death, but only as a Saint Martin’s summer reminds us of
spring. With the year 1830 came the decisive crisis.
In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political
power. Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically,
took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell
of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question,
whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital
or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In
place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place
of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent
of apologetic. Still, even the obtrusive pamphlets with which the Anti-Corn
Law League, led by the manufacturers Cobden and Bright, deluged the world,
have a historic interest, if no scientific one, on account of their polemic
against the landed aristocracy. But since then the Free-trade legislation,
inaugurated by Sir Robert Peel, has deprived vulgar economy of this its
last sting.
The Continental revolution of 1848-9 also had its reaction in
England. Men who still claimed some scientific standing and aspired to
be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of the ruling-classes
tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no
longer to be ignored, of the proletariat. Hence a shallow syncretism of
which John Stuart Mill is the best representative. It is a declaration
of bankruptcy by bourgeois economy, an event on which the great Russian
scholar and critic, N. Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the light of a master
mind in his “Outlines of Political Economy according to Mill.”
In Germany, therefore, the capitalist mode of production came
to a head, after its antagonistic character had already, in France and
England, shown itself in a fierce strife of classes. And meanwhile, moreover,
the German proletariat had attained a much more clear class-consciousness
than the German bourgeoisie. Thus, at the very moment when a bourgeois
science of Political Economy seemed at last possible in Germany, it had
in reality again become impossible.
Under these circumstances its professors fell into two groups.
The one set, prudent, practical business folk, flocked to the banner of
Bastiat, the most superficial and therefore the most adequate representative
of the apologetic of vulgar economy; the other, proud of the professorial
dignity of their science, followed John Stuart Mill in his attempt to reconcile
irreconcilables. Just as in the classical time of bourgeois economy, so
also in the time of its decline, the Germans remained mere schoolboys,
imitators and followers, petty retailers and hawkers in the service of
the great foreign wholesale concern.
The peculiar historical development of German society therefore
forbids, in that country, all original work in bourgeois economy; but not
the criticism of that economy. So far as such criticism represents a class,
it can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow
of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes
— the proletariat.
The learned and unlearned spokesmen of the German bourgeoisie
tried at first to kill “Das Kapital” by silence, as they had managed to
do with my earlier writings. As soon as they found that these tactics no
longer fitted in with the conditions of the time, they wrote, under pretence
of criticising my book, prescriptions “for the tranquillisation of the
bourgeois mind.” But they found in the workers’ press — see, e.g., Joseph
Dietzgen’s articles in the Volksstaat — antagonists stronger than themselves,
to whom (down to this very day) they owe a reply. [3]
An excellent Russian translation of “Das Kapital” appeared in
the spring of 1872. The edition of 3,000 copies is already nearly exhausted.
As early as 1871, N. Sieber, Professor of Political Economy in the University
of Kiev, in his work “David Ricardo’s Theory of Value and of Capital,”
referred to my theory of value, of money and of capital, as in its fundamentals
a necessary sequel to the teaching of Smith and Ricardo. That which astonishes
the Western European in the reading of this excellent work, is the author’s
consistent and firm grasp of the purely theoretical position.
That the method employed in “Das Kapital” has been little understood,
is shown by the various conceptions, contradictory one to another, that
have been formed of it.
Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the
one hand, I treat economics metaphysically, and on the other hand — imagine!
— confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead
of writing receipts [4] (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future. In
answer to the reproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it:
“In so far as it deals with actual theory, the method of Marx is the deductive
method of the whole English school, a school whose failings and virtues
are common to the best theoretic economists.”
M. Block — “Les Théoriciens
du Socialisme en Allemagne. Extrait du Journal des Economistes, Juillet
et Août 1872” — makes the discovery that my method is analytic and says:
“Par cet ouvrage M. Marx se classe parmi les esprits analytiques les plus
eminents.” German reviews, of course, shriek out at “Hegelian sophistics.”
The European Messenger of St. Petersburg in an article dealing exclusively
with the method of “Das Kapital” (May number, 1872, pp. 427-436), finds
my method of inquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation,
unfortunately, German-dialectical. It says:
“At first sight, if the judgment
is based on the external form of the presentation of the subject, Marx
is the most ideal of ideal philosophers, always in the German, i.e., the
bad sense of the word. But in point of fact he is infinitely more realistic
than all his forerunners in the work of economic criticism. He can in no
sense be called an idealist.”
I cannot answer the writer better than by
aid of a few extracts from his own criticism, which may interest some of
my readers to whom the Russian original is inaccessible.
After a quotation from the preface to my “Criticism of Political
Economy,” Berlin, 1859, pp. IV-VII, where I discuss the materialistic basis
of my method, the writer goes on:
“The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the
phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that
law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they
have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period.
Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their
development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from
one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered,
he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social
life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show,
by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate
orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible,
the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is
quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the
present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which
the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men
believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious
of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history,
governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and
intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness
and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element
plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry
whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have
for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to
say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as
its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation
and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For
this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated
as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect
to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of
all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences
and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present
themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are
one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or
the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws
do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has
laws of its own. ... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development,
and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject
also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous
to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists
misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the
laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows
that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants
or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different
laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a
whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions
in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law
of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on
the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ...
With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions
and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task
of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system
established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly
scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic
life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing
of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death
of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one.
And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx’s book has.”
Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this
striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way,
what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?
Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from
that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail,
to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner
connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately
described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter
is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before
us a mere a priori construction.
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but
is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain,
i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he
even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real
world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the
Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material
world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly
thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as
I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure
of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi
[Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured
Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s
time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed
myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the
chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression
peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands,
by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form
of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing
on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover
the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany,
because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things.
In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and
its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and
affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time
also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable
breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form
as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature
not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon
it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society
impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the
changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and
whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again
approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality
of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics
even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German
empire.
Karl Marx
London
January 24, 1873
Footnotes
1. Geschichtliche Darstellung des Handels,
der Gewerbe und des Ackerbaus, &c.. von Gustav von Gulich. 5 vols.,
Jena. 1830-45.
2. See my work “Zur Kritik, &c.,”
p. 39.
3. The mealy-mouthed babblers of German
vulgar economy fell foul of the style of my book. No one can feel the literary
shortcomings in “Das Kapital” more strongly than I myself. Yet I will for
the benefit and the enjoyment of these gentlemen and their public quote
in this connexion one English and one Russian notice. The Saturday Review
always hostile to my views, said in its notice of the first edition: “The
presentation of the subject invests the driest economic questions with
a certain peculiar charm.” The “St. Petersburg Journal” (Sankt-Peterburgskie
Viedomosti), in its issue of April 8 (20), 1872, says: “The presentation
of the subject, with the exception of one or two exceptionally special
parts, is distinguished by its comprehensibility by the general reader,
its clearness, and, in spite of the scientific intricacy of the subject,
by an unusual liveliness. In this respect the author in no way resembles
... the majority of German scholars who ... write their books in a language
so dry and obscure that the heads of ordinary mortals are cracked by it.”
4.
Rezepte – translated as “Receipt,” which in the 19th Century, meant “recipe” and Ben Fowkes, for example translates this as “recipe.” [MIA footnote].
Transcribed by Hinrich Kuhls
Html Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)