THE work, the first volume of wbicli I now submit to the public, forms the continuation of my '' Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie " (A contribution to the criticism of Political Economy) published in 1859. The long pause between the first part and the continu- ation is due to an illness of many years' duration that again and again interrupted my work.
The substance of that earlier work is summarised in the first three chapters of this volume. This is done not merely for the sake of connection and completeness. The presentation of the subject-matter is improved. As far as circumstances in any way permit, many points only hinted at in the earlier book are here worked out more fully, whilst, conversely, points worked out fully there are only touched upon in this volume. The sections on the history of the theories of value and of money are now, of course, left out altogether. The reader of the earlier work will find, however, in the notes to the first chapter additional sources of reference relative to the history of those theories.
Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, pre- sent the greatest difficulty. That which concerns more xvi Authors Prefaces.
especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised/ The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society the commodity-form of the product of labour — or the value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.
With the exception of the section on value-form, therefore, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.
The physicist either observes physical phenomena '' This is the more necessary, as even the section of Ferdinand Lassalle's work against Schulze-Delitzsch, in which he professes to give "the intel- lectual quintessence " of my explanations on these subjects, contains im- portant mistakes. If Ferdinand Lassalle has borrowed almost literally from my writings, and without any acknowledgment, all the general theoretical propositions in his economic works, e.q,^ those on the historical character of capital, on the connection between the conditions of produc- tion and the mode of production, &c., &c. even to the terminology created by me, this may perhaps be due to purposes of propaganda. I am here, of course, not speaking of his detailed working out and application of these propositions, with which I have nothing to do.
Author's Prefaces, xvii where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of produc- tion, and the conditions of production and exchange cor- responding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why Eng- land is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas. If, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English in- dustrial and agricultural labourers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him, ^' De te fabula narratur! " Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevit- able results. The country that is more developed indus- trially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
But apart from this. Where capitalist production is fully naturalised among the Germans (for instance, in the factories proper) the condition of things is much worse than in England, because the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside of modem evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and xviii Author s Prefaces, political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!
The social statistics of Germany and the rest of Con- tinental Western Europe are, in comparison with those of England, wretchedly compiled. But they raise the veil just enough to let us catch a glimpse of the Medusa head behind it. We should be appalled at the state of things at home, if, as in England, our governments and parliaments appointed periodically commissions of en- quiry into economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at the trath; if it was possible to find for this purpose men as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are the English factory -inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of enquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food. Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.
Let us not deceive ourselves on this. As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle-class, so in the 19 th century, the American civil war sounded it for the European working-class. In England the progress of social dis- integration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must re-act on the continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of develop ment of the working-class itself. Apart from higher motives, therefore, their own most impor- tant interests dictate to the classes that are for the nonce the ruling ones, the removal of all legally remov- able hindrances to the free development of the working class. For this reason, as well as others, I have given Author s Prefaces. xix so large a space in this volume to the history, the de- tails, and the results of English factory legislation. One nation can and should learn from others. And even when a society has got upon the right track for the dis- coverv of the natural laws of its movement — and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay l^are the economic law of motion of modern society — it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactmejits, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal develop- ment. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.
To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur- de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class- interests. My stand-point, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.
In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific enquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The English Estab- lished Church, e.g.^ will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on A of its income. Now- adays atheism itself is culpa levis, as compared with criticism of existing property relations. Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable advance. I refer, e.g., to the bluebook published within the last few weeks: '* Corre- spondence with Her Majesty's Missions Abroad, regard- XX Authors Prefaces.
ing Industrial Questions and Trades' Unions." The representatives of the English Crown in foreign countries there declare in so many words that in Germany, in France, to be brief, in all the civilised states of the European continent, a radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour is as evident and inevitable as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Wade, vice-presi- dent of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day. These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify that to-morrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling-classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.
The second volume of this work will treat of the pro- cess of the circulation of capital^ (Book II.), and of the varied forms assumed by capital in the course of its development (Book III.), the third and last volume (Book IV.), the history of the theory.
Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to the prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great Florentine is mine: " Segui il tuo corso,.e lascia dir le genti."
KARL MARX.
London, July 25, 1867.
"• On p. 570 the author explains what he comprises under this head.
Author s Prefaces, xxi n. TO THE SECOND EDITION.
To the present moment Political Economy, in Ger- many, is a foreign science. Gustav von Glilich in his " Historical description of Commerce, Industry," &c., ^ 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 col- lection of dogmas, interpreted by them in terms of the petty trading world around them, and therefore mis- interpreted. The feeling of scientific impotence, a feeling not wholly to be repressed, and the uneasy con- sciousness 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 hopeless 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, modem economic conditions '' Geschichtliche Darstellung des Handels, der Gewerbe und des Acker- baus, &c., von Gustav von Giilich. 5 vols., Jena, 1830-45.
xxii Authors Prefaces, did not actually exist in Germany. And as soon as these conditions did come into existence, they did so under cir- cumstances 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 capita- list 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 un- developed. 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.^ 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 T See my work *' Zur Kritik, &c.," p. 39.
Author s Pre/aces, xxiii Ricardo already serves, ia 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- struo^de 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 bour- geoisie 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 con- quered 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 enquirers, 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^ xxiv Author^s Prefaces, deluged the world, have a historic interest, if no scientific one, on account of their polemic against the landed aris- tocracy. But siace 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 re- action in England. Men who still claimed some scien- tific 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 bank- ruptcy 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 produc- tion 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-con- sciousness 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 Author's Prefaces. xxv 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 whole- sale concern.
The peculiar historic 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 fited in with the conditions of the time, they wrote, under pretence of criticising my book, prescriptions '' for the tranquillisa- tion 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, Ko whom (down to this very day) they owe a reply. ^ An excellent Eussian translation of " Das Kapital " ap- '' 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 connection one English and one Russian notice. The " Saturday Review," always hostile to my views, said in its notice of the first edition: " The presenta- tion 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 20, 1872, says: " The presentation of the subject, with the exception of one or two exceptionally special parts, is distinguished by its comprehensibility by fche general reader, its clear- ness, 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."
xxvi Author s Prefaces, peared in the spring of 1872. The edition of 3000 copies is already neariy exhausted. As early as 1871, A. Sieber, Professor of Political Economy in the Univer- sity 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 " D^s Kapital " has been little understood, is shown by the various concep- tions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of it.
Thus the Paris Revue Posiviste 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 (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 theoriciens du socialisme en Allemagne, Extrait du Journal des Economistes, Juillet et AoM 1872 " — makes the discovery that my method is analytic and says: ^' Par cet ouvrage M. Marx se classe parmi les esprits analytiques les plus 6minents." German reviews, of course, shriek out at " Hegelian sophistics." The European Messenger of St. Petersburg, in an article deal- ing exclusively with the method of ** Das Kapital" (May number, 1872, pp. 427-436), finds my method of enquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation, Author s Prefaces, xxvii 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 fore-runners 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. 4-7, where I dis- cuss 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 connection within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, ^.^., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connections 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 xxviii Author's Prefaces, 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 indepen- dent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, conscious- ness and intelligence...If in the history of civilisa- tion the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical* inquiry whose sub- ject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, conscious- ness. 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 con- frontation 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 accur- ately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, diiFerent 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 dijfferent stages of such an evolution pre- sent 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 develop- ment, 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 ns 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 Author s Prefaces.
XXIX 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, i&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 investiga- tion 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, Marxs book has."
Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as con- cerns 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 connection. 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 XXX Author's Prefaces.
mirror, then it may appear as if we liad before us a mere a priori construction.
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegeliara, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, Le,^ 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 trans- lated 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 ETnyoi/ot 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 con- scious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would dis- cover 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 doc- trinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehen- Autkor^s Prefaces, xxxi