As usual, he thought he would be able to finish his great project soon. He wrote to Engels in 1851: ‘I am so far advanced that I will have finished with the economic stuff in 5 weeks’ time. Et cela fait, I shall complete the political economy at home and apply myself to another branch of learning at the museum.’ Sixteen years later, he announced to the same man: ‘So this week the whole vile business will be over.’6 And this time it really would be!
The Grundrisse and A Contribution had been crucial stages on the road to the first volume. But he was still far from the goal. He continued reading copious amounts of literature on the subject that in some way could be of significance for his great social theory. But that was not enough: he constantly developed his theory, step by step constructing the finely branched conceptual apparatus with which he tried to capture the essentials of the society he lived in.
It was at this point that he arrived at the conclusion that his life’s work should be named Capital, with A Critique of Political Economy as the subheading. He announced the new title in December 1862 in an interesting letter to his friend in Hannover, the doctor Ludwig Kugelmann. The letter gives the impression that he was practically finished with the work, which he saw as a more comprehensive continuation of A Contribution. He would clarify ‘what Englishmen call “the Principles of Political Economy”’, thus in brief (once again) the essential features of the theory. He hoped that not only he himself, but others as well would be able to build further on this foundation.7
But he could not finish the work this time, either. In fact, Marx had written an enormous manuscript of approximately 2,400 printed pages, in which an important part was not intended at all for the volume he had promised. This part is known to posterity as Theories of Surplus Value and was first published by Karl Kautsky between 1905 and 1910 in a state that aroused a great deal of criticism for its inaccuracies. This large amount of working material, including Theories of Surplus Value, is available today in a critical version in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe.8
But none of this was still ready for print; nor was the considerable pile of manuscripts that was the result of Marx’s work between 1863 and 1865. There are preparatory works for all three volumes comprising Capital, but also a lecture in English: ‘Value, Price, and Profit’, which he held for the leadership of the International.
He now had a clear picture of the totality he had been striving for. In the summer of 1865, he wrote to Engels that the advantage of his work was that it constituted ‘an artistic whole’. The entire manuscript therefore had to be ready before he sent it off to the publisher. It was dialectically structured, which was why he could not do as the Brothers Grimm did with their Deutsches Wörterbuch and send it off instalment by instalment.9
He had come a long way from the idea that led him, six years earlier, to publish the first instalment of A Contribution. Now everything had to be made ready for print at the same time, both for the reader’s sake and also his own, since every part was going to be connected with every other part.
He was obviously talking here about all of Capital, which he had now done the preparatory work for. Only three chapters remained and then everything would be ready, he said. The final volume – ‘the historical-literary one’ – was not part of the same totality and had been easy to complete, since all the questions had been answered in the three previous volumes.10
As we know, Marx’s hopes were not fulfilled. Only the first volume came out during his lifetime. His idea about the totality deserves to be examined more closely, but, before that, a sketch of the continued work on Capital is needed.
On New Year’s Day 1866, Marx began working on the text that would finally go to print the following year. But despite all the preparatory work, the path to completion remained an arduous one. His health did not hold out. By February, he said in a letter to Engels that he could work like a man possessed as long as he was free from the usual liver troubles. But now, instead, he had suffered an attack of that odious skin disease. He was still so weak that he could not manage to grapple with the purely theoretical parts, but had only expanded a section on the working day.
Nonetheless, he thought that he would soon be finished not only with the first part, but the second as well. So as not to tire the reader out, he was thinking of having the second part – which would in fact correspond to what is now divided between Volumes II and III – published three months after Volume I.
His health continued to disrupt his peace and quiet. If it was not the carbuncles plaguing him, it was his liver; and if it was not his liver, it was toothache and neck pain. In July, he nevertheless believed that Volume I would be ready for print in August, and in November he saw completion as only a week away.11 But it was not until April 1867 that he went in person to the publisher, Otto Meissner in Hamburg, to deliver the entire manuscript. Meissner wanted Marx to stay in the area for the sake of editing, so he set out for the Kugelmann family home in Hannover where he stayed for a few weeks.12 But finally he was forced back to London, and now Engels assisted him with the editing. Engels found parts of the text difficult to understand, and encouraged Marx to make them more easily accessible as far as they would permit. But the acuity was commendable, he assured Marx. For his part, Marx could pester Engels up through the final edit with questions regarding the latter’s purely practical insights as a ‘manufacturer’.13
Engels could not only provide him with information on these matters, he also realized what the work that was now reaching its partial completion had cost his friend. ‘Forever resisting completion, it was driving you physically, mentally and financially to the ground,’ he wrote.14
In September 1867, the bulky tome of the first volume was finally ready. But new problems now awaited. How would the work get the attention it deserved? Engels wrote a steady stream of reviews: nine in all, eight for German newspapers and the ninth for the British Fortnightly Review – which, however, refused publication. Engels’s ability to vary his texts is admirable. One of the reports ended up in Elberfelder Zeitung, a local paper for the town in whose vicinity he was born and where he had stood on the barricades nearly twenty years earlier. In it, he emphasized that Marx’s work laid the scientific ground for socialism. The daily press could not judge the science, he said; here science itself must have the last word. But he also joked about how long it had taken before Volume I was finished – and much still remained.
Another interesting review was written for Rheinische Zeitung, which however did not print it. Here, he called Capital the Bible of the new Social Democratic Party. It rose far above ordinary social democratic publications, he declared, and despite the first forty pages being difficult with all their dialectics the book was easy to understand and marked by ‘the author’s sarcastic manner of writing which spares no one’.15
The rejected report for Fortnightly Review is above all an outline of Marx’s book, and is both quite long and quite dry. It is not likely that it would have attracted many English-speaking readers to Capital if it had been published.16
Despite the pains of Engels and other followers, the work on distribution went rather sluggishly. A number of negative reviews also appeared. The most important of them was the one published by Eugen Dühring, a senior lecturer in philosophy in Berlin and a social democrat.17 It was a fateful event; without it, Engels would never have written Anti-Dühring a few years later. It would also affect Marx, however condescendingly he would express himself about the review in his correspondence. Dühring had misunderstood a great deal, he wrote to Engels. Above all, Dühring was afraid, he wrote to Kugelmann. But in a later letter to Kugelmann, he was upset over Dühring bundling him together with Hegel – Hegel was an idealist; Marx, on the other hand, was a materialist.18 It would soon appear that Dühring’s statement had hit him hard. In a moment, we will see how this became evident.
Otherwise there was silence and indifference around Capital, which bothered both Marx and Engels. The foremost exception was the interest that some Russians s
howed in Marx’s work. Crucially, a young Russian, twenty-five-year-old Nikolai Danielson, contacted Marx about a translation. Marx was enthusiastic. He had certainly not placed hopes for speedy social changes in Russia, but the positive interest that not only Danielson but a number of his countrymen showed him gradually gave him new ideas. He immediately began teaching himself Russian, and after six months of intensive study he had got so far that he could make excerpts of Russian-language literature.19 He himself asserted that texts in Russian were necessary for him to be able to complete the manuscript of Volume III that had lain dormant since 1864. But this was surely not the only reason.
An acquaintance of Danielson’s, German Lopatin, was the first to grapple with a translation. But it was Danielson who, together with his friend Nikolai Lyubavin, completed the project. The book was published in Russia on 27 March, 1872. The censors let the book through with the words: ‘Although the political convictions of the author are completely socialist and the book is socialist through and through, it is certainly not a book accessible to everyone; what is more, its style is strictly mathematical and scientific…’ The reassuring final point reads: ‘Few people in Russia will read it. Even fewer will understand it.’20
The book quickly sold 900 copies. It was no grand success, but nonetheless it was a good reception. Marx’s Russian adventures had begun. Danielson had wanted to translate the second volume together with the first, but Marx blocked that. In October 1868, he wrote that it would not be possible – it would be perhaps six months before it was completed, since he first had to wait for a series of important statistical information to be published in France, the United States, and Great Britain. In other respects, the first volume constituted a totality in itself, he added.21
The work on what is today Volume II did not take six months, but the rest of Marx’s life. He wrote a number of new versions that Engels had to make up his mind about when, after Marx’s death, he was going to publish the work.
Nor did the first volume give its author any peace. A new edition in the original German had to come out, and that required a great deal of work. Marx was not satisfied with the earlier results, and readers had informed him of the unnecessary difficulties that met those interested. He carried out an exhaustive revision, which we can now follow in detail through the critical edition of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Among other things, he worked out an outline that is far more easy to grasp. The formerly six chapters became twenty-five. In an afterword to the second edition, he wrote that the central section on value ‘has been carried out with greater scientific strictness’, and that this strictness was certainly something he had been striving for in the entire work.22
The new edition was published in nine instalments from the summer of 1872 to the summer of 1873. At that time, a French translation was already on the way, done by Joseph Roy. Marx was satisfied with Roy’s work at the beginning, but he gradually became increasingly critical. It was too literal, and Marx therefore had to make the text more French in places where the original German shone through. The corrections cost him more work than if he had carried out the entire work himself, he said; the entire text had to be reshaped. Ultimately, his own changes became so sweeping that the title page of the final translation, published in 1875, said that it was a ‘Traduction de M. J. Roy, entièrement révisée par l’auteur’ (Translation by Mr. J. Roy, completely revised by the author). In fact, Marx had not been satisfied with rewriting the text, but also made changes and supplements to the second edition of the German original. The remarkable thing is that the French translation is the last version of Capital that Marx himself prepared for printing. Everything published later was marked to a greater or lesser extent by Engels’s editing. In those editions, incidentally, Engels did not include all the additions and changes Marx made to the French version.23
Considering the constant reworkings of the first volume, it is no wonder that Marx had difficulties finding enough time to complete the sequel. Political work also demanded plenty of time. Add to that his health being unstable; in fact, he aged markedly during the 1870s – entirely too early by today’s standards, but hardly by those of the time (if anything, Engels with his good health and his well-maintained physique was among the exceptions).
None of the many different versions of the text for the second volume that Marx left behind met his strict requirements for a print-ready manuscript. (The third volume remained in the state he left it in 1865). In addition, he always felt compelled to enter deeply into his widely differing areas of knowledge. He read literature in subjects such as agrarian chemistry, interested in what the constantly expanding productivity of the time meant for the environment, and he tried to improve his mathematics in the hope of being able to bring his theory to greater heights. Stacks of new excerpts joined the older ones. The fourth section of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe contains such excerpts, as well as short paragraphs and notes in the margin, most in Marx’s hand and significantly fewer in Engels’s. Once the work was completed, it was thirty-two thick volumes all in all, with an equal number of volumes of commentary and indexes. Marx was, and remained, the master of the unfinished work.
The Structure of Capital
Capital is indisputably Marx’s most discussed piece of writing. Engels’s reviews of Volume I were the first attempts at leading readers by the hand into the great work. Since then, the streams of interpretations, popularizations, and rebuttals has continued without interruption. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the literature concerning Capital changed its character. Now, there is no longer any accepted orthodox tradition to take a position on. Its echoes can certainly still be felt, but they no longer have a state or an army to lean on.
After the global economic crisis of 2008, Capital has become as topical as it had rarely been before. Marx has found a large new audience, and a long series of commentators have come to their assistance with all kinds of introductions and interpretations. Old and new problems and points of conflict have become urgent, and are discussed with both acuity and passion. The grizzled veterans of reading Marx have met the enthusiastic newcomers who never needed to take a position on the orthodoxy once dictated from Moscow. They were quite simply too young for the question when the Berlin Wall came down. Many of them had not even been born.
In the next section, we will get more closely acquainted with this ‘new reading of Marx’ (neue Marx-Lektüre), as it is called in Germany.24 But before that, Marx’s original texts must be presented so that at least their construction is explained. A survey of this kind can never be completely uncontroversial; there is disagreement on several fundamental points where Capital is concerned. Different authors also place different stresses. Often, the governing question is: What is still topical – still opens perspectives – today? The hopelessly out of date must also have a place in a historical account.
What follows first is a summary account of the main content of the three volumes, and after that a survey of the central conceptual apparatus.
When Marx was writing the Grundrisse, he had in mind a work in six different parts. In the mid-1860s, as we have seen, there were only four parts that had crossed his mind – the first three of which would constitute ‘an artistic whole’. These three parts, in order, would deal with the production process, the process of circulation, and finally the total process of capital. He himself said that the construction was dialectical. It is easy to see that he was moving from the abstract to the increasingly concrete.
First, production, which capital acquired power over and thereby directs. One condition is a developed monetary system. The owners of capital invest their money in the production of commodities that can be sold at a profit, which can then largely be invested in new and expanding production. They take into service people who, unlike the slaves or serfs of previous epochs, are not bound to a certain master but free to choose the occupation that makes it possible for them to survive. Thus arises the working class, which like the industrial capitalists is a ne
w phenomenon in history. Capitalist and worker have opposing goals: the capitalist wants to squeeze out as much work as possible at as low a price as possible; the worker strives for the opposite. The resulting struggle over the working day and wages for labour is an unmistakable feature of capitalism.
Capitalism is a dynamic economy in which each capitalist must invest in more efficient technology just to remain in competition. When the capitalists as a collective draw down their investments, the system ends up in crisis. When it flourishes, new and larger capital accumulates. The original accumulation, which made capitalism possible at all, took place in an earlier society in which the conflict-filled relationship between capitalist and free worker had not yet been established.
In the second volume of Capital, circulation is in focus. Once a commodity has been produced, it must go out onto the market to meet its potential buyers. This entails additional costs for the capitalist. Intermediaries responsible for transport and sales must have their compensation, the necessary bookkeeping is not free, and so on. Only when the capitalist has sold their commodities at a price exceeding the costs they had for production have they reached their goal. Now the cycle can begin again: with the money the commodities sold brought in, the worker can be hired anew, raw materials procured, and new commodities produced – preferably more than were recently thrown out onto the market. And so it continues, round after round, for as long as capitalism remains.
A World to Win Page 48