Karl Marx. Capital. Critique of Political Economy. 
Volume One. Hamburg, Meissner, 1867 

Whatever one may think of the tendency of the book before us, 
we believe we may say that it is one of those achievements which 
do honour to the German spirit. It is indicative that while the 
author is a Prussian, he is one of the Rhenish Prussians, who until 
recently liked to describe themselves as“compulsory Prussians”, 
and, moreover, a Prussian who has spent the last few decades far 
from Prussia, in exile. Prussia itself has long ceased to be a 
country of any scientific initiative whatsoever, and especially in 
historical, political or social subjects such an initiative would be 
impossible there. One could say of it that it represents the Russian 
rather than the German spirit. 

As for the book itself, one must distinguish clearly between two 
very disparate aspects of it: between, firstly, its solid, positive 
expositions and, secondly, the tendential conclusions the author 
draws from them. The first are to a great extent a direct 
enrichment of science. The author there treats economic relations 
with a quite new, materialistic, natural-historic method. In this way 
he represents money and very expertly traces in detail the various 
successive forms of industrial production: co-operation, the division 
of labour and with it manufacture in the narrower sense, and lastly 
machinery, large-scale industry and the corresponding social 
combinations and relations which naturally grow one from the 
other. 

As for the author’s tendencies, we can here, too, discern again a 
two-fold trend. In so far as he endeavours to show that 
present-day society, economically considered, is pregnant with 

Review of Capital for Beobachter 225 

another, higher form of society, he merely strives to present as law 
in the social sphere the same process which Darwin traced in 
natural history, a process of gradual evolution. Up to now such a 
gradual transformation has indeed taken place in social relations 
from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the present; and as far 
as we know it has never been seriously claimed from any scientific 
quarters that Adam Smith and Ricardo have said the last word on 
the future development of present-day society. On the contrary, 
liberal teaching on progress also includes progress in the social 
sphere, and it is one of the arrogant paradoxes of so-called 
socialists to pretend that they alone have a lien on social progress. 
By contrast to the run-of-the-mill socialists we must recognise it as 
a merit of Marx that he also traces progress where the extremely 
one-sided development of present-day conditions is accompanied 
by directly abhorrent consequences, as everywhere in the presenta- 
tion of the great extremes of wealth and poverty resulting from 
the factory system as a whole, etc. Just by this critical conception 
of the subject the author has brought forward—certainly against 
his will—the strongest arguments against all socialism by the book. 

It is quite a different matter with the other tendency, the 
author’s subjective conclusions, with the manner in which he 
represents to himself and others the ultimate result of the present 
course of social developments. These have nothing to do with 
what we have called the positive part of the book; nay, if space 
permitted we could perhaps show that his subjective whims are 
refuted by his own objective exposition. 

If Lassalle’s entire socialism consisted in abusing the capitalists 
and flattering the Prussian rural squires, here we find the 
diametrical opposite. Herr Marx explicitly proves the historical 
necessity of the capitalist mode of production, as he calls the 
present social phase, and equally the superfluous nature of the 
merely consuming land-holding squirearchy. If Lassalle had big 
ideas about Bismarck’s fitness to introduce the socialist Millen- 
nium, Herr Marx refutes his wayward pupil loudly enough. He 
not only explicitly declares that he will have nothing to do with 
any “Royal Prussian government socialism’’,* he says straight out 
on p. 762 ff. that the system now prevailing in France and Prussia 
would shortly bring about the rule of the Russian knout over 
Europe if it were not stopped in time. 

Finally, we remark that above we have only been able to con- 

4 See this volume, p. 80.— Ed. 

10* 

sider the main features of this big volume; in detail there is still 
much that could be said about it, but here we must pass it by. 
For this purpose there exist enough specialist journals, which will 
doubtless enter into this most remarkable phenomenon. 

, : , script 

No. 303,. December 27, 1867 Published in English for the first