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

This book will disappoint many a reader. In certain circles its 
appearance had been anticipated for years. Here the true secret 
socialist teaching and panacea was at last to be revealed, and many 
may have imagined, when at last they saw it announced, that they 
would now learn what the communist Millennium would actually 
be like. Anyone who had keenly awaited this pleasure made a. 
great mistake. Indeed, he learns here how things should not be, 
_and this he is told in detail with very outspoken bluntness on 784 
pages, and he who has eyes to see will find here the demand for a 
social revolution clearly enough presented. Here it is not a 
question of workers’ associations with state capital, as with Lassalle 
of old; here it is a question of abolishing capital altogether. 

Marx is and remains the same revolutionary he has always been, 
and in a scientific work he would assuredly be the last to hide his 
views in this respect. But as for what is going to happen after the 
social revolution—on that he gives us only very dark hints. We 
learn that large-scale industry “matures the contradictions and 
antagonisms of the capitalist form of the production process and 
thereby at the same time the elements for the formation of a new 
society and the elements for exploding the old one’”’,,* and further 
that the abolition of the capitalist form of production “restores 
individual property but on the basis of the acquisitions of the 
capitalist era: 1.e., of co-operation of free. workers and the 

4 Quoted from the first German edition of Volume One of Capital, pp. 492-93. 
Cf. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, translated by S. Moore and E. Aveling and edited by 
F. Engels, London, 1887, Chapter XV, “Machinery and Modern Industry”, Section 
9, p. 512.— Ed. 

Review of Capital for Düsseldorfer Zeitung 247 

common ownership of the land and the means of production 
produced by labour itself”.* 

With this we must rest content, and to judge by the present 
volume the promised second and third will also tell us little on this 
interesting point. For the present we must be contented with the 
“Critique of Political. Economy”, and there we get into a very wide 
field indeed. Here, of course, we cannot enter into the scientific 
consideration of the detailed conclusions presented in_ this 
voluminous book, we cannot even briefly repeat the main 
propositions put forward there. The more or less well-known 
principles of the socialist theory can all be reduced to the fact that in 
modern society the worker does not obtain the full value of the 
product of his labour. This proposition is also the red thread 
which runs through the present work, but it is made more acutely 
precise followed more consistently in all its implications, and knitted 
more closely into the main propositions of political economy or more 
directly placed in opposition to them than hitherto. This part of the 
work is distinguished to great advantage from all similar earlier 
writings we know by its attempt to be strictly scientific, and we see 
that the author takes seriously not only his own theory but science as 
a whole. . 

We found particularly striking in this book the author’s 
conception of the propositions of political economy not, as is usual, 
as eternally valid truths but as the results of certain historical 
developments. While even the natural sciences are being trans- 
formed more and more into historical sciences—compare Lap- 
lace’s astronomical theory, the whole of geology and the works of 
Darwin— political economy has hitherto been just as abstract and 
universally valid a science as mathematics. Whatever may be the fate 
of the remaining propositions of this book, we regard it as a lasting 
merit of Marx to have put an end to this narrow-minded concept. 
After this work it will no longer be possible to treat slave labour, serf 
labour and free wage labour, for example, as economically alike, or 
to apply laws which are valid for modern large-scale industry, 
conditioned by free competition, without further ado to the 
conditions of antiquity or the guilds of the Middle Ages, or, when 
these modern laws do not fit ancient conditions, simply to declare the 
ancient conditions as heretical. The Germans of all nations have the 

@ Quoted from the first German edition of Volume One of Capital, p. 745. Cf. 
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, London, 1887, Chapter XXXII, “Historical Tendency of 
Capitalist Accumulation”, p. 789.— Ed. 

218 Frederick Engels _. 

greatest, nay, even a unique historical sense, and thus it is quite 
natural that it is again a German who traces the historical 
connections also in the sphere of political economy. 

1867 paper 

No. 316, November 17, 1867 time