Friedrich Engels

Karl Marx. Capital. Review in the ‘Zukunft’

Die Zukunft.  
No. 254, 30 October 1867.  
Supplement  

Karl Marx, Capital. First Volume.  
Hamburg. Meißner. 1867. 784 pages. 8vo.  

It is a saddening fact for every German that we, the people of thinkers, have achieved so little up to now in the field of political economy. Our celebrities in this subject are at best compilers, like Rau and Roscher, and where something original is produced, we have protectionists like List (who is said to have copied from a Frenchman) or socialists, like Rodbertus and Marx. – Our correct political economy really seems to have made it its task to drive everyone who is seriously concerned with economic science into the arms of socialism. Have we not lived to see the whole official economy daring to deny, in the face of a Lassalle, the time-honoured law determining wages, and to see it left to a Lassalle to take under his wing people like Ricardo against Schulze-Delitzsch and others! It is unfortunately true, they could not even deal scientifically with a Lassalle and had to – whatever recognition their practical endeavours may have deserved – put up with the reproach that their whole science consists of the watering-down of the harmonies of a Bastiat, which hush up all contrasts and difficulties. – Bastiat as an authority and Ricardo denied – that is our official economy today in Germany. But indeed, how could it be otherwise? Economy is unfortunately a field in our country in which no one is scientifically interested; it is either a piece of bread-and-butter study for the cameralistic examination or an auxiliary subject to be learned as superficially as possible for political agitation. Is it our political fragmentation, our industry which is unfortunately still too little developed, or our traditional dependence on foreign countries in this branch of science that is to blame?

Under these circumstances it is always gratifying to get hold of a book like the one above, in which the author, while indignantly now referring the current watered-down, or as he very aptly calls it, “vulgar economy”, back to its classical models as far as Ricardo and Sismondi, also maintains a critical attitude towards the classics themselves, but nevertheless constantly strives to follow the path of strictly scientific investigation. Marx’s earlier writings, especially the one on the money system published in 1859 by Duncker in Berlin, were already distinguished both by a strictly scientific spirit and by ruthless criticism, and to our knowledge our entire official economy has so far advanced nothing against it. – But if it could not cope with that work at the time, how will it fare now with this 49-sheet treatise on capital? – Let us be rightly understood. We are not saying that no objection could be raised to the deductions of this book, that Marx has completely proved his arguments; we are merely saying we do not believe that among all our economists a single one will be found who is capable of refuting them. – The investigations conducted in this book are of the utmost scientific subtlety. We appeal above all to the artistic, dialectical structure of the whole, to the way in which, in the concept of the commodity, money is already presented as existing in itself, how capital is developed out of money. We confess that we regard the newly introduced category of surplus-value as an advance; that we do not see what can be said against the assertion that it is not labour, but labour-power that appears as a commodity on the market; that we consider the correction made to Ricardo’s law on the rate of profit (that surplus-value must be put in place of profit) to be entirely in order. – We must admit that the historical sense that pervades the whole book and forbids the author from regarding economic laws as eternal truths, as anything other than the formulation of the conditions of existence of certain transitory social states, has greatly appealed to us; that the learning and acumen with which the various historical social states and their conditions of existence are here depicted will, on the side of our official economists, probably be sought in vain. – Investigations such as those into the economic conditions and laws of slavery, of the various forms of serfdom and bondage, and into the emergence of the free labourers, have remained entirely foreign to our specialist economists up to now.

We would likewise like to hear the opinion of these gentlemen on the developments presented to us here on cooperation, division of labour and manufacture, machinery and large-scale industry in their historical and economic interconnections and effects; they can certainly learn quite a few new things here. – And what will they say, in particular, to the fact, which slaps in the face all traditional theories of free competition and is nevertheless demonstrated here from official material, that in England, the fatherland of free competition, there is now scarcely any branch of labour in which the daily working time is not strictly prescribed by state intervention and is not supervised by the factory inspector? And that in proportion as working time is limited, not only do the individual branches of industry rise, but the individual worker produces more product in the shorter time than before in the longer?

It is unfortunately undeniable that the particularly harsh tone which the author adopts towards the official German economists is not unjustified. They all belong more or less to the “vulgar economy”, they have prostituted their science for the sake of the popularity of the day and denied its classical coryphaei. They speak of “harmonies” and drift about in the most banal contradictions. May the harsh lesson which this book imparts to them serve to wake them from their lethargy, to bring home to them that economy is not merely a milch cow that supplies us with butter, but a science that demands a serious and zealous cult.