Friedrich Engels

[The Third Volume of Karl Marx’s “Capital”]

Written about 9 January 1894.

[“Vorwärts” No. 9, 12 January 1894]

Marx’s *Capital*, Book Three, is now in the press and will hopefully be able to appear by September of this year at the latest. The contents of this long-awaited third book will complete the theoretical part of the work, so that only the final, fourth book remains to be awaited, which will contain a historico-critical survey of the theories of surplus-value. The first book shows how the capitalist’s surplus-value is wrung out of the worker, and the second book shows how this surplus-value, which initially consists in product, is realised in money. These first two books, therefore, deal only with surplus-value so long as it is still in the hands of its first appropriator, the industrial capitalist. It remains, however, only partly in the hands of this first appropriator; later it is distributed among various interested parties in the form of commercial profit, entrepreneurial gain, interest, ground-rent; and it is the laws of this distribution that are set forth in the third book. With the production, circulation and distribution of surplus-value, however, its entire life-course is concluded and there is nothing further to be said about it. Besides the laws of the rate of profit in general, this third book examines: commercial capital, interest-bearing capital, credit and banks, ground-rent and landed property—subjects by which, following on from the themes treated in the first two books, the “Critique of Political Economy” promised on the title-page exhausts itself.