(Hamburg, Otto Meissner, Volume I, 1867) . 

Fifty sheets of learned treatise to prove to us that the entire 
capital of our bankers, merchants, manufacturers and large 
landowners is nothing but the accumulated and unpaid labour of 
the working class! We recall that in 1849 the Neue Rheinische 
Zeitung raised the demand for a “Silesian milliard” in the name of 
the Silesian peasants.* A thousand million talers, it was claimed, 
were illegally withdrawn from the Silesian peasants alone, to flow 
into the pockets of the large landowners when serfdom and feudal 
services were abolished, and this amount was demanded back. But 
the gentlemen of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of old are like the 
late Sibyl with her books: the less they are offered, the more they 
ask. What are a thousand million talers compared with the colossal 
amount now demanded back in the name of the working class as a 
whole—for that is, surely, how we must understand it! If the 
entire accumulated capital of the propertied classes is nothing but 
“unpaid labour”, it would appear to follow directly that this 
labour is to be paid later, that is, the entire capital in question is to 
be transferred to labour. That would indeed raise the question 
who in particular would be entitled to receive it. But joking apart! 
However radically socialist the present book is in its approach, 
however blunt and unsparing on all hands its treatment of people 
who as a rule are regarded as authorities, we must confess that it 
is a most scholarly work which has a claim to be regarded as most 

a A reference to the series of articles Die schlesische Milliarde written by Wilhelm 
Wolff, an associate of Marx and Engels, and published in the Neue Rheinische 
Zeitung, Nos. 252, 255, 256, 258, 264, 270-72 and 281, from March 22 to April 25, 
1849.— Ed. 

Review of Capital for Elberfelder Zeitung 215 

strictly scientific. The press has already frequently mentioned 
Marx’s intention to sum up the results of his many years’ studies 
in a critique of the whole of political economy to date and 
thereby to provide the scientific basis for socialist aspirations which 
neither Fourier nor Proudhon nor even Lassalle had been able to 
do. This work has already long since and frequently been announced 
in the press. In 1859 a “first part”* appeared at Duncker’s in 
Berlin, which, however, dealt only with matters without immediate 
practical interest and which therefore caused hardly a stir. The 
following parts did not appear and the new socialist science seemed 
destined not to survive its birthpangs. How many jokes were 
not made about this new revelation which was announced so of- 
ten and yet never once seemed actually about to appear in 
public! Well and good, here is at last the “first volume” —fifty 
sheets as we have said—and nobody can maintain that it does not 
contain enough and more than enough that is new, bold and 
audacious and that this is not presented in thoroughly scientific 
form. This time Marx appeals with his unusual propositions not to 
the masses but to the men of science. It is up to them to defend 
their economic theories which are here attacked at their founda- 

tions, and give proof that capital is indeed accumulated labour but + 

not accumulated unpaid labour. Lassalle was a practical agitator, 
and it could suffice to oppose him in practical agitation, in the 
daily press and at meetings. But here we have a systematic 
scientific theory, and here the daily press cannot help to decide, 
here only science can speak the last word. It is to be hoped that 
people like Roscher, Rau, Max Wirth, etc., will seize the 
opportunity to defend the up till now generally recognised political 
economy against this new and certainly not contemptible attack. The 
social-democratic seed has sprouted among the younger genera- 
tion and the working population of many a place—through this 
book it will in any case find plenty of new nourishment.