Karl Marx. Capital. Critique of Political Economy. 
Volume I. The Process of Production of Capital. 
Hamburg, O. Meissner, 1867 

Universal suffrage has added to our present parliamentary 
parties a new one, the Social-Democratic Party. At the last elections 
to the North German Imperial Diet it put up its own candidates in 
most big cities and in all factory districts, and succeeded in getting 
six or eight representatives elected.'"* Compared with the last but 
one election it deployed much greater strength and we can 
therefore assume that, at least for the time being, it is still 
growing. It would be foolish to continue to treat the existence, 
activity and doctrines of such a party with genteel silence in a 
country where universal suffrage has placed the final decision into 
the hands of the most numerous and poorest classes. 

However much the few social-democratic parliamentarians may 
be at loggerheads with each other, we can be sure that all factions 
of this party will welcome the present book as their theoretical bible, 
as the armoury from which they will take their most telling 
arguments. For this reason alone it deserves special attention. But 
it is also bound to cause a stir by its own content. If LassallesS main 
argumentation —and in political economy Lassalle was only a pupil 
of Marx—was confined to repeating again and again the Ricardo 
so-called law of wages, we here have before us a work which with 
undeniably rare scholarship presents the whole relationship of 
capital and labour in its connection with economic science as a 
whole, and which makes it its final goal “to reveal the economic law 
of motion of modern society”, and comes, after obviously sincere 
studies unmistakably conducted with expert knowledge, to the 
conclusion that the whole “capitalist mode of production” must be 
abolished. Moreover, we would like to draw particular attention to 
the fact that, in addition to the conclusions of the work, the author 

in its course represents a whole series of major points of political 
economy in quite a new light, and comes in purely scientific 
questions to results which markedly depart from hitherto current 
political economy, and which orthodox economists will have to 
criticise seriously and refute scientifically if they do not wish to see 
their hitherto current doctrines founder. In the interest of science it 
is desirable that the polemic on these particular points should 
develop very soon in the specialist literature. 

Marx begins with the presentation of the relationship between 
commodity and money, the essence of which was already 
published somé time ago in a special work.* He then passes on to 
capital, and here we soon come to the crucial point of the whole 
work. What is capital? Money which changes into a commodity in 
order to change from a commodity into more money than the 
original amount. When I buy cotton for 100 talers and sell this for 
110 talers, I establish my 100 talers as capital, self-expanding 
value. Now the question arises: whence do the ten talers come 
which I earn in this process, how does it happen that by two 
simple exchanges 100 talers become 110 talers? For political 
economy presupposes that in all exchanges equal value is 
exchanged for equal value. Marx now runs through all possible 
cases (variations in the price of commodities, etc.) to prove that 
under the presuppositions assumed by political economy the 
formation of 10 talers surplus-value from an original sum of 
100 talers is impossible. Nevertheless, this process takes place daily, 
and the economists still owe us an explanation for this. Marx 
provides the explanation as follows: The riddle can only be solved 
if we find on the market a commodity of a very peculiar kind, a 
commodity the use-value of which consists in creating exchange- 
value. This commodity exists: it is labour-power. The capitalist buys 
labour-power on the market and makes it work for him so as to 
sell its product again. We must therefore in the first instance 
examine labour-power. 

What is the value of labour-power? According to a well-known 
law it is the value of the means of subsistence necessary to 
maintain and reprodyce the worker in the manner historically 
established in the given country and epoch. We assume that the 
worker’s labour-power is paid for at its full value. We assume 
further that this value is represented in six hours’ work a day, or 
half a working day. But the capitalist claims that he has bought the 
labour-power for a whole day and makes the worker work 12 

hours or more. Hence with 12 hours of work he has acquired the 
product of six hours working-time without payment. Marx 
concludes: All surplus-value, whichever way it may be distributed, 
as capitalist gain, rent, tax, etc., is unpaid labour. 

The struggle for the length of the working day arises from the 
interest of the factory owner to gain every day as much unpaid 
labour as possible and the opposite interest of the worker. Marx 
describes the course of this struggle in an illustration well worth 
reading, which fills about a hundred pages, taken from English 
large-scale industry; in spite of the protest of the factory owner, 
who was a champion of free trade, this struggle ended last spring 
in not only all factory industry, but all the small-scale and even 
domestic industry being brought under the restraints of the factory 
act which limits the daily work of women and children under 18 
years of age—and therewith indirectly also that of men —in the most 
important industries to at most 10'/y hours.? He also explains 
why English industry has not suffered, but on the contrary, gained 
thereby: since the work of every individual worker became more 
intense as its duration was shortened. 

Surplus-value can, however, also be raised by another method 
than that of extending working-time beyond that needed to 
produce the necessary means of subsistence or their value. 
According to our previous assumption, a given working day of, 
say, 12 hours, contains six hours of necessary work and six hours 
of work used to produce surplus-value. If by some means we 
succeed in reducing the necessary working-time to five hours, 
there remain seven hours during which surplus-value is produced. 
This can be achieved by shortening the working-time needed to 
produce the necessary means of subsistence, in other words, by 
reducing their cost, and this again only by improvements in 
production. On this point Marx gives again a detailed illustration, 
examining and describing the three main levers by which these 
improvements are brought about: 1. co-operation, or the multiplica- 
tion of the forces which results from the simultaneous and 
planned working together of many individuals; 2. the division of 
labour as it was developed in the period of manufacture properly 
so-called, i.e. up to about 1770; and, lastly, 3. machinery with the 
aid of which large-scale industry has developed since then. These 
descriptions are also of great interest, and reveal amazing expert 
knowledge, up to technical details... 

__We cannot go more deeply into the details of the studies on 

surplus-value and wages; to avoid misunderstandings we merely 
remark that wages are less than the total product of labour, as 
Marx proved by a number of quotations, and which is a fact not 
unknown to orthodox economics either. We must hope that this 
book will provide the opportunity for the gentlemen of the 
orthodox tradition to give us more enlightenment on this really 
strange point. It is most commendable that all factual examples 
given by Marx are taken from the best sources, mostly official 
parliamentary reports. We take this opportunity to support the 
author’s plea made indirectly in the preface: that in Germany, too, 
working conditions in the various industries should be thoroughly 
investigated by government commissioners—who, however, should 
not be biassed bureaucrats—and their reports submitted to the 
Imperial Diet and the public. 

The first volume concludes with a discourse on the accumula- 
tion of capital. Much has already been written on this point, but 
we must confess that here too there is much given that is new, 
while the old is presented from new angles. Most original is the 
attempt to prove that the accumulation of a redundant population 
of workers goes hand in hand with the concentration and 
accumulation of capital, and that eventually both make a social 
revolution on the one hand necessary, on the other possible. 

Whatever the reader may think of the author’s socialist views, 
we believe to have shown above that he has here before him a 
work which stands way above the current social-democratic 
literature of the day. We add that except for the somewhat stark 
dialectical style on the first 40 pages and in spite of its scientific 
strictness, the work is very easy to follow and is made most 
interesting by the author’s sarcastic manner of writing which 
spares no one. 7 om