Marx was not destined to get this, the third, edition ready for the 
press himself. The powerful thinker, to whose greatness even his op- 
ponents now make obeisance, died on March 14, 1883. 

Upon me who in Marx lost the best, the truest friend I had — and 
had for forty years— the friend to whom I am more indebted than 
can be expressed in words— upon me now devolved the duty of at- 
tending to the publication of this third edition, as well as of the sec- 
ond volume, which Marx had left behind in manuscript. I must now 
account here to the reader for the way in which I discharged the first 
part of my duty. 

It was Marx’s original intention to re-write a great part of the text 
of the first volume, to formulate many theoretical points more 
exactly, insert new ones and bring historical and statistical materials 
up to date. But his ailing condition and the urgent need to do the 
final editing of the second volume *%* induced him to give up 
this scheme. Only the most necessary alterations were to be made, 
only the insertions which the French edition (Le Capital. Par Karl 
Marx. Paris, Lachatre, 1873)!° already contained, were to be 
put in. 

Among the books left by Marx there was a German copy which he 
himself had corrected here and there and provided with references to 
the French edition; also a French copy in which he had indicated the 
exact passages to be used. These alterations and additions are con- 
fined, with few exceptions, to the last [Engl. ed.: second last] part of 
the book: ‘““The Accumulation of Capital’. Here the previous text fol- 


28 Preface to the Third German Edition 


lowed the original draft more closely than elsewhere, while the pre- 
ceding sections had been gone over more thoroughly. The style was 
therefore more vivacious, more of a single cast, but also more careless, 
studded with Anglicisms and in parts unclear; there were gaps here 
and there in the presentation of arguments, some important particu- 
lars being merely alluded to. 

With regard to the style, Marx had himself thoroughly revised sever- 
al sub-sections and thereby had indicated to me here, as well as in 
numerous oral suggestions, the length to which I could go in elimi- 
nating English technical terms and other Anglicisms. Marx would in 
any event have gone over the additions and supplemental texts and 
have replaced the smooth French with his own terse German; I had 
to be satisfied, when transferring them, with bringing them into 
maximum harmony with the original text. 

Thus not a single word was changed in this third edition without 
my firm conviction that the author would have altered it himself. It 
would never occur to me to introduce into Das Kapital the current 
Jargon in which German economists are wont to express them- 
selves — that gibberish in which, for instance, one who for cash has 
others give him their labour is called a labour-giver [Arbeitgeber] and 
one whose labour is taken away from him for wages is called a labour- 
taker [Arbeitnehmer|. In French, too, the word travail is used in 
every-day life in the sense of “occupation”. But the French would 
rightly consider any economist crazy should he call the capitalist 
a donneur de travail [labour-giver] or the worker a receveur de travail 
[labour-taker]. 

Nor have I taken the liberty to convert the English coins and mon- 
eys, measures and weights used throughout the text to their new- 
German equivalents. When the first edition appeared there were as 
many kinds of measures and weights in Germany as there are days in 
the year. Besides there were two kinds of marks (the Reichsmark exist- 
ed at the time only in the imagination of Soetbeer, who had invented 
it in the late thirties), two kinds of gulden and at least three kinds of 
taler, including one called neues Cweidrittel.2*° In the natural sciences 
the metric system prevailed, in the world market — English measures 
and weights. Under such circumstances English units of measure 
were quite natural for a book which had to take its factual proofs al- 
most exclusively from British industrial relations. The last-named rea- 
son is decisive even today, especially because the corresponding rela- 
tions in the world market have hardly changed and English weights 


Preface to the Third German Edition 29 


and measures almost completely control precisely the key industries, 
iron and cotton. 

In conclusion a few words on Marx’s art of quotation, which is so 
little understood. When they are pure statements of fact or descrip- 
tions, the quotations, from the English Blue Books,° for example, 
serve of course as simple documentary proof. But this is not so when 
the theoretical views of other economists are cited. Here the quota- 
tion is intended merely to state where, when and by whom an econom- 
ic idea conceived in the course of development was first clearly 
enunciated. Here the only consideration is that the economic concep- 
tion in question must be of some significance to the history of science, 
that it is the more or less adequate theoretical expression of the econom- 
ic situation of its time. But whether this conception still possesses 
any absolute or relative validity from the standpoint of the author or 
whether it already has become wholly past history is quite immate- 
rial. Hence these quotations are only a running commentary to the 
text, a commentary borrowed from the history of economic science, 
and establish the dates and originators of certain of the more import- 
ant advances in economic theory. And that was a very necessary 
thing in a science whose historians have so far distinguished them- 
selves only by tendentious ignorance characteristic of careerists. It 
will now be understandable why Marx, in consonance with the After- 
word to the second edition,? only in very exceptional cases had occa- 
sion to quote German economists. 

There is hope that the second volume will appear in the course of 
1884.94 


Frederick Engels 
London, November 7, 1883 


a See this volume, pp. 12-20. 


30