Review in the “Düsseldorfer Zeitung”

Friedrich Engels

Karl Marx. Das Kapital.
Review in the
“Düsseldorfer Zeitung”

Düsseldorfer Zeitung.
No. 316, 16 November 1867

* Karl Marx. Das Kapital. Kritik der
politischen Oekonomie. Erster Band.
Hamburg, Meißner. 1867.

This book will greatly disappoint many a reader. For years its
appearance has been pointed to from a certain quarter. Here the true
socialist secret doctrine and panacea were at last to be revealed,
and many a one may have imagined, when it was finally announced,
that he would now learn what the communist millennium would actually
look like. Anyone who has been looking forward to this pleasure has
been thoroughly mistaken. He certainly learns here how things ought
not to be, and this is explained to him with very plain bluntness and
in 784 pages, and whoever has eyes to see, sees here the demand for
a social revolution stated clearly enough. Here it is not a question of
workers’ associations with state capital, as with the late Lassalle,
here it is a question of the abolition of capital altogether.

Marx is and remains the same revolutionary that he always was,
and in a scientific work he would certainly be the last person to have
concealed his views in this respect. But what is to become of things
after the social upheaval — on that he gives us only very obscure
hints. We learn that large-scale industry “ripens the contradictions
and antagonisms of the capitalist form of the production process, and
thereby, simultaneously, the formative elements of a new society and
the elements of upheaval of the old one”, and further, that the
supersession of the capitalist form of production “re-establishes
individual property, but on the basis of the acquisitions of the
capitalist era: the co-operation of free workers and their common
ownership of the land and of the means of production produced by
labour itself”.

With this we must rest content, and judging from what lies before
us, the second and third volumes of this work, which have been
promised, will probably offer us little on this interesting point. For
the present we shall have to be satisfied with the “Critique of Political
Economy”, and that takes us on to an indeed very extensive field.
We cannot, of course, enter here into a scientific consideration of the
detailed deductions carried out in this voluminous book, we cannot
even reproduce briefly the main propositions put forward in it. The
more or less well-known basic tenets of socialist theory all reduce
themselves to this: that in present-day society the worker does not
receive the full value of his product of labour as remuneration. This
proposition also forms the thread running through the present work,
only that it is far more sharply defined, pursued more consistently in
all its consequences, and more closely interwoven with the main
propositions of political economy or placed in more direct opposition
to them, than has been the case hitherto. This part of the work
distinguishes itself very advantageously from all earlier writings of
this kind known to us by its attempt at rigorous scientificity, and
one sees that the author is in earnest not only with his theory, but
with science in general.

What has particularly struck us in this book is this: that the author
does not conceive the propositions of political economy, as is usually
done, as eternally valid truths, but as the results of definite historical
developments. While even natural science is increasingly transforming
itself into a historical science — compare Laplace’s astronomical
theory, the whole of geology, and the writings of Darwin — political
economy has hitherto been an abstract, universally valid science just
like mathematics. Whatever may be the fate of the other assertions
in this book, we consider it to be a lasting service of Marx that he has
put an end to this narrow-minded conception. After this work it will
no longer be possible, for example, to lump together economically
slave labour, corvée labour, and free wage labour, or to apply laws
which are valid for present-day large-scale industry, determined by
free competition, without further ado to the conditions of antiquity
or the guilds of the Middle Ages, or, when these modern laws do not
fit the old conditions, simply to declare the old conditions heretical.
Of all nations, the Germans possess the greatest, indeed almost the
only, historical sense, and so it is quite in order that it is once again a
German who demonstrates the historical interconnections in the field
of political economy as well.