Friedrich Engels

Karl Marx. Das Kapital. Review in the Beobachter

Der Beobachter.
No. 303, 27 December 1867

Karl Marx. Das Kapital.

Critique of Political Economy.
First Volume.
Hamburg, Meißner 1867.

Whatever one may think of the tendency of the present book, we believe we may say that it belongs among those achievements that do honour to the German mind. It is indicative that the author, though a Prussian, is a Rhenish Prussian, who until recently liked to call themselves “compulsory Prussians”, and, furthermore, a Prussian who has spent the last few decades far from Prussia, in exile. Prussia itself has long ceased to be a land of any scientific initiative; specifically in the historical, political, or social field such an initiative would there be impossible. Of it one can rather say that it represents the Russian, not the German spirit.

As to the book itself, one must very carefully distinguish between two very disparate parts within it: first, the solid positive developments contained in it, and second, the tendentious conclusions which the author draws from them.

The former are to a great extent a direct enrichment of science. In them the author deals with economic relations in an entirely new, materialist, natural-historical method. Thus the presentation of the money system, and the detailed, highly expert demonstration of how the various successive forms of industrial production—here co-operation, the division of labour and with it manufacture in the narrower sense, and finally machinery, large-scale industry, and the corresponding social combinations and relations—develop naturally out of one another.

As regards the author’s tendency, we can again distinguish a twofold direction within it. In so far as he endeavours to show that present society, economically considered, is pregnant with a different, higher social form, he seeks only to establish the same gradual process of upheaval in the social sphere as a law which Darwin has demonstrated in natural history. Such a gradual change has indeed taken place in social relations from antiquity through the Middle Ages down to the present, and to our knowledge it has never yet been seriously asserted by any scientific quarter that Adam Smith and Ricardo have said the last word on the future further development of present-day society. On the contrary, the liberal doctrine of progress includes progress in the social sphere as well, and it is one of the presumptuous paradoxes of the so-called socialists to act as if they alone had a monopoly on social progress. Compared with the ordinary socialists, it must be recognised as a merit of Marx that he demonstrates progress even where the extremely one-sided development of present conditions is accompanied by immediately repellent consequences. Thus everywhere in the depiction of the extremes of wealth and poverty, etc., which arise from the factory system on a large scale. Precisely through this critical treatment of the subject the author has—certainly against his will—provided the strongest arguments against all professional socialism.

It is quite otherwise with the tendency, with the subjective conclusions of the author, with the manner in which he presents to himself and others the final result of the present social process of development. These have nothing whatever to do with what we call the positive part of the book; indeed, if space permitted entering into the matter, it might perhaps be shown that these subjective whims of his are refuted by his own objective exposition.

If Lassalle’s entire socialism consisted in abusing the capitalists and flattering the Prussian cabbage Junkers, we find here precisely the opposite. Herr Marx expressly demonstrates the historical necessity of the capitalist mode of production, as he calls the present social phase, and equally the superfluity of the merely consuming, landowning Junkerdom. If Lassalle harboured grand fancies of Bismarck’s calling to introduce the socialist millennium, Herr Marx loudly disavows his ill-fated disciple. Not only does he expressly declare that he has nothing to do with any “royal Prussian government socialism”; he also says on page 762 ff., outright, that the system now prevailing in France and Prussia will result within a short time in the rule of the Russian knout over Europe, if it is not checked in time.

We note, finally, that in the above we could only take account of the main features of the stout volume; on points of detail much could still be remarked, which, however, we must here pass over—there are enough specialist journals for that purpose, which will certainly deal with this in any case very noteworthy phenomenon.