Text of Das Kapital Volume I, English Trans by Samuel Moore

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Preface to the First German Edition (Marx, 1867)................................................................................................................................. 6
Preface to the French Edition (Marx, 1872).......................................................................................................................................... 9
Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873)................................................................................................................................. 10
Afterword to the French Edition (1875).............................................................................................................................................. 16
Preface to the Third German Edition (1883)........................................................................................................................................ 17
Preface to the English Edition (Engels, 1886)...................................................................................................................................... 19
Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels, 1890) .......................................................................................................................... 22

Part 1: Commodities and Money ..................................................................................................................................... 26

Chapter 1: Commodities................................................................................................................................................................. 27
Section 1: The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value (The Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value)............................... 27
Section 2: The Two-fold Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities ............................................................................................ 30
Section 3: The Form of Value or Exchange-Value ................................................................................................................................. 33
Section 4: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof .......................................................................................................... 47

Chapter 2: Exchange...................................................................................................................................................................... 60

Chapter 3: Money, Or the Circulation of Commodities.......................................................................................................................... 67
Section 1: The Measure of Values....................................................................................................................................................... 67
Section 2: The Medium of Circulation.................................................................................................................................................. 71
Section 3: Money............................................................................................................................................................................. 84

Part 2: Transformation of Money into Capital.............................................................................................................. 103

Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital....................................................................................................................................... 104

Chapter 5: Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital................................................................................................................. 111

Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power............................................................................................................................. 119

Part 3: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value ...................................................................................................... 126

Chapter 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value ........................................................................................... 127
Section 1: The Labour-Process or the Production of Use-Values............................................................................................................... 127
Section 2: The Production of Surplus-Value.......................................................................................................................................... 131

Chapter 8: Constant Capital and Variable Capital................................................................................................................................. 142

Chapter 9: The Rate of Surplus-Value ................................................................................................................................................. 150
Section 1: The Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power........................................................................................................................... 150
Section 2: The Representation of the Components of the Value of the Product by Corresponding Proportional Parts of the Product Itself ........... 154
Section 3: Senior’s “Last Hour” ........................................................................................................................................................... 156
Section 4: Surplus-Produce ................................................................................................................................................................ 159

Chapter 10: The Working day ............................................................................................................................................................ 162
Section 1: The Limits of the Working day .............................................................................................................................................. 162
Section 2: The Greed for Surplus-Labor, Manufacturer and Boyard ........................................................................................................... 164
Section 3: Branches of English Industry Without Legal Limits to Exploitation.............................................................................................. 168
Section 4: Day and Night Work. The Relay System.................................................................................................................................. 175
Section 5: The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Compulsory Laws for the Extension of the Working Day from the Middle of the 14th to the End of the 17th Century ....178
Section 6: The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Compulsory Limitation by Law of the Working-Time. English Factory Acts, 1833 ..................................................... 184
Section 7: The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Reaction of the English Factory Acts on Other Countries ...................................................................................... 194

Chapter 11: Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value ....................................................................................................................................... 213

Part 4: Production of Relative Surplus-Value ................................................................................................................. 219

Chapter 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value .............................................................................................................................. 220

Chapter 13: Co-operation ................................................................................................................................................................. 227

Chapter 14: Division of Labour and Manufacture.................................................................................................................................... 237
Section 1: Two-Fold Origin of Manufacture.............................................................................................................................................. 237
Section 2: The Detail Labourer and his Implements................................................................................................................................. 238
Section 3: The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture: Heterogeneous Manufacture, Serial Manufacture ..................................................... 240
Section 4: Division of Labour in Manufacture, and Division of Labour in Society........................................................................................... 244
Section 5: The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture ............................................................................................................................... 248

Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry ........................................................................................................................................ 261
Section 1 : The Development of Machinery............................................................................................................................................. 261
Section 2: The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product................................................................................................................... 268
Section 3: The Proximate Effects of Machinery on the Workman................................................................................................................ 271
Section 4: The Factory......................................................................................................................................................................... 284
Section 5: The Strife Between Workman and Machine ............................................................................................................................. 287
Section 6: The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery ........................................................................ 293
Section 7: Repulsion and Attraction of Workpeople by the Factory System. Crises in the Cotton Trade............................................................. 298
Section 8: Revolution Effected in Manufacture, Handicrafts, and Domestic Industry by Modern Industry.......................................................... 304
Section 9: The Factory Acts. Sanitary and Educational Clauses of the same. Their General Extension in England .............................................. 315
Section 10: Modern Industry and Agriculture........................................................................................................................................... 329

Part 5: Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value.......................................................................................... 358

Chapter 16: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value ................................................................................................................................... 359

Chapter 17: Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value ................................................................................. 367
Section 1: Length of the Working day and Intensity of Labour Constant. Productiveness of Labour Variable...................................................... 367
Section 2: Working day Constant. Productiveness of Labour Constant. Intensity of Labour Variable ................................................................. 370
Section 3: Productiveness and Intensity of Labour Constant. Length of the Working day Variable .................................................................... 370
Section 4: Simultaneous Variations in the Duration, Productiveness, and Intensity of Labour .......................................................................... 375

Chapter 18: Various Formula for the rate of Surplus-Value ....................................................................................................................... 375

Part 6: Wages............................................................................................................................................................................. 378

Chapter 19: The Transformation of the Value (and Respective Price) of Labour-Power into Wages................................................................... 379

Chapter 20: Time-Wages...................................................................................................................................................................... 384

Chapter 21: Piece Wages..................................................................................................................................................................... 390

Chapter 22: National Differences of Wages............................................................................................................................................. 396

Part 7: The Accumulation of Capital ................................................................................................................................... 400

Chapter 23: Simple Reproduction ........................................................................................................................................................ 401

Chapter 24: Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital.............................................................................................................................. 410
Section 1: Capitalist Production on a Progressively Increasing Scale. Transition of the Laws of Property that Characterise Production of Commodities into Laws of Capitalist Appropriation ... 410
Section 2: Erroneous Conception, by Political Economy, of Reproduction on a Progressively Increasing Scale .............................................................................................................. 415
Section 3: Separation of Surplus-value into Capital and Revenue. The Abstinence Theory ........................................................................................................................................ 417
Section 4: Circumstances that, Independently of the Proportional Division of Surplus-value into Capital and Revenue, Determine the Amount of Accumulation. Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power. Productivity of Labour. Growing Difference in Amount Between Capital Employed and Capital Consumed. Magnitude of Capital Advanced............................ 421
Section 5: The So-Called Labour Fund ............................................................................................................................................................................ 426

Chapter 25: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation .................................................................................................................................................. 434
Section 1: The Increased Demand for labour power that Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital Remaining the same ......................................... 434
Section 2: Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration that Accompanies it........ 438
Section 3: Progressive Production of a Relative surplus population or Industrial Reserve Army  ............................................................................................... 442
Section 4: Different Forms of the Relative surplus population. The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation ............................................................................. 449
Section 5: Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation................................................................................................................................... 453

Part 8: Primitive Accumulation ..................................................................................................................................................................... 506

Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation ........................................................................................................................................................... 507

Chapter 27: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population From the Land............................................................................................................................... 510

Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century, Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament .................................. 522

Chapter 29: Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer.................................................................................................................................................................... 528

Chapter 30: Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home-Market for Industrial Capital ................................................................. 530

Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist.......................................................................................................................................................... 533

Chapter 32: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation................................................................................................................................................ 541

Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation1  ............................................................................................................................................................ 543

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The work, the first volume of which I now submit to the public, forms the continuation of my Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie (A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy) published in 1859. The long pause between the first part and the continuation is due to an illness of many years’ duration that again and again interrupted my work. The substance of that earlier work is summarised in the first three chapters of this volume. This is done not merely for the sake of connexion and completeness. The presentation of the subject matter is improved. As far as circumstances in any way permit, many points only hinted at in the earlier book are here worked out more fully, whilst, conversely, points worked out fully there are only touched upon in this volume. The sections on the history of the theories of value and of money are now, of course, left out altogether. The reader of the earlier work will find, however, in the notes to the first chapter additional sources of reference relative to the history of those theories. 

Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty.  That which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised.¹  The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour – or value-form of the commodity – is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.

With the exception of the section on value-form, therefore, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I presuppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.  The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas. If, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him, “De te fabula narratur!” [It is of you that the story is told. – Horace]

Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.

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The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. But apart from this. Where capitalist production is fully naturalised among the Germans (for instance, in the factories proper) the condition of things is much worse than in England, because the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif! [The dead holds the living in his grasp. – formula of French common law]


The social statistics of Germany and the rest of Continental Western Europe are, in comparison with those of England, wretchedly compiled. But they raise the veil just enough to let us catch a glimpse of the Medusa head behind it. We should be appalled at the state of things at home, if, as in England, our governments and parliaments appointed periodically commissions of inquiry into economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at the truth; if it was possible to find for this purpose men as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are the English factory-inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food. Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

Let us not deceive ourselves on this. As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so that in the 19th century, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working class. In England the process of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working class itself. Apart from higher motives, therefore, their own most important interests dictate to the classes that are for the nonce the ruling ones, the removal of all legally removable hindrances to the free development of the working class. For this reason, as well as others, I have given so large a space in this volume to the history, the details, and the results of English factory legislation. One nation can and should learn from others. And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement – and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society – it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.

To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose [i.e., seen through rose-tinted glasses]. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular classrelations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation
of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income. Now-a-days atheism is culpa levis [a relatively slight

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sin, c.f. mortal sin], as compared with criticism of existing property relations. Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable advance. I refer, e.g., to the Blue book published within the last few weeks: “Correspondence with Her Majesty’s Missions Abroad, regarding Industrial Questions and Trades’ Unions.” The representatives of the English Crown in foreign countries there declare in so many words that in Germany, in France, to be brief, in all the civilised states of the European Continent, radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour is as evident and inevitable as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Wade,  vice-president of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day. These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing. The second volume of this book will treat of the process of the circulation of capital (Book II.), and of the varied forms assumed by capital in the course of its development (Book III.), the third and last volume (Book IV.), the history of the theory.

Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great

Florentine is mine:  “Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.” [Follow your own course, and let people talk – paraphrased from Dante]


Karl Marx
London
July 25, 1867


¹ This is the more necessary, as even the section of Ferdinand Lassalle’s work against SchulzeDelitzsch, in which he professes to give “the intellectual quintessence” of my explanations on these subjects, contains important mistakes. If Ferdinand Lassalle has borrowed almost literally from my  writings, and without any acknowledgement, all the general theoretical propositions in his economic  works, e.g., those on the historical character of capital, on the connexion between the conditions of  production and the mode of production, &c., &c., even to the terminology created by me, this may  perhaps be due to purposes of propaganda. I am here, of course, not speaking of his detailed working  out and application of these propositions, with which I have nothing to do.

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To the citizen Maurice Lachâtre

Dear Citizen,

I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.

That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connexion between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.

That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

Believe me, dear citizen,

Your devoted,
Karl Marx
London
March 18, 1872

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I must start by informing the readers of the first edition about the alterations made in the second edition. One is struck at once by the clearer arrangement of the book. Additional notes are
everywhere marked as notes to the second edition. The following are the most important points with regard to the text itself:

In Chapter I, Section 1, the derivation of value from an analysis of the equations by which every exchange-value is expressed has been carried out with greater scientific strictness; likewise the
connexion between the substance of value and the determination of the magnitude of value by socially necessary labour-time, which was only alluded to in the first edition, is now expressly emphasised. Chapter I, Section 3 (the Form of Value), has been completely revised, a task which was made necessary by the double exposition in the first edition, if nothing else. – Let me remark, in passing, that that double exposition had been occasioned by my friend, Dr. L Kugelmann in Hanover. I was visiting him in the spring of 1867 when the first proof-sheets arrived from Hamburg, and he convinced me that most readers needed a supplementary, more didactic explanation of the form of value. – The last section of the first chapter, “The Fetishism of Commodities, etc.,” has largely been altered. Chapter III, Section I (The Measure of Value), has been carefully revised, because in the first edition this section had been treated negligently, the reader having been referred to the explanation already given in “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie,” Berlin 1859. Chapter VII, particularly Part 2 [Eng. ed., Chapter IX, Section 2], has been re-written to a great extent.

It would be a waste of time to go into all the partial textual changes, which were often purely stylistic. They occur throughout the book. Nevertheless I find now, on revising the French translation appearing in Paris, that several parts of the German original stand in need of rather thorough remoulding, other parts require rather heavy stylistic editing, and still others painstaking elimination of occasional slips. But there was no time for that. For I had been informed only in the autumn of 1871, when in the midst of other urgent work, that the book was sold out and that the printing of the second edition was to begin in January of 1872.

The appreciation which “Das Kapital” rapidly gained in wide circles of the German working class is the best reward of my labours. Herr Mayer, a Vienna manufacturer, who in economic matters represents the bourgeois point of view, in a pamphlet published during the Franco-German War aptly expounded the idea that the great capacity for theory, which used to be considered a hereditary German possession, had almost completely disappeared amongst the so-called educated classes in Germany, but that amongst its working class, on the contrary, that capacity was celebrating its revival.

To the present moment Political Economy, in Germany, is a foreign science. Gustav von Gulich in his “Historical description of Commerce, Industry,” &c.,¹ especially in the two first volumes published in 1830, has examined at length the historical circumstances that prevented, in Germany, the development of the capitalist mode of production, and consequently the development, in that country, of modern bourgeois society. Thus the soil whence Political Economy springs was wanting. This “science” had to be imported from England and France as a ready-made article; its German professors remained schoolboys. The theoretical expression of a foreign reality was turned, in their hands, into a collection of dogmas, interpreted by them in terms of the petty trading world around them, and therefore misinterpreted. The feeling of scientific impotence, a feeling not wholly to be repressed, and the uneasy consciousness of having

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to touch a subject in reality foreign to them, was but imperfectly concealed, either under a parade of literary and historical erudition, or by an admixture of extraneous material, borrowed from the so-called “Kameral” sciences, a medley of smatterings, through whose purgatory the hopeful
 candidate for the German bureaucracy has to pass.


Since 1848 capitalist production has developed rapidly in Germany, and at the present time it is in
 the full bloom of speculation and swindling. But fate is still unpropitious to our professional
 economists. At the time when they were able to deal with Political Economy in a straightforward fashion, modern economic conditions did not actually exist in Germany. And as soon as these
 conditions did come into existence, they did so under circumstances that no longer allowed of
 their being really and impartially investigated within the bounds of the bourgeois horizon. In so far as Political Economy remains within that horizon, in so far, i.e., as the capitalist regime is
 looked upon as the absolutely final form of social production, instead of as a passing historical
 phase of its evolution, Political Economy can remain a science only so long as the class struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena.


Let us take England. Its Political Economy belongs to the period in which the class struggle was as yet undeveloped. Its last great representative, Ricardo, in the end, consciously makes the
 antagonism of class interests, of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting point of his investigations, naively taking this antagonism for a social law of Nature. But by this start the
 science of bourgeois economy had reached the limits beyond which it could not pass. Already in
 the lifetime of Ricardo, and in opposition to him, it was met by criticism, in the person of
 Sismondi.²  The succeeding period, from 1820 to 1830, was notable in England for scientific activity in the domain of Political Economy. It was the time as well of the vulgarising and extending of
 Ricardo’s theory, as of the contest of that theory with the old school. Splendid tournaments were held. What was done then, is little known to the Continent generally, because the polemic is for the most part scattered through articles in reviews, occasional literature and pamphlets. The unprejudiced character of this polemic – although the theory of Ricardo already serves, in exceptional cases, as a weapon of attack upon bourgeois economy – is explained by the
 circumstances of the time. On the one hand, modern industry itself was only just emerging from
 the age of childhood, as is shown by the fact that with the crisis of 1825 it for the first time opens the periodic cycle of its modern life. On the other hand, the class struggle between capital and
 labour is forced into the background, politically by the discord between the governments and the feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance on the one hand, and the popular masses,
 led by the bourgeoisie, on the other; economically by the quarrel between industrial capital and
 aristocratic landed property - a quarrel that in France was concealed by the opposition between
 small and large landed property, and that in England broke out openly after the Corn Laws. The literature of Political Economy in England at this time calls to mind the stormy forward
 movement in France after Dr. Quesnay’s death, but only as a Saint Martin’s summer reminds us
 of spring. With the year 1830 came the decisive crisis.


In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class
 struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a
 question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there
 were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic. Still, even the obtrusive pamphlets with which the Anti-Corn Law League,
 led by the manufacturers Cobden and Bright, deluged the world, have a historic interest, if no

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scientific one, on account of their polemic against the landed aristocracy. But since then the Free
 Trade legislation, inaugurated by Sir Robert Peel, has deprived vulgar economy of this its last

sting.


The Continental revolution of 1848-9 also had its reaction in England. Men who still claimed
 some scientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of
 the ruling classes tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to be ignored, of the proletariat. Hence a shallow syncretism of which John Stuart Mill is the best
 representative. It is a declaration of bankruptcy by bourgeois economy, an event on which the
 great Russian scholar and critic, N. Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the light of a master mind in
 his “Outlines of Political Economy according to Mill.”


In Germany, therefore, the capitalist mode of production came to a head, after its antagonistic character had already, in France and England, shown itself in a fierce strife of classes. And
 meanwhile, moreover, the German proletariat had attained a much more clear class-consciousness
 than the German bourgeoisie. Thus, at the very moment when a bourgeois science of Political Economy seemed at last possible in Germany, it had in reality again become impossible.
 Under these circumstances its professors fell into two groups. The one set, prudent, practical business folk, flocked to the banner of Bastiat, the most superficial and therefore the most
 adequate representative of the apologetic of vulgar economy; the other, proud of the professorial dignity of their science, followed John Stuart Mill in his attempt to reconcile irreconcilables. Just as in the classical time of bourgeois economy, so also in the time of its decline, the Germans
 remained mere schoolboys, imitators and followers, petty retailers and hawkers in the service of
 the great foreign wholesale concern.


The peculiar historical development of German society therefore forbids, in that country, all original work in bourgeois economy; but not the criticism of that economy. So far as such
 criticism represents a class, it can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes – the
 proletariat.


The learned and unlearned spokesmen of the German bourgeoisie tried at first to kill “Das
 Kapital” by silence, as they had managed to do with my earlier writings. As soon as they found
 that these tactics no longer fitted in with the conditions of the time, they wrote, under pretence of
 criticising my book, prescriptions “for the tranquillisation of the bourgeois mind.” But they found
 in the workers’ press – see, e.g., Joseph Dietzgen’s articles in the – antagonists stronger than
 themselves, to whom (down to this very day) they owe a reply.³


An excellent Russian translation of “Das Kapital” appeared in the spring of 1872. The edition of
 3,000 copies is already nearly exhausted. As early as 1871, N. Sieber, Professor of Political
 Economy in the University of Kiev, in his work “David Ricardo’s Theory of Value and of
 Capital,” referred to my theory of value, of money and of capital, as in its fundamentals a
 necessary sequel to the teaching of Smith and Ricardo. That which astonishes the Western
 European in the reading of this excellent work, is the author’s consistent and firm grasp of the
 purely theoretical position.


That the method employed in “Das Kapital” has been little understood, is shown by the various
 conceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of it.
 Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I treat economics
 metaphysically, and on the other hand – imagine! – confine myself to the mere critical analysis of
actual facts, instead of writing receipts4 (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future. In
 answer to the reproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it: