Classics:
Note
After the publication of Das Capital in 1867, there is a conspiracy to maintain silence on it
as was observed in the case of Marx’s work, “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”.
To spread wide and popularize the ideas contained in “The Capital” , Engels wrote many reviews
with resoluteness overcoming the mistrust of bourgeois editors. These reviews made by Engels
areinestimable aids to the study of “The Capital”. We are reproducing here one review in the
Leipzig Demokratisches Wochenblast in 1868.
- Editor
As long as there have been
capitalists and workers on earth,
no book has appeared which is of
as much importance for the
workers as the one before us. The
relation between capital and
labour, the hinge on which our
entire present system of society
turns, is here treated scientifically
for the first time and with a
thoroughness and acuity possible
only for a German. Valuable as the
writings of an Owen, Saint-Simon,
Fourier are and will remain, it was
reserved for a German first to
climb to the height from which the
whole field of modern social
relations can be seen clearly and
in full view just as the lower
mountain scenery is seen by an
observer standing on the topmost
peak.
Political economy up to now
has taught us that labour is source
of all wealth and the measure of
all values, so that two objects
whose production has cost the
same labour-time possess the
same value and must also be
exchanged for each other, since
on the average only equal values
are exchangeable for one another.
At the same time, however, it
teaches that there exists a kind of
stored-up labour which it calls
capital; that this capital, owing to
the auxiliary sources contained in
it, raises the productivity of living
labour a hundred and a
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thousandfold, and in return claims
a certain compensation which is
termed profit or gain. As we all
know, this occurs in reality in such
a way that the profits of stored-up,
dead labour become ever more
massive, the capital of the
capitalists becomes ever more
colossal, while the wages of living
labour constantly decrease, and
the mass of workers living solely
on wages ever more numerous
and poverty-stricken. How is this
contradiction to be solved? How
can there remain a profit for the
capitalist if the worker gets back
the full value of the labour he adds
to his product? And yet this should
be the case, since only equal
values are exchanged. On the
other hand, how can equal values
be exchanged, how can the
worker receive the full value of his
product, if, as is admitted by many
economists, this product is
divided between him and the
capitalist? Economics up to now
has been helpless in the face of
this contradiction and writes or
stutters embarrassed meaning-
less phrases. Even the previous
socialist critics of economics
were unable to do more than
emphasise the contradiction; no
one has solved it, until now at last
Marx has traced the process by
which this profit arises right to its
birthplace and has thereby made
everything clear.
In tracing the development of
capital, Marx stars from the simple,
notoriously obvious fact that the
capitalists turn their capital to
account by exchange: they buy
commodities for their money and
afterwards sell them for more
money them they cost them. For
example, a capitalist buys cotton
for 1,000 talers and then sells it
for 1,100, thus “earning” 100
talers. This excess of 100 talers
over the original capital Marx calls
surplus-value. Where does this
surplus-value come from?
According to the economists’
assumption, only equal values are
exchanged, and in the sphere of
abstract theory this is correct.
Hence, the purchase of cotton and
its subsequent sale can just as
little y ield surplus-value as the
exchange of a silver taler for thirty
silver groschen and the re-
exchange of the small coins for a
silver taler, a process by which
one becomes neither richer nor
poorer. But surplus-value can just
as little arise from sellers selling
commodities above their value, or
buyers and seller and this would,
therefore, again balance. No more
can it arise from buyers and
sellers reciprocally overreaching
each other, for this would create
no new or surplus-value, but would
only distribute the existing capital
differently between the capitalists.
In spite of the fact that the capitalist
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