But as the issue dragged beyond his
lifetime
I cannot well ignore it here.
Marx - Capital-Volume-I
the majority of German scholars who .
.
.
write their books in a language so dry and obscure that the heads of ordinary mortals are cracked by it.
?
4 Rezepte - translated as --Receipt,? which in the 19th Century, meant --recipe? and Ben Fowkes, for example translates this as --recipe. ? [MIA footnote].
? ? Afterword to the French Edition (1875)
Mr. J. Roy set himself the task of producing a version that would be as exact and even literal as possible, and has scrupulously fulfilled it. But his very scrupulosity has compelled me to modify his text, with a view to rendering it more intelligible to the reader. These alterations, introduced from day to day, as the book was published in parts, were not made with equal care and were bound to result in a lack of harmony in style.
Having once undertaken this work of revision, I was led to apply it also to the basic original text (the second German edition), to simplify some arguments, to complete others, to give additional historical or statistical material, to add critical suggestions, etc. Hence, whatever the literary defects of this French edition may be, it possesses a scientific value independent of the original and should be consulted even by readers familiar with German.
Below I give the passages in the Afterword to the second German edition which treat of the development of Political Economy in Germany and the method employed in the present work.
Karl Marx
London
April 28, 1875
? Preface to the Third German Edition (1883)
Marx was not destined to get this, the third, edition ready for press himself. The powerful thinker, to whose greatness even his opponents 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 attending to the publication of this third edition, as well as of the second 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 Volume I, 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 Volume II 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, Lacha^tre 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 confined, with few exceptions, to the last [Engl. ed. : second last] part of the book: --The Accumulation of Capital. ? Here the previous text followed the original draft more closely than elsewhere, while the preceding 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 particulars being merely alluded to.
With regard to the style, Marx had himself thoroughly revised several sub-sections and thereby had indicated to me here, as well as in numerous oral suggestions, the length to which I could go in eliminating 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 themselves - 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 (a labour-giver) or the worker a receveur de travail (a labour-taker).
Nor have I taken the liberty to convert the English coins and moneys, 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 existed 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 Zweidrittel. In the natural sciences the metric system prevailed, in the
? 18 Preface to the Third German Edition (1883)
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 almost exclusively from British industrial relations. The last-named reason is decisive even to-day, especially because the corresponding relations in the world market have hardly changed and English weights 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 descriptions, 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 quotation is intended merely to state where, when and by whom an economic idea conceived in the course of development was first clearly enunciated. Here the only consideration is that the economic conception in question must be of some significance to the history of science, that it is the more or less adequate theoretical expression of the economic 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 immaterial. 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 important advances in economic theory. And that was a very necessary thing in a science whose historians have so far distinguished themselves only by tendentious ignorance characteristic of careerists. It will now be understandable why Marx, in consonance with the Afterword to the second edition, only in very exceptional cases had occasion to quote German economists.
There is hope that the second volume will appear in the course of 1884.
Frederick Engels
London November 7, 1883
? Preface to the English Edition (Engels, 1886)
The publication of an English version of --Das Kapital? needs no apology. On the contrary, an explanation might be expected why this English version has been delayed until now, seeing that for some years past the theories advocated in this book have been constantly referred to, attacked and defended, interpreted and misinterpreted, in the periodical press and the current literature of both England and America.
When, soon after the author's death in 1883, it became evident that an English edition of the work was really required, Mr. Samuel Moore, for many years a friend of Marx and of the present writer, and than whom, perhaps, no one is more conversant with the book itself, consented to undertake the translation which the literary executors of Marx were anxious to lay before the public. It was understood that I should compare the MS. with the original work, and suggest such alterations as I might deem advisable. When, by and by, it was found that Mr. Moore's professional occupations prevented him from finishing the translation as quickly as we all desired, we gladly accepted Dr. Aveling's offer to undertake a portion of the work; at the same time Mrs. Aveling, Marx's youngest daughter, offered to check the quotations and to restore the original text of the numerous passages taken from English authors and Blue books and translated by Marx into German. This has been done throughout, with but a few unavoidable exceptions.
The following portions of the book have been translated by Dr. Aveling: (I) Chapters X. (The Working day), and XI. (Rate and Mass of Surplus value); (2) Part VI. (Wages, comprising Chapters XIX. to XXII. ); (3) from Chapter XXIV. , Section 4 (Circumstances that &c. ) to the end of the book, comprising the latter part of Chapter XXIV. ,. Chapter XXV. , and the whole of Part VIII. (Chapters XXVI. to XXXIII); (4) the two Author's prefaces. All the rest of the book has been done by Mr. Moore. While, thus, each of the translators is responsible for his share of the work only, I bear a joint responsibility for the whole.
The third German edition, which has been made the basis of our work throughout, was prepared by me, in 1883, with the assistance of notes left by the author, indicating the passages of the second edition to be replaced by designated passages, from the French text published in 1873. 1 The alterations thus effected in the text of the second edition generally coincided with changes prescribed by Marx in a set of MS. instructions for an English translation that was planned, about ten years ago, in America, but abandoned chiefly for want of a fit and proper translator. This MS. was placed at our disposal by our old friend Mr. F. A. Sorge of Hoboken N. J. It designates some further interpolations from the French edition; but, being so many years older than the final instructions for the third edition, I did not consider myself at liberty to make use of it otherwise than sparingly, and chiefly in cases where it helped us over difficulties. In the same way, the French text has been referred to in most of the difficult passages, as an indicator of what the author himself was prepared to sacrifice wherever something of the full import of the original had to be sacrificed in the rendering.
There is, however, one difficulty we could not spare the reader: the use of certain terms in a sense different from what they have, not only in common life, but in ordinary Political Economy. But this was unavoidable. Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science. This is best shown by chemistry, where the whole of the terminology is radically changed about once in twenty years, and where you will hardly find a single organic compound that has not gone through a whole series of different names. Political Economy has generally been
? 20 Preface to the English Edition (Engels 1886)
content to take, just as they were, the terms of commercial and industrial life, and to operate with them, entirely failing to see that by so doing, it confined itself within the narrow circle of ideas expressed by those terms. Thus, though perfectly aware that both profits and rent are but sub- divisions, fragments of that unpaid part of the product which the labourer has to supply to his employer (its first appropriator, though not its ultimate exclusive owner), yet even classical Political Economy never went beyond the received notions of profits and rents, never examined this unpaid part of the product (called by Marx surplus-product) in its integrity as a whole, and therefore never arrived at a clear comprehension, either of its origin and nature, or of the laws that regulate the subsequent distribution of its value. Similarly all industry, not agricultural or handicraft, is indiscriminately comprised in the term of manufacture, and thereby the distinction is obliterated between two great and essentially different periods of economic history: the period of manufacture proper, based on the division of manual labour, and the period of modern industry based on machinery. It is, however, self- evident that a theory which views modern capitalist production as a mere passing stage in the economic history of mankind, must make use of terms different from those habitual to writers who look upon that form of production as imperishable and final.
A word respecting the author's method of quoting may not be out of place. In the majority of cases, the quotations serve, in the usual way, as documentary evidence in support of assertions made in the text. But in many instances, passages from economic writers are quoted in order to indicate when, where, and by whom a certain proposition was for the first time clearly enunciated. This is done in cases where the proposition quoted is of importance as being a more or less adequate expression of the conditions of social production and exchange prevalent at the time, and quite irrespective of Marx's recognition, or otherwise, of its general validity. These quotations, therefore, supplement the text by a running commentary taken from the history of the science.
Our translation comprises the first book of the work only. But this first book is in a great measure a whole in itself, and has for twenty years ranked as an independent work. The second book, edited in German by me, in 1885, is decidedly incomplete without the third, which cannot be published before the end of 1887. When Book III. has been brought out in the original German, it will then be soon enough to think about preparing an English edition of both.
--Das Kapital? is often called, on the Continent, --the Bible of the working class. ? That the conclusions arrived at in this work are daily more and more becoming the fundamental principles of the great working- class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain, that everywhere the working class more and more recognises, in these conclusions, the most adequate expression of its condition and of its aspirations, nobody acquainted with that movement will deny. And in England, too, the theories of Marx, even at this moment, exercise a powerful influence upon the socialist movement which is spreading in the ranks of --cultured? people no less than in those of the working class. But that is not all. The time is rapidly approaching when a thorough examination of England's economic position will impose itself as an irresistible national necessity. The working of the industrial system of this country, impossible without a constant and rapid extension of production, and therefore of markets, is coming to a dead stop.
Free Trade has exhausted its resources; even Manchester doubts this its quondam economic gospel. 2 Foreign industry, rapidly developing, stares English production in the face everywhere, not only in protected, but also in neutral markets, and even on this side of the Channel. While the productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production and crisis, ever
? 21 Preface to the English Edition (Engels 1886)
recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression. The sighed for period of prosperity will not come; as often as we seem to perceive its heralding symptoms, so often do they again vanish into air. Meanwhile, each succeeding winter brings up afresh the great question, --what to do with the unemployed"; but while the number of the unemployed keeps swelling from year to year, there is nobody to answer that question; and we can almost calculate the moment when the unemployed losing patience will take their own fate into their own hands. Surely, at such a moment, the voice ought to be heard of a man whose whole theory is the result of a lifelong study of the economic history and condition of England, and whom that study led to the conclusion that, at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means. He certainly never forgot to add that he hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a --pro-slavery rebellion,? to this peaceful and legal revolution.
1 --Le Capital,? par Karl Marx. Traduction de M. J. Roy, entierement revise? e par l'auteur. Paris. Lacha^tre. This translation, especially in the latter part of the book, contains considerable alterations in and additions to the text of the second German edition.
2 At the quarterly meeting of the Manchester Chamber of commerce, held this afternoon a warm discussion took place on the subject of Free Trade. A resolution was moved to the effect that --having waited in vain 40 years for other nations to follow the Free Trade example of England, this Chamber thinks the time has now arrived to reconsider that position. The resolution was rejected by a majority of one only, the figures being 21 for, and 22 against. - Evening Standard, Nov. 1, 1886.
? ? Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels, 1890)
The fourth edition required that I should establish in final form, as nearly as possible, both text and footnotes. The following brief explanation will show how I have fulfilled this task.
After again comparing the French edition and Marx's manuscript remarks I have made some further additions to the German text from that translation. They will be found on p. 80 (3rd edition, p. 88) [present edition, pp. 117-18], pp. 458-60 (3rd edition, pp. 509-10) [present edition, pp. 462-65],1 pp. 547-51 (3rd edition, p. 600) [present edition, pp. 548-51], pp. 591-93 (3rd edition, p. 644) [present edition, 587-89] and p. 596 (3rd edition, p. 648) [present edition, p. 591] in Note 1. I have also followed the example of the French and English editions by putting the long footnote on the miners into the text (3rd edition, pp. 509- 15; 4th edition, pp. 461-67) [present edition, pp. 465-71]. Other small alterations are of a purely technical nature.
Further, I have added a few more explanatory notes, especially where changed historical conditions seemed to demand this. All these additional notes are enclosed in square brackets and marked either with my initials or --D. H. ? 2
Meanwhile a complete revision of the numerous quotations had been made necessary by the publication of the English edition. For this edition Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, undertook to compare all the quotations with their originals, so that those taken from English sources, which constitute the vast majority, are given there not as re-translations from the German but in the original English form In preparing the fourth edition it was therefore incumbent upon me to consult this text. The comparison revealed various small inaccuracies. Page numbers wrongly indicated, due partly to mistakes in copying from notebooks, and partly to the accumulated misprints of three editions; misplaced quotation or omission marks, which cannot be avoided when a mass of quotations is copied from note-book extracts; here and there some rather unhappy translation of a word; particular passages quoted from the old Paris notebooks of 1843-45, when Marx did not know English and was reading English economists in French translations, so that the double translation yielded a slightly different shade of meaning, e. g. , in the case of Steuart, Ure, etc. , where the English text had now to be used - and other similar instances of trifling inaccuracy or negligence. But anyone who compares the fourth edition with the previous ones can convince himself that all this laborious process of emendation has not produced the smallest change in the book worth speaking of. There was only one quotation which could not be traced - the one from Richard Jones (4th edition, p. 562, note 47). Marx probably slipped up when writing down the title of the book. 3 All the other quotations retain their cogency in full, or have enhanced it due to their present exact form.
Here, however, I am obliged to revert to an old story.
I know of only one case in which the accuracy of a quotation given by Marx has been called in question.
But as the issue dragged beyond his lifetime I cannot well ignore it here.
On March 7, 1872, there appeared in the Berlin Concordia, organ of the German Manufacturers' Association, an anonymous article entitled: --How Karl Marx Quotes. ? It was here asserted, with an effervescence of moral indignation and unparliamentary language, that the quotation from Gladstone's Budget Speech of April 16, 1863 (in the Inaugural Address of the International
? 23 Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels 1890)
Workingmen's Association, 1864, and repeated in --Capital,? Vol. I, p. 617, 4th edition; p. 671, 3rd edition) [present edition, p. 610], had been falsified; that not a single word of the sentence: --this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power . . . is . . . entirely confined to classes of property? was to be found in the (semi-official) stenographic report in Hansard. --But this sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech. Exactly the opposite is stated there. ? (In bold type): --This sentence, both in form and substance, is a lie inserted by Marx. "
Marx, to whom the number of Concordia was sent the following May, answered the anonymous author in the Volksstaat of June 1st. As he could not recall which newspaper report he had used for the quotation, he limited himself to citing, first the equivalent quotation from two English publications, and then the report in The Times, according to which Gladstone says:
--That is the state of the case as regards the wealth of this country. I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to classes who are in easy circumstances. This takes no cognisance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation I have described and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes possessed of property. ?
Thus Gladstone says here that he would be sorry if it were so, but it is so: this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property. And as to the semi- official Hansard, Marx goes on to say: --In the version which he afterwards manipulated [zurechtgestu? mpert], Mr. Gladstone was astute enough to obliterate [wegzupfuschen] this passage, which, coming from an English Chancellor of the Exchequer, was certainly compromising. This, by the way, is a traditional usage in the English parliament and not an invention gotten up by little Lasker against Bebel. ?
The anonymous writer gets angrier and angrier. In his answer in Concordia, July 4th, he sweeps aside second-hand sources and demurely suggests that it is the --custom? to quote parliamentary speeches from the stenographic report; adding, however, that The Times report (which includes the --falsified? sentence) and the Hansard report (which omits it) are --substantially in complete agreement,? while The Times report likewise contains --the exact opposite to that notorious passage in the Inaugural Address. ? This fellow carefully conceals the fact that The Times report explicitly includes that self-same --notorious passage,? alongside of its alleged --opposite. ? Despite all this, however, the anonymous one feels that he is stuck fast and that only some new dodge can save him. Thus, whilst his article bristles, as we have just shown, with --impudent mendacity? and is interlarded with such edifying terms of abuse as --bad faith,? --dishonesty,? --lying allegation,? --that spurious quotation,? --impudent mendacity,? --a quotation entirely falsified,? --this falsification,? --simply infamous,? etc. , he finds it necessary to divert the issue to another domain and therefore promises --to explain in a second article the meaning which we (the non-mendacious anonymous one) attribute to the content of Gladstone's words. ? As if his particular opinion, of no decisive value as it is, had anything whatever to do with the matter. This second article was printed in Concordia on July 11th.
Marx replied again in the Volksstaat of August 7th now giving also the reports of the passage in question from the Morning Star and the Morning Advertiser of April 17, 1863. According to both reports Gladstone said that he would look with apprehension, etc. , upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if he believed it to be confined to --classes in easy circumstances. ? But this augmentation was in fact --entirely confined to classes possessed of property. ? So these reports too reproduced word for word the sentence alleged to have been --lyingly inserted. ? Marx further established once more, by a comparison of The Times and the Hansard texts, that this sentence, which three newspaper reports of identical content, appearing
? 24 Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels 1890)
independently of one another the next morning, proved to have been really uttered, was missing from the Hansard report, revised according to the familiar --custom,? and that Gladstone, to use Marx's words, --had afterwards conjured it away. ? In conclusion Marx stated that he had no time for further intercourse with the anonymous one. The latter also seems to have had enough, at any rate Marx received no further issues of Concordia.
With this the matter appeared to be dead and buried. True, once or twice later on there reached us, from persons in touch with the University of Cambridge, mysterious rumours of an unspeakable literary crime which Marx was supposed to have committed in --Capital,? but despite all investigation nothing more definite could be learned. Then, on November 29, 1883, eight months after Marx's death, there appeared in The Times a letter headed Trinity College, Cambridge, and signed Sedley Taylor, in which this little man, who dabbles in the mildest sort of co-operative affairs, seizing upon some chance pretext or other, at last enlightened us, not only concerning those vague Cambridge rumours, but also the anonymous one in Concordia.
--What appears extremely singular,? says the little man from Trinity College, --is that it was reserved for Professor Brentano (then of the University of Breslau, now of that of Strassburg) to expose. . . the bad faith which had manifestly dictated the citation made from Mr. Gladstone's speech in the [Inaugural] Address. Herr Karl Marx, who . . . attempted to defend the citation, had the hardihood, in the deadly shifts to which Brentano's masterly conduct of the attack speedily reduced him, to assert that Mr. Gladstone had ? manipulated' the report of his speech in The Times of April 17, 1863, before it appeared in Hansard, in order to ? obliterate' a passage which ? was certainly compromising' for an English Chancellor of the Exchequer. On Brentano's showing, by a detailed comparison of texts, that the reports of The Times and of Hansard agreed in utterly excluding the meaning which craftily isolated quotation had put upon Mr. Gladstone's words, Marx withdrew from further controversy under the plea of ? want of time. '?
So that was at the bottom of the whole business! And thus was the anonymous campaign of Herr Brentano in Concordia gloriously reflected in the productively co-operating imagination of Cambridge. Thus he stood, sword in hand, and thus he battled, in his --masterly conduct of the attack,? this St. George of the German Manufacturers' Association, whilst the infernal dragon Marx, --in deadly shifts,? --speedily? breathed his last at his feet.
All this Ariostian battle scene, however, only serves to conceal the dodges of our St. George. Here there is no longer talk of --lying insertion? or --falsification,? but of --craftily isolated quotation. ? The whole issue was shifted, and St. George and his Cambridge squire very well knew why.
Eleanor Marx replied in the monthly journal To-day (February 1884), as The Times refused to publish her letter. She once more focussed the debate on the sole question at issue: had Marx --lyingly inserted? that sentence or not? To this Mr. Sedley Taylor answered that --the question whether a particular sentence did or did not occur in Mr. Gladstone's speech? had been, in his opinion, --of very subordinate importance? in the Brentano-Marx controversy, --compared to the issue whether the quotation in dispute was made with the intention of conveying, or of perverting Mr. Gladstone's meaning. ? He then admits that The Times report contains --a verbal contrariety"; but, if the context is rightly interpreted, i. e. , in the Gladstonian Liberal sense, it shows what Mr. Gladstone meant to say. (To-day, March, 1884. ) The most comic point here is that our little Cambridge man now insists upon quoting the speech not from Hansard, as, according to the anonymous Brentano, it is --customary? to do, but from The Times report, which the same Brentano had characterised as --necessarily bungling. ? Naturally so, for in Hansard the vexatious sentence is missing.
? 25 Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels 1890)
Eleanor Marx had no difficulty (in the same issue of To-day) in dissolving all this argumentation into thin air. Either Mr. Taylor had read the controversy of 1872, in which case he was now making not only --lying insertions? but also --lying? suppressions; or he had not read it and ought to remain silent. In either case it was certain that he did not dare to maintain for a moment the accusation of his friend Brentano that Marx had made a --lying? addition. On the contrary, Marx, it now seems, had not lyingly added but suppressed an important sentence. But this same sentence is quoted on page 5 of the Inaugural Address, a few lines before the alleged --lying insertion. ? And as to the --contrariety? in Gladstone's speech, is it not Marx himself, who in --Capital,? p. 618 (3rd edition, p. 672), note 105 [present edition, p. 611, Note 1], refers to --the continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's Budget speeches of 1863 and 1864"? Only he does not presume a` la Mr. Sedley Taylor to resolve them into complacent Liberal sentiments. Eleanor Marx, in concluding her reply, finally sums up as follows:
--Marx has not suppressed anything worth quoting, neither has he ? lyingly' added anything. But he has restored, rescued from oblivion, a particular sentence of one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches, a sentence which had indubitably been pronounced, but which somehow or other had found its way - out of Hansard. ?
With that Mr. Sedley Taylor too had had enough, and the result of this whole professorial cobweb, spun out over two decades and two great countries, is that nobody has since dared to cast any other aspersion upon Marx's literary honesty; whilst Mr. Sedley Taylor, no doubt, will hereafter put as little confidence in the literary war bulletins of Herr Brentano as Herr Brentano will in the papal infallibility of Hansard.
Frederick Engels
London.
June 25. 1890
1 In the English edition of 1887 this addition was made by Engels himself. - Ed.
2 In the present edition they are put into square brackets and marked with the initials
3 Marx was not mistaken in the title of the book but in the page. He put down 36 instead of 37. (See pp. 560-61 of the present edition. ) - Ed.
? ? Part 1: Commodities and Money
Chapter 1: Commodities
Section 1: The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value
(The Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value)
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as --an immense accumulation of commodities,? 1 its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. 2 Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.
Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c. , may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history. 3 So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.
The utility of a thing makes it a use value. 4 But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities. 5 Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.
Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort,6 a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i. e. , an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms. 7 Let us consider the matter a little more closely.
A given commodity, e. g. , a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. - in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold &c. , each represents the exchange value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c. , must, as exchange values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange
? 27 Chapter 1
values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.
4 Rezepte - translated as --Receipt,? which in the 19th Century, meant --recipe? and Ben Fowkes, for example translates this as --recipe. ? [MIA footnote].
? ? Afterword to the French Edition (1875)
Mr. J. Roy set himself the task of producing a version that would be as exact and even literal as possible, and has scrupulously fulfilled it. But his very scrupulosity has compelled me to modify his text, with a view to rendering it more intelligible to the reader. These alterations, introduced from day to day, as the book was published in parts, were not made with equal care and were bound to result in a lack of harmony in style.
Having once undertaken this work of revision, I was led to apply it also to the basic original text (the second German edition), to simplify some arguments, to complete others, to give additional historical or statistical material, to add critical suggestions, etc. Hence, whatever the literary defects of this French edition may be, it possesses a scientific value independent of the original and should be consulted even by readers familiar with German.
Below I give the passages in the Afterword to the second German edition which treat of the development of Political Economy in Germany and the method employed in the present work.
Karl Marx
London
April 28, 1875
? Preface to the Third German Edition (1883)
Marx was not destined to get this, the third, edition ready for press himself. The powerful thinker, to whose greatness even his opponents 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 attending to the publication of this third edition, as well as of the second 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 Volume I, 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 Volume II 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, Lacha^tre 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 confined, with few exceptions, to the last [Engl. ed. : second last] part of the book: --The Accumulation of Capital. ? Here the previous text followed the original draft more closely than elsewhere, while the preceding 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 particulars being merely alluded to.
With regard to the style, Marx had himself thoroughly revised several sub-sections and thereby had indicated to me here, as well as in numerous oral suggestions, the length to which I could go in eliminating 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 themselves - 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 (a labour-giver) or the worker a receveur de travail (a labour-taker).
Nor have I taken the liberty to convert the English coins and moneys, 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 existed 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 Zweidrittel. In the natural sciences the metric system prevailed, in the
? 18 Preface to the Third German Edition (1883)
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 almost exclusively from British industrial relations. The last-named reason is decisive even to-day, especially because the corresponding relations in the world market have hardly changed and English weights 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 descriptions, 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 quotation is intended merely to state where, when and by whom an economic idea conceived in the course of development was first clearly enunciated. Here the only consideration is that the economic conception in question must be of some significance to the history of science, that it is the more or less adequate theoretical expression of the economic 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 immaterial. 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 important advances in economic theory. And that was a very necessary thing in a science whose historians have so far distinguished themselves only by tendentious ignorance characteristic of careerists. It will now be understandable why Marx, in consonance with the Afterword to the second edition, only in very exceptional cases had occasion to quote German economists.
There is hope that the second volume will appear in the course of 1884.
Frederick Engels
London November 7, 1883
? Preface to the English Edition (Engels, 1886)
The publication of an English version of --Das Kapital? needs no apology. On the contrary, an explanation might be expected why this English version has been delayed until now, seeing that for some years past the theories advocated in this book have been constantly referred to, attacked and defended, interpreted and misinterpreted, in the periodical press and the current literature of both England and America.
When, soon after the author's death in 1883, it became evident that an English edition of the work was really required, Mr. Samuel Moore, for many years a friend of Marx and of the present writer, and than whom, perhaps, no one is more conversant with the book itself, consented to undertake the translation which the literary executors of Marx were anxious to lay before the public. It was understood that I should compare the MS. with the original work, and suggest such alterations as I might deem advisable. When, by and by, it was found that Mr. Moore's professional occupations prevented him from finishing the translation as quickly as we all desired, we gladly accepted Dr. Aveling's offer to undertake a portion of the work; at the same time Mrs. Aveling, Marx's youngest daughter, offered to check the quotations and to restore the original text of the numerous passages taken from English authors and Blue books and translated by Marx into German. This has been done throughout, with but a few unavoidable exceptions.
The following portions of the book have been translated by Dr. Aveling: (I) Chapters X. (The Working day), and XI. (Rate and Mass of Surplus value); (2) Part VI. (Wages, comprising Chapters XIX. to XXII. ); (3) from Chapter XXIV. , Section 4 (Circumstances that &c. ) to the end of the book, comprising the latter part of Chapter XXIV. ,. Chapter XXV. , and the whole of Part VIII. (Chapters XXVI. to XXXIII); (4) the two Author's prefaces. All the rest of the book has been done by Mr. Moore. While, thus, each of the translators is responsible for his share of the work only, I bear a joint responsibility for the whole.
The third German edition, which has been made the basis of our work throughout, was prepared by me, in 1883, with the assistance of notes left by the author, indicating the passages of the second edition to be replaced by designated passages, from the French text published in 1873. 1 The alterations thus effected in the text of the second edition generally coincided with changes prescribed by Marx in a set of MS. instructions for an English translation that was planned, about ten years ago, in America, but abandoned chiefly for want of a fit and proper translator. This MS. was placed at our disposal by our old friend Mr. F. A. Sorge of Hoboken N. J. It designates some further interpolations from the French edition; but, being so many years older than the final instructions for the third edition, I did not consider myself at liberty to make use of it otherwise than sparingly, and chiefly in cases where it helped us over difficulties. In the same way, the French text has been referred to in most of the difficult passages, as an indicator of what the author himself was prepared to sacrifice wherever something of the full import of the original had to be sacrificed in the rendering.
There is, however, one difficulty we could not spare the reader: the use of certain terms in a sense different from what they have, not only in common life, but in ordinary Political Economy. But this was unavoidable. Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science. This is best shown by chemistry, where the whole of the terminology is radically changed about once in twenty years, and where you will hardly find a single organic compound that has not gone through a whole series of different names. Political Economy has generally been
? 20 Preface to the English Edition (Engels 1886)
content to take, just as they were, the terms of commercial and industrial life, and to operate with them, entirely failing to see that by so doing, it confined itself within the narrow circle of ideas expressed by those terms. Thus, though perfectly aware that both profits and rent are but sub- divisions, fragments of that unpaid part of the product which the labourer has to supply to his employer (its first appropriator, though not its ultimate exclusive owner), yet even classical Political Economy never went beyond the received notions of profits and rents, never examined this unpaid part of the product (called by Marx surplus-product) in its integrity as a whole, and therefore never arrived at a clear comprehension, either of its origin and nature, or of the laws that regulate the subsequent distribution of its value. Similarly all industry, not agricultural or handicraft, is indiscriminately comprised in the term of manufacture, and thereby the distinction is obliterated between two great and essentially different periods of economic history: the period of manufacture proper, based on the division of manual labour, and the period of modern industry based on machinery. It is, however, self- evident that a theory which views modern capitalist production as a mere passing stage in the economic history of mankind, must make use of terms different from those habitual to writers who look upon that form of production as imperishable and final.
A word respecting the author's method of quoting may not be out of place. In the majority of cases, the quotations serve, in the usual way, as documentary evidence in support of assertions made in the text. But in many instances, passages from economic writers are quoted in order to indicate when, where, and by whom a certain proposition was for the first time clearly enunciated. This is done in cases where the proposition quoted is of importance as being a more or less adequate expression of the conditions of social production and exchange prevalent at the time, and quite irrespective of Marx's recognition, or otherwise, of its general validity. These quotations, therefore, supplement the text by a running commentary taken from the history of the science.
Our translation comprises the first book of the work only. But this first book is in a great measure a whole in itself, and has for twenty years ranked as an independent work. The second book, edited in German by me, in 1885, is decidedly incomplete without the third, which cannot be published before the end of 1887. When Book III. has been brought out in the original German, it will then be soon enough to think about preparing an English edition of both.
--Das Kapital? is often called, on the Continent, --the Bible of the working class. ? That the conclusions arrived at in this work are daily more and more becoming the fundamental principles of the great working- class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain, that everywhere the working class more and more recognises, in these conclusions, the most adequate expression of its condition and of its aspirations, nobody acquainted with that movement will deny. And in England, too, the theories of Marx, even at this moment, exercise a powerful influence upon the socialist movement which is spreading in the ranks of --cultured? people no less than in those of the working class. But that is not all. The time is rapidly approaching when a thorough examination of England's economic position will impose itself as an irresistible national necessity. The working of the industrial system of this country, impossible without a constant and rapid extension of production, and therefore of markets, is coming to a dead stop.
Free Trade has exhausted its resources; even Manchester doubts this its quondam economic gospel. 2 Foreign industry, rapidly developing, stares English production in the face everywhere, not only in protected, but also in neutral markets, and even on this side of the Channel. While the productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production and crisis, ever
? 21 Preface to the English Edition (Engels 1886)
recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression. The sighed for period of prosperity will not come; as often as we seem to perceive its heralding symptoms, so often do they again vanish into air. Meanwhile, each succeeding winter brings up afresh the great question, --what to do with the unemployed"; but while the number of the unemployed keeps swelling from year to year, there is nobody to answer that question; and we can almost calculate the moment when the unemployed losing patience will take their own fate into their own hands. Surely, at such a moment, the voice ought to be heard of a man whose whole theory is the result of a lifelong study of the economic history and condition of England, and whom that study led to the conclusion that, at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means. He certainly never forgot to add that he hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a --pro-slavery rebellion,? to this peaceful and legal revolution.
1 --Le Capital,? par Karl Marx. Traduction de M. J. Roy, entierement revise? e par l'auteur. Paris. Lacha^tre. This translation, especially in the latter part of the book, contains considerable alterations in and additions to the text of the second German edition.
2 At the quarterly meeting of the Manchester Chamber of commerce, held this afternoon a warm discussion took place on the subject of Free Trade. A resolution was moved to the effect that --having waited in vain 40 years for other nations to follow the Free Trade example of England, this Chamber thinks the time has now arrived to reconsider that position. The resolution was rejected by a majority of one only, the figures being 21 for, and 22 against. - Evening Standard, Nov. 1, 1886.
? ? Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels, 1890)
The fourth edition required that I should establish in final form, as nearly as possible, both text and footnotes. The following brief explanation will show how I have fulfilled this task.
After again comparing the French edition and Marx's manuscript remarks I have made some further additions to the German text from that translation. They will be found on p. 80 (3rd edition, p. 88) [present edition, pp. 117-18], pp. 458-60 (3rd edition, pp. 509-10) [present edition, pp. 462-65],1 pp. 547-51 (3rd edition, p. 600) [present edition, pp. 548-51], pp. 591-93 (3rd edition, p. 644) [present edition, 587-89] and p. 596 (3rd edition, p. 648) [present edition, p. 591] in Note 1. I have also followed the example of the French and English editions by putting the long footnote on the miners into the text (3rd edition, pp. 509- 15; 4th edition, pp. 461-67) [present edition, pp. 465-71]. Other small alterations are of a purely technical nature.
Further, I have added a few more explanatory notes, especially where changed historical conditions seemed to demand this. All these additional notes are enclosed in square brackets and marked either with my initials or --D. H. ? 2
Meanwhile a complete revision of the numerous quotations had been made necessary by the publication of the English edition. For this edition Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, undertook to compare all the quotations with their originals, so that those taken from English sources, which constitute the vast majority, are given there not as re-translations from the German but in the original English form In preparing the fourth edition it was therefore incumbent upon me to consult this text. The comparison revealed various small inaccuracies. Page numbers wrongly indicated, due partly to mistakes in copying from notebooks, and partly to the accumulated misprints of three editions; misplaced quotation or omission marks, which cannot be avoided when a mass of quotations is copied from note-book extracts; here and there some rather unhappy translation of a word; particular passages quoted from the old Paris notebooks of 1843-45, when Marx did not know English and was reading English economists in French translations, so that the double translation yielded a slightly different shade of meaning, e. g. , in the case of Steuart, Ure, etc. , where the English text had now to be used - and other similar instances of trifling inaccuracy or negligence. But anyone who compares the fourth edition with the previous ones can convince himself that all this laborious process of emendation has not produced the smallest change in the book worth speaking of. There was only one quotation which could not be traced - the one from Richard Jones (4th edition, p. 562, note 47). Marx probably slipped up when writing down the title of the book. 3 All the other quotations retain their cogency in full, or have enhanced it due to their present exact form.
Here, however, I am obliged to revert to an old story.
I know of only one case in which the accuracy of a quotation given by Marx has been called in question.
But as the issue dragged beyond his lifetime I cannot well ignore it here.
On March 7, 1872, there appeared in the Berlin Concordia, organ of the German Manufacturers' Association, an anonymous article entitled: --How Karl Marx Quotes. ? It was here asserted, with an effervescence of moral indignation and unparliamentary language, that the quotation from Gladstone's Budget Speech of April 16, 1863 (in the Inaugural Address of the International
? 23 Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels 1890)
Workingmen's Association, 1864, and repeated in --Capital,? Vol. I, p. 617, 4th edition; p. 671, 3rd edition) [present edition, p. 610], had been falsified; that not a single word of the sentence: --this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power . . . is . . . entirely confined to classes of property? was to be found in the (semi-official) stenographic report in Hansard. --But this sentence is nowhere to be found in Gladstone's speech. Exactly the opposite is stated there. ? (In bold type): --This sentence, both in form and substance, is a lie inserted by Marx. "
Marx, to whom the number of Concordia was sent the following May, answered the anonymous author in the Volksstaat of June 1st. As he could not recall which newspaper report he had used for the quotation, he limited himself to citing, first the equivalent quotation from two English publications, and then the report in The Times, according to which Gladstone says:
--That is the state of the case as regards the wealth of this country. I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to classes who are in easy circumstances. This takes no cognisance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation I have described and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes possessed of property. ?
Thus Gladstone says here that he would be sorry if it were so, but it is so: this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property. And as to the semi- official Hansard, Marx goes on to say: --In the version which he afterwards manipulated [zurechtgestu? mpert], Mr. Gladstone was astute enough to obliterate [wegzupfuschen] this passage, which, coming from an English Chancellor of the Exchequer, was certainly compromising. This, by the way, is a traditional usage in the English parliament and not an invention gotten up by little Lasker against Bebel. ?
The anonymous writer gets angrier and angrier. In his answer in Concordia, July 4th, he sweeps aside second-hand sources and demurely suggests that it is the --custom? to quote parliamentary speeches from the stenographic report; adding, however, that The Times report (which includes the --falsified? sentence) and the Hansard report (which omits it) are --substantially in complete agreement,? while The Times report likewise contains --the exact opposite to that notorious passage in the Inaugural Address. ? This fellow carefully conceals the fact that The Times report explicitly includes that self-same --notorious passage,? alongside of its alleged --opposite. ? Despite all this, however, the anonymous one feels that he is stuck fast and that only some new dodge can save him. Thus, whilst his article bristles, as we have just shown, with --impudent mendacity? and is interlarded with such edifying terms of abuse as --bad faith,? --dishonesty,? --lying allegation,? --that spurious quotation,? --impudent mendacity,? --a quotation entirely falsified,? --this falsification,? --simply infamous,? etc. , he finds it necessary to divert the issue to another domain and therefore promises --to explain in a second article the meaning which we (the non-mendacious anonymous one) attribute to the content of Gladstone's words. ? As if his particular opinion, of no decisive value as it is, had anything whatever to do with the matter. This second article was printed in Concordia on July 11th.
Marx replied again in the Volksstaat of August 7th now giving also the reports of the passage in question from the Morning Star and the Morning Advertiser of April 17, 1863. According to both reports Gladstone said that he would look with apprehension, etc. , upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if he believed it to be confined to --classes in easy circumstances. ? But this augmentation was in fact --entirely confined to classes possessed of property. ? So these reports too reproduced word for word the sentence alleged to have been --lyingly inserted. ? Marx further established once more, by a comparison of The Times and the Hansard texts, that this sentence, which three newspaper reports of identical content, appearing
? 24 Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels 1890)
independently of one another the next morning, proved to have been really uttered, was missing from the Hansard report, revised according to the familiar --custom,? and that Gladstone, to use Marx's words, --had afterwards conjured it away. ? In conclusion Marx stated that he had no time for further intercourse with the anonymous one. The latter also seems to have had enough, at any rate Marx received no further issues of Concordia.
With this the matter appeared to be dead and buried. True, once or twice later on there reached us, from persons in touch with the University of Cambridge, mysterious rumours of an unspeakable literary crime which Marx was supposed to have committed in --Capital,? but despite all investigation nothing more definite could be learned. Then, on November 29, 1883, eight months after Marx's death, there appeared in The Times a letter headed Trinity College, Cambridge, and signed Sedley Taylor, in which this little man, who dabbles in the mildest sort of co-operative affairs, seizing upon some chance pretext or other, at last enlightened us, not only concerning those vague Cambridge rumours, but also the anonymous one in Concordia.
--What appears extremely singular,? says the little man from Trinity College, --is that it was reserved for Professor Brentano (then of the University of Breslau, now of that of Strassburg) to expose. . . the bad faith which had manifestly dictated the citation made from Mr. Gladstone's speech in the [Inaugural] Address. Herr Karl Marx, who . . . attempted to defend the citation, had the hardihood, in the deadly shifts to which Brentano's masterly conduct of the attack speedily reduced him, to assert that Mr. Gladstone had ? manipulated' the report of his speech in The Times of April 17, 1863, before it appeared in Hansard, in order to ? obliterate' a passage which ? was certainly compromising' for an English Chancellor of the Exchequer. On Brentano's showing, by a detailed comparison of texts, that the reports of The Times and of Hansard agreed in utterly excluding the meaning which craftily isolated quotation had put upon Mr. Gladstone's words, Marx withdrew from further controversy under the plea of ? want of time. '?
So that was at the bottom of the whole business! And thus was the anonymous campaign of Herr Brentano in Concordia gloriously reflected in the productively co-operating imagination of Cambridge. Thus he stood, sword in hand, and thus he battled, in his --masterly conduct of the attack,? this St. George of the German Manufacturers' Association, whilst the infernal dragon Marx, --in deadly shifts,? --speedily? breathed his last at his feet.
All this Ariostian battle scene, however, only serves to conceal the dodges of our St. George. Here there is no longer talk of --lying insertion? or --falsification,? but of --craftily isolated quotation. ? The whole issue was shifted, and St. George and his Cambridge squire very well knew why.
Eleanor Marx replied in the monthly journal To-day (February 1884), as The Times refused to publish her letter. She once more focussed the debate on the sole question at issue: had Marx --lyingly inserted? that sentence or not? To this Mr. Sedley Taylor answered that --the question whether a particular sentence did or did not occur in Mr. Gladstone's speech? had been, in his opinion, --of very subordinate importance? in the Brentano-Marx controversy, --compared to the issue whether the quotation in dispute was made with the intention of conveying, or of perverting Mr. Gladstone's meaning. ? He then admits that The Times report contains --a verbal contrariety"; but, if the context is rightly interpreted, i. e. , in the Gladstonian Liberal sense, it shows what Mr. Gladstone meant to say. (To-day, March, 1884. ) The most comic point here is that our little Cambridge man now insists upon quoting the speech not from Hansard, as, according to the anonymous Brentano, it is --customary? to do, but from The Times report, which the same Brentano had characterised as --necessarily bungling. ? Naturally so, for in Hansard the vexatious sentence is missing.
? 25 Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels 1890)
Eleanor Marx had no difficulty (in the same issue of To-day) in dissolving all this argumentation into thin air. Either Mr. Taylor had read the controversy of 1872, in which case he was now making not only --lying insertions? but also --lying? suppressions; or he had not read it and ought to remain silent. In either case it was certain that he did not dare to maintain for a moment the accusation of his friend Brentano that Marx had made a --lying? addition. On the contrary, Marx, it now seems, had not lyingly added but suppressed an important sentence. But this same sentence is quoted on page 5 of the Inaugural Address, a few lines before the alleged --lying insertion. ? And as to the --contrariety? in Gladstone's speech, is it not Marx himself, who in --Capital,? p. 618 (3rd edition, p. 672), note 105 [present edition, p. 611, Note 1], refers to --the continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's Budget speeches of 1863 and 1864"? Only he does not presume a` la Mr. Sedley Taylor to resolve them into complacent Liberal sentiments. Eleanor Marx, in concluding her reply, finally sums up as follows:
--Marx has not suppressed anything worth quoting, neither has he ? lyingly' added anything. But he has restored, rescued from oblivion, a particular sentence of one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches, a sentence which had indubitably been pronounced, but which somehow or other had found its way - out of Hansard. ?
With that Mr. Sedley Taylor too had had enough, and the result of this whole professorial cobweb, spun out over two decades and two great countries, is that nobody has since dared to cast any other aspersion upon Marx's literary honesty; whilst Mr. Sedley Taylor, no doubt, will hereafter put as little confidence in the literary war bulletins of Herr Brentano as Herr Brentano will in the papal infallibility of Hansard.
Frederick Engels
London.
June 25. 1890
1 In the English edition of 1887 this addition was made by Engels himself. - Ed.
2 In the present edition they are put into square brackets and marked with the initials
3 Marx was not mistaken in the title of the book but in the page. He put down 36 instead of 37. (See pp. 560-61 of the present edition. ) - Ed.
? ? Part 1: Commodities and Money
Chapter 1: Commodities
Section 1: The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value
(The Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value)
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as --an immense accumulation of commodities,? 1 its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. 2 Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.
Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c. , may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history. 3 So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.
The utility of a thing makes it a use value. 4 But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities. 5 Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.
Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort,6 a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i. e. , an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms. 7 Let us consider the matter a little more closely.
A given commodity, e. g. , a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. - in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold &c. , each represents the exchange value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c. , must, as exchange values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange
? 27 Chapter 1
values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.
