The Birth of Capital, Socialist Standard, 1967, R. Ambridge
In September 1867, Otto Meissner of Hamburg published the first edition of the book that was to rank with Darwin’s ORIGIN OF SPECIES, and Morgan’s ANCIENT SOCIETY; Volume One of CAPITAL. What Darwin’s book did for natural science and Morgan’s for sociology, Marx’s CAPITAL did for political economy. In this work Marx was able, by his use of the dialectical method, to solve the riddle of value, which had eluded all previous economists, and so lay the foundation for a scientific understanding of capitalism.
At the end of 1865 the work existed in the form of an enormous manuscript which only Marx could prepare for publication. From January 1866 to March 1867, out of this mass of material, he produced the first volume of CAPITAL, in the form we have it today, a complete work. This was an achievement which displayed a terrific working capacity, as during this period he was troubled by ill-health, including a serious illness in February 1866, and by an accumulation of debts that worried him.
The final work was started in January 1866. Marx writing to Engels of that year said…”I enjoyed licking the infant clean after so many birth pangs”. No work of this nature has ever been written under more difficult circumstances. On at least two occasions, Marx fixed a time limit for its completion; in 1851 it was five weeks, in 1859 it was six weeks. Always the time limit was ignored, due to his tremendous care and scrupulous regard for facts, from which he would not be shaken, even by the impatient urging of his friend Engels.
The first bundle of manuscript was sent to Meissner in November 1866. In April 1867, Marx personally took the rest of the material to Hamburg, and was able to complete the arrangements for publication.
A letter from Engels, dated April 1867, portrays the strain Marx underwent during the years of preparation:
I have always thought that the damned book on which you have worked so long was the reason for all your misfortunes. And that you could never be able to overcome them as long as you had not shaken it off. Its completeness dragged you down physically, intellectually and financially, and I can well understand that you feel a different fellow now that you have got rid of it.
The hope expressed in this letter was only partly fulfilled.
Marx, on his return to London, corrected the proof sheets and at two o’clock in the morning of the 16 August 1867 wrote to Engels informing him that the last printer’s sheets had just been corrected. “So this volume is now finished”. His tribute to Engels read…”I must thank you alone that it was possible, without your sacrifices for me, I could never possibly have done the enormous amount of work for the three volumes. I embrace you with heartfelt thanks. Greetings my dearly beloved friend”.
Marx was, during this period, very anxious about his book. Writing to Engels on 2nd November 1867, he said…”The fate of my book makes me nervous. I see and hear nothing”. The impatience shown by this quotation was hardly justified. The book had been barely published two months, certainly not long enough to write and publish a proper criticism. Engels and Dr. Kugelman, the latter a friend of Marx, did their best to call attention to the book. Between them they secured the publication of advance notices in a number of journals, and even a reprint of the introduction. In addition they prepared an advertisement, which was quite sensational for those days – the publication of a biographical article in Die Gartenlaube. But Marx requested them to stop ‘Such nonsense'.
The article which Engels wrote for DIE GARTENLAUBE was eventually published in a Berlin paper, and later, in an abbreviated form, by William Liebknecht in a Social Democratic journal.
Shortly after this, Marx’s work received some excellent criticism; Engels in the Demokratischer Wochenblatt, Schweizer in the Social Democrat, a review by Joseph Dietzgen. Eugen Duhring did a review in Meyer’s Encyclopaedia in 1867. Although Marx was not quite satisfied, he declared, quite decent’. However, it was not long before Duhring, did his best to tear the book to pieces.
Probably one of the most curious opinions of the first volume came from a friend of Marx, Freiligrath, who was presented with a copy by the author. Freiligrath wrote to Marx, thanking him and commentating,
I know that many young merchants, and manufacturers in the Rhineland are enthusiastic about the book, and in such circles it will fulfil its real aim, and besides, it will prove an indispensable work of reference for students.
It seems fantastic that anyone should have regarded CAPITAL in such a manner.
Ruge, an anti-socialist who as a young man fought for the Hegelian doctrine, wrote as follows:
It is an epoch-making work and it sheds a brilliant, sometimes dazzling, light on the development, decline, birth pangs and the horribly painful maladies of social periods. The passages on the production of surplus value by unpaid labour, the expropriation of the workers who for themselves, and the approaching expropriation of the expropriators are classic. Marx’s knowledge is wide and scholarly, and he possesses splendid dialectical talent. The book is far above the intellectual horizon of many people, and many newspaper writers, but it will make its way despite the breadth of its plan, or perhaps it will exercise a powerful influence for this reason.
Ludwig Feuerbach reacted in much the same way as Ruge, with the difference that he was less interested in the dialectics of the author, than that the book was “Rich in undeniable facts of the most interesting, but at the same time, most horrible nature
”.
In his preface to the second edition, dated 24 January 1873, Marx refers to the reception of the first edition in the following words:
The learned and unlearned spokesman 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 times, they wrote under the pretence of criticising my book, prescriptions ‘for the tranquilisation of the bourgeois mind’ But they found in the workers’ press (see e.g. Joseph Dietzgen’s articles in the Volkstaat) antagonists stronger than themselves, to whom (down to this very day) they owe a reply.
The statement by Ruge that the book would ‘make its way’ has been proven correct.
During the century since the first appearance of CAPITAL, it has been translated into many, if not all languages. One of the early translations, in 1872, was Russian.
Permission to publish was given by the Russian censorship authority with the explanation that: “although the political opinions of the author are of a very definitely socialist character, the manner of its presentation is certainly not such as to make the book open to all, and in addition, it is written in a strictly scientific fashion, so that in the opinion of the committee it should not be prosecuted”.
The reasoning of the committee of 1872 was as strange then as that of censors today. It was during this period that work commenced on a French edition. The English translation appeared in 1886, three years after the death of Marx.
One of the difficulties which have stood in the way of understanding CAPITAL is one which Marx suggests in his Preface to the First edition, where he says: “I pre-suppose of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore, to think for himself”. Such readers are very rare. Marx was very optimistic when he made the supposition. Another difficulty has been, and still is, that of the alleged Marxists who apparently have never read the main work of Marx, or have never understood what they read, so that all sorts of weird ideas are attributed to Marx, and to Capital. Engels once asked to be spared the Marxists.
Object and Declaration of Principles
Object
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.
Declaration of Principles
THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN HOLDS:
1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (ie land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.
2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.
3.That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.
4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.
5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.
7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.
8. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.